Hey guys, thanks for joining me today on Behind the Curtain. I'm your host, Rebecca Harvin, and this is where we have honest conversations about foster care and adoption. My guest on the show today is Jennifer Tice. She is the co-founder and executive director of Lillipad, a soft place to land, which is a South Carolina faith-based nonprofit that transforms institutional spaces into trauma-informed environments for children and vulnerable individuals in crisis. Today on our show, she is going to talk about that work, but she's going to kind of talk about how she got into the work and what she saw and how the story came about and the need that she is filling through Lillipad, but because of her years as a foster mom. Jennifer was a registered nurse specializing in labor and delivery. And because of that work became a foster parent in 2010. She has fostered more than 40 children. This conversation with Jennifer is rich and deep and so honoring of children in care and at the same time so authentic of the journey that foster moms go on. In fact, our conversation just takes off out of the gate. So I hit record before we started talking. And normally I edit the start of the podcast when we start talking about like podcast-specific things. You are going to today come right into the middle of our conversation because it is just that good that we never stopped to formally start the podcast version of the conversation. So with that, here is my guest, Jennifer Tice. I hope you enjoy the conversation.
SPEAKER_00But I just would love to know some of your history and your listeners and that type of thing.
SPEAKER_01Sure. So we um can you still hear me okay if I sit back?
SPEAKER_00I can, yeah.
SPEAKER_01From the microphone, or should I set the microphone like right here so that I can sit back? And that's great. Yes, there we go. Um started fostering, we started fostering in 2017. And about a year and a half later, I wanted to quit. And so instead of quitting, I built an organization that does um therapeutic retreats for caregivers. So the mission at Haven is to create sustainability in foster care and adoption and looking at the caregivers and going, hey, nobody's actually really taking care of us.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01And we're the ones most responsible for this job that we're doing. We are, even if our kids are in every ounce of therapies that we can get them in, unless they're like a medically fragile kid, you're talking about like four, maybe five hours of different therapies a week. The rest of the 140 hours, or 100 and is it 168 hours in a week? It's essentially it's up to us. Like that's on us. We're carrying the burning. And nobody's looking at us and going, I wonder if you're okay. Like I won't like, and so I started Haven to do that, to just kind of bring in therapists and talk to the caregivers about like their journey of indifferent, like we do moms, dads, couples together, and then we do the biological children in the home.
SPEAKER_02That's great.
SPEAKER_01So yeah. Um much needed. Yes. And that's kind of what we found. Like it just kind of was like this um, as it's grown and grown, it's mostly grown through just word of mouth. Like it's just kind of like foster mom's talk, you know, like adoptive mom's talk. And so um a couple years ago in 2024, we kind of were looking at like, how do we, if we want to expand to other regions in America, like if we want to bring Haven there, how do we grow like a digital footprint for the least amount of money? And a podcast was that answer. So with the podcast, I
bring kind of just the same element of like it's called behind the curtain because um honest conversations, because it's like that's that's one of the things that's missing from this whole like slew of foster care advocacy or whatever, right? Is this like nobody's we're people are telling the truth, but they're telling it in a way that still um makes it pretty and makes people want to foster it. Yeah, I was gonna say like really safe, right?
SPEAKER_00Because you feel that I've gone through this. I mean, we fostered for 14 years, and yeah, I never wanted to say anything that would discourage someone else from doing it because so many there's so much need. However, as I grew into it, I realized everyone should not be a foster parent. And we do have to be honest about what it's like so that they can be prepared to take care of themselves and do it to their best ability and to not have so much turnover. So I get it 100%. My husband um is a law enforcement officer, and for a brief time he taught for a company called O2X, and they would go to first responders all over the country, a lot here on the East Coast, and they very same concept as what taking care of themselves so that they can take care of others. They would do med, they would have um a physical, medical side, physical assessment, you know, how to manage your blood pressure, all that, how stress feeds into it. They've had they would have physical therapists come in, um and mental therapists, like everything. And I just thought, wow. I mean, I watched him for over a decade. And police officers see so much and don't, they're not required to go to therapy. It's available if they want it, but then it's almost like, oh, if you have to do that, that's a problem. Then we need to be talking to your supervisor because yes, they're all afraid they're gonna lose their job or be pulled from the road or what have you. And no, it needs to be the opposite thought of by doing this, you're actually taking care of yourself and protecting the department and the people that you serve.
SPEAKER_01And yeah, yeah, like almost mandatory as a police, like right?
SPEAKER_00Like if you want to be I said mandatory, it should be mandatory, yeah.
SPEAKER_01Like at least absolutely sessions a year, right? Like something where you know that somebody is there and they're gonna listen to you because how do you process everything that you see, right? And the same in foster care, in foster care, and the same is true um in adoption. How do you process all of the things that are coming your way? And without anybody saying, not only do you need to, but you should like that. This is actually imperative that you process this because you will be a better foster parent, you will be a better mom, you will be a better adult, like you have to take care of your own stuff. Like you're gonna get triggered in this. Absolutely.
SPEAKER_00And so in the game, I would say the same for our case managers. Yeah, someone referred to them recently as first responders to me, and I thought, that's exactly what they are. That's exactly what they are.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, we're actually adding a caseworker day where we're gonna partner with a local church here in town that did like a lunch that does a lunch and bring in caseworkers and do like a miniature retreat day with them, just because like the again, the turnover rate, right? Like we're talking about kids who already have every odd stacked against them in a side of a system that starts in brokenness. I was talking to a friend about this yesterday, right? Like we want so much, I want so much for the foster care system, but it is a system that begins in brokenness, and so there's an element of it that will always be broken because it shouldn't exist. Like this is it it has to start from brokenness in order to exist, right? And beautiful things can happen, but um when we forget that the like the core of its identity is brokenness, um then we do everybody a disservice, right? And so it's like in the middle of like caseworkers aren't doing this because they're getting paid so much money, they're doing this because they want to change lives, right? Like and and we there's so much temptation to go like, oh, we have this bad caseworker, they just do this. And it's like maybe they have 20 cases too many because they can't keep people because the turnover rate is so high. Like
maybe when the turnover rate for foster parents is 50% in the first year, we're not actually getting really good care for children who need it the most in their most vulnerable moments, right? Like if one meltdown changes their security in a house, like and I get it.
SPEAKER_00That story actually was told to me recently within this year. Um, a case manager told me that a child was brought back to find placement. Her placement was disrupted essentially after three nights in a foster home because she cried herself to sleep for three nights. And I thought, why is that why that that's normal in this, you know, that could be normal in a child that's not experienced trauma, let alone I just was flabbergasted, and that's it, it is, I don't know, where did the system fail those foster parents as they were being prepared to be foster parents?
SPEAKER_01I I don't know, you know, but where in a that's a great question to ask, Jennifer. And the um where in their brain does it not make sense for a child who just lost everything to be crying for three nights, right? I had somebody tell me different organization, different country, even like they were talking about one of the kids, it was at an orphanage, and they were like, Oh, they just cry for two nights and then they don't cry anymore. They're like totally happy to be here. And I was like, uh that's not true. Like that's that's not true at all, actually, because it doesn't it's great for the person that's got a kid that's just going to sleep quietly now, but you have like the humanity we're moving away from like the basics of like the human condition. Like a child should be sad when they leave their parents. It that makes sense. A child with very little words will display that in behavior. That makes sense. The behaviors are going to be extreme. The duration, right? The intensity and the duration um can throw parents for a loop. That also makes sense. Like there's not shame here in it. It's like, yeah.
SPEAKER_00I wish when that family would have called to disrupt the placement, there was some resource to go out and talk to them, like a peer mentorship something. Like they take a senior foster parent and say, Well, let us have this person come out and help you tonight and walk you through this and let's get some supports around you rather than just, okay, we'll come pick up the child. You know, there's so many, yeah, so many things that go into it, so many thoughts that went through my head. But one of the first ones was we adopted our two sons when they were two and three, but they had come to us uh through foster care when they were five months old and 18 months old. The 18 month old cried for six weeks straight. If he wasn't crying, he was sleeping. And we still to this day, you know, kind of laugh about it, I guess, because I mean, if we weren't laughing, we were crying. And but that did not phase us. Uh, we did not think it was abnormal. Even our extended family and friends just thought, can you imagine what's going on in his little body? He can't speak, he can only point and grunt at things. Um yeah, I I just so there's so much that could be done for our foster and adoptive families to avoid things like this happening, but um it takes time and resources, and even our case managers, you know, new and old. Um everyone needs I was telling somebody the other day, so I've been doing this for 14 years, and there's still things I'm learning. I don't know at all, and still things I'm not perfect at. You know, they were asking me for advice for new foster parents, and I said, Well, I can tell you this, but I'm not perfect at it. I can say the words, but I'm not perfect at it.
SPEAKER_01Um what did you tell them?
SPEAKER_00They were asking um how you handle when reunification happens and um uh are and that you know, you see it coming and then it's time for them to go. And we've had situations where I I told her, I said, uh I'm just gonna be honest with you. Sometimes I fought it, you know, I fought God's plan, I fought uh the system, I thought for sure we knew what the better uh plan
was for the child. But it was about a year into our foster care experience. We had fostered a little girl from birth to almost a year old. And um she reunified, and I sat in the back of church and cried for many Sundays through the hymns. But the Lord taught me, my children are not my own, they're a gift for a time. Whether they come to us biologically, foster care, adoption. Um, you know, I I was a labor and delivery nurse for many, many years, and I saw too many people have healthy babies that then went on to get sick or you know, have um things that would disable them, what have you. Nothing's a guarantee, if that makes sense. And um just having to trust the Lord genuinely with our children's future, um no matter what. Now that doesn't make it easy to say goodbye. And you know, I think about the little one that was crying themselves to sleep for three nights. I mean, I've cried myself asleep many a night after a child has left our home. You know, but that doesn't mean I'm not trusting, there's just genuine, real, human emotions there.
SPEAKER_01Um yeah, two things can be true, right? And that is that that's one of the lessons that we end up learning along the journey is we can have these two really big, very true things that seem contradictory and they're just not. It's normal to have grief at reunification, and you can also have a surety that God is writing a story that you don't have access to every chapter, and like those two things can be true, but there's still a human emotion of grief and sadness.
SPEAKER_00Yes. Um that's okay. It doesn't mean you're not on board with how foster care is supposed to go, or reunification being a goal, or it isn't sad you loved, yeah.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, like it means that you poured your heart out and you loved, and like there's a sadness that comes with reunification. I think for me, one of the harder parts um was when I was not sad at reunification or like departure, right? Like that was like a it was like, oh, everybody's saying like I could never do foster care because I could never say goodbye. And you know, seven years in, I was like, um sometimes you can really love that child a whole lot better when they're not in your home. Yeah, yeah, and you can have more genuine um feelings for them that feel easier when they are not in your home, and that is hard to describe too.
SPEAKER_00It is, it is okay to feel relief, yeah. To feel like you can take a deep breath, um, especially if you've been living in like fight or flight for a long time. Not every child will be easy to bond with. Right. It's just the truth of the matter. And if we don't say that, then there are going to be plenty of people that will feel guilty for feeling like it's hard to bond. And our I'll get our 18-month-old, for example, when he came. A child that cries for six weeks, no stop, is hard to bond with. 100% hard to bond with. Yes. Also, you know, our other son, he came at five months old. So you're holding him, you're snuggling him, you're wearing him against your chest. There's there's an easier, it just makes it easier to bond.
Um, and I can say this, my husband would tell you, he had a very hard time bonding with our 18-month-old. It took a very long time, and that's okay. It's it's you're you are bringing someone else's child into your home and loving them as your own. And there is, there is a bonding process. You know what? Even with our biological daughter, I carried her for nine months when she was born. He loved her, but there there wasn't this instant. I I'll tell three months later when she smiled for the first time, he started crying and he looked at me and he said, I've loved her, but I'm in love with her. Yes, like, you know, he finally for men, the interaction, the smiling, the reacting to him was what he needed. And he was young and a first-time dad. I mean, we have to give ourselves so much grace. And also, we're not always not every foster parent, adoptive parent, loved parent is going to have the same experience. Not every child that comes through our home is going to be the same experience as the last time. And that's okay.
SPEAKER_01And it's totally normal. I um when I had my oldest, everybody had described that like rush of love that you feel when you hold your baby in your arms for the first time, right? Like they are describing it to these new moms, and I'm like, great, can't wait. Like, I can't wait. And I have her, and it does not happen. And I was like, huh. I feel the same. There were changes that happened inside of me for sure, right? Like there was, um, she ended up having to go to the NICU for a handful of hours to like monitor whatever, right? Stories that I'm sure that you were very familiar with.
SPEAKER_00That makes it hard for bonding too.
SPEAKER_01Well, it does, but I mean, just like a handful of hours. And we got the first 30 minutes together, and then they were like, we just we want to observe. And so at eight o'clock, because there was nothing really wrong with her, they just didn't like how she was crying or breathing or something, right? Um, and they told me that by like 6:30. They had said, like, hey, we've observed her, she's great. And by eight o'clock, she still wasn't back in my room. Now I am up to this point in my life a very passive person, like a very like, I don't want to cause any like ripples. I don't like, I'm gonna be nice to everybody. I like honey attracts better, like more than vinegar, right?
SPEAKER_00They know what they're doing. I'm gonna go with the food.
SPEAKER_01They know what they're doing. They know what they're doing. And so I'm call I call, I get an update, and I'm like, what's going on? And then I call back and they say, and the first update was like, they had just bathed her. The second update was they had just bathed her 30 minutes ago, and she has to warm up. And I said, Come again. Uh-huh. She had just been bathed at 6 30, but shift change and like whatever, right? Yes. And I can understand this. That's totally fine. What happened though for me, like when I at the end of that conversation, when I put the phone down and I said, what I said was, you're gonna call me every single 10 minutes until she's back in my room with an update on her status and when she when I can expect her back here. And I said it just like that. Like I was still, I was very direct, but I was I would still put myself in the kind category, just direct. And I hung up the phone, and my older sister, who has always been that person for me, looked at me and was like, Who are you? And what have you done with Rebecca? And I thought that they have my daughter, like they like it. How would I not say that? They have so like those changes happened immediately, like all throw down now in a way that I would never have before. It wasn't, and that that was my only clue. That interaction and the knowledge that I would gladly die for her were my only clues that I loved her for three weeks, Jennifer, until uh we were sitting in my living room and I looked down, and then the wave came, and it was like, Oh, that's what people are talking about. Like it was like it was exactly what your husband experienced, right? Like that moment, but it's delayed, and then you're like, Oh now, loving her gave me this ability to love my son immediately when he came, right? Like it was just this like because she had taught me all of those things. But I think that in foster care and adoption, especially because
there's this saying that goes around that I wish we would eradicate from the language of foster care. I'm saying it and I'm keeping that in. I love them like they're my own.
SPEAKER_02Uh-huh.
SPEAKER_01I want I want that sentence gone from how we talk about kids in foster care. Because no, you don't. No, you we can love them tremendously. We can love them in a huge way. They can own a piece of our heart for the time that they are in our home. But 19 kids came and went from my house, and I am okay. Like, you know what I mean? Like it's like in the way that like if if Zoe or Slade, and this is if Zoe and Slade were ever removed from me, if there was a moment when I didn't have, I would not be okay. Like if something happened to them, I would not be okay for another day of my life. Like, I just interviewed a mom whose son passed away yesterday. Her son passed away years ago. I was interviewing her yesterday, and she was like, There will never be a day of my life that is the same anymore as it was the day before he died, right? And I think that that language also impacts how people feel like they're supposed to bond with foster children. I'm gonna love you huge. There will be no difference in what you see and experience in the, you know what I mean? Like, right? There will be no difference in that. But I understand my place as your middle mom. I understand my place here in this role of keeping you safe and loving you fully and and advocating for you as your mother in this space while you're in my home. And then, like what you were talking about, I can sit on the back row of church and cry my eyes out and release you back into the unknown, trusting that I have done my part in your story. That is not the same. You know what I mean? Like it's like those two. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. But in it, it's like that's where I mean, I just I see so much. Um gosh, that's a soapbox that I have that we don't need to go on.
SPEAKER_00I'll have to sit with it a little bit. I have to think about it. Um, because I definitely have said and do say, you know, I love them like my own. But there have been, we've had 40 children through our home. We've had some stay with us for two years, we've had some stay with us for a few days. You know, there is a difference, right? There is a difference. Um we the the little girl that our organization is um is named in her honor, she was an adoptions case, which is unusual. She was abandoned at the hospital, so she was in adoption. So we had let our guard down. You know, we did think about the future. And I was telling somebody the other day in foster care, you love them and you and you take it one day at a time.
SPEAKER_02Yes.
SPEAKER_00You don't think about kindergarten graduation or high school graduation or teaching them to drive. You just have to live in that moment of what your family looks like at that time. Um, but her case changed at almost 20 months in the reunification. COVID was involved. There's lots of things after being foster parents for a decade that we were like, whoa, you know, this is not we thought once again, we thought we knew everything that could happen. Um, and I protect obviously a lot of the details because it's her story. Um, and this has always been a thing for me as a foster mom. Our my story is interwoven with these children. Yeah. But there's so and I want to share and I want to tell, but there's so much that I want to protect for them still after they're gone from my home. Um, but we raised her from birth to over two years and then put her in a car and never saw her again.
SPEAKER_01And that grief was heavy, profound and different because you did love her like you're like, you know what I mean?
SPEAKER_00Like in those cases. Yes. That is one the wall came down. Yes, not not, and only foster parents or adopt parents understand. There's not a you know, when these children come in, it's not like I'm gonna love you at a distance. It's not that, no, um, but they're there. I've had a conversation with friends of mine who do have biological children, adoptive children. And I we have to be very honest that there is something biological. Now, my my first child is my biological child. So I also don't know if it was because it was my first child or my only biological. But when she would cry, we did the Cry It Out, which I know is not, you know, lots of people don't do anymore.
SPEAKER_01It's 2026. She's probably like, what is she like 10, 15 years old?
SPEAKER_00She's 16. And listen, she's a straight A student, she's fine. Crying out didn't hurt her, okay? Uh, but it would hurt me. I would have to put headphones in or leave the house. Yeah, I physically would ache. I could not handle it. Now, when her brothers came and were with us in foster care, I don't know if it's because two came at once and I now had three kids and it was chaos, or I was seasoned, or they did not physically come out of my body. There was not an ache there when they cried. Does that make sense?
SPEAKER_01I I don't it's it's C for I I will tell you it is C.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01Like that is there's not an ache because there's not that there's not a biological connection. Yes, there's it's still a caring, there's an empathy, there's a disruption, there's a my nervous system doesn't feel, but there is not a physical pain inside of us.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. With without it, there is
I attribute it to my nursing, similar to my nursing career. I know so much about healthcare, labor and delivery. And I took care of a friend once, and that was a completely different experience than taking care of strangers. Yeah. And I said, after that experience, I will be there for a friend in labor if they want me to be there in like a support person, but I will not be the primary nurse in a friend's delivery because it is completely different than taking care of a stranger. I don't know how, you know, like there's just this bond there with a close friend that I, you know, this horrific fear that overcomes me of something going wrong. And, you know, not that I don't care that for the strangers I cared for, but of course. So there's there's probably I would I would say it's very similar to that. Um, but I will tell you what you're saying about your daughter and and then my husband, when he knew he had bonded in love with our daughter, our sons, our oldest. We are going to a visit on his birthday. They specifically wanted to schedule it on his birthday, and he's given me permission to share this. Um they're gonna bring cake and birthday presents, got them all dressed up. We hyped it up, we talked about it, we went, they didn't come. And we walked out of that visit into the parking lot, and I called my husband to share, but they didn't come. And I said on the phone to him, they are not going to do this to our son. And in that moment, I knew something had changed. Like, I knew something had changed, and I was afraid of this feeling that had overcome me because I still knew reunification was the plan.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and yeah, so that's I we're hitting on something that is so real in this journey that there what you experience with your little girl and and it being you for so and that wall, like letting that wall down is really um, you know, there's a difference. There's a difference when we know that our heart is only responsible for a season versus for the rest of the their life, right? There's a different um, there's different access. And so it's not it is not um and it's a beautiful thing. The different access is a beautiful thing, it's not something to shy away from. And you gave her that access, and the grief is profound and complex when when that access is cut off. Like I'm sure I'm sure that you still probably have times where you're like, I just miss her so much, or what is she doing?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, how like right? There's when our part of my heart living outside my body. Yes, which is how I say about my children, my forever children. Um I look at my mom, who has all biological children. We were the first to adopt in many generations of our family. Um now my parents have more children adopted into their grandchildren adopted into their family than they do biological. Because my sister adopted two girls that we had fostered. And um, but I look at her with us as adults and think, there's a season she went through the same thing, she loved us and was fully responsible for us for a season, and then she had to release us and trust the Lord with our future, you know. Um, it's it I I don't know. I'll know when I get to that point with my children, but it feels similar.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Um, yeah, I had this, I had the same moment that you were talking about in the parking lot. I had it driving home before um it's the reason that we ended up adopting the kids is because I was driving down my road and we had a sibling set of four that um we were in the pipeline, we were in the pipeline to adopt, and we were in that season of like, are should we is this are we crazy? Like all of the questions of like adopting a sibling of four is no small thing. Um turns out I just did this research a couple weeks ago for something else. Only six percent, like if you are a sibling set of four, you have a six percent chance of being raised together, like being placed together in foster care. And I don't know the actual percentage of being adopted because the six percent chance stopped me in my tracks. Like I just like I they had a six percent chance of growing up together. Like that's that's wild. But I was driving home and I had we had just done the last visit like a couple weeks before, or maybe a month before, and I had watched, I'd experienced a mom putting a kid in a car and then driving away, never not knowing if she was ever like the depths of grief that I experienced that day on her behalf, right? Um, and I knew that I had done that with 19 kids. Like I had put kids in a car and they had driven away and I had been fine. And it was that that's when I understood this different, like of like, if this were Zoe and Slayed, I would never be okay again, like this, right? And I was driving home and I saw my driveway, and I just kind of pictured a caseworker's car in my driveway packing up the kids, but I pictured them one by one. And our youngest came to us at five and a half months old. So I held him, I saw him sit up for the first time, I saw him crawl, I saw him like taught him to walk, taught him like we did all of those. But mostly I held him and I was bottle feeding him, and I like and I could not picture it. Like my brain couldn't fathom him going into a car and being driven away. And when I when I couldn't picture it, I knew we were adopting the kids.
SPEAKER_00Like there's a reason God gives us infants. Yes, there is a reason. Uh, like if if He if if we birthed toddlers, I don't know, we wouldn't have as many children. There the bond with an infant is much easier than that. And I believe that's part of the reason we have such difficulty housing older kids and teenagers, but I totally get where you're going.
SPEAKER_01Because the attachment of the of the stuff, right? But it's like it is that it was that moment where I was like, mm-hmm, okay, all right, yes, we're in it. We're doing this for forever.
SPEAKER_00Um you touched on something with I was gonna say, you know, when I said uh the mama bear came out on me of this is my son, and they're not gonna do this to him. There was also part of the fear was if we were going to adopt, we had always thought we'd adopt one child and um maybe then have another biological child or something. And knowing there was two of them was like, can we afford this? You know, we didn't know all the resources in our state. Children, if they're adopted out of foster care, still get Medicaid, which we didn't need, but now realize how helpful that is. Um, there was real fear there of, oh wow, this this wasn't our plan to have you know, two. And I'm sure when you say four, that's like, whoa, wow.
SPEAKER_01Not the plan.
SPEAKER_00Not the plan. Um we laugh. I always thought if we adopted, they'd be children of a different race. And the Lord gave us two little white boys, and one of them looks exactly like me. I mean, we could go our whole lives with nobody knowing we adopted our children, you know? And then we've got friends of ours who adopted two children of a different race, and they can't go anywhere without people knowing that they're an adoptive family. It's a it's quite a dynamic, you know. We can fly under the radar if we want to. Now our boys are we speak. One of the best advice we were given, I feel, early on was actually an attorney that was a private adoption attorney, but he had served as an attorney for Department of Social Services for quite some time. And he said, I'd like to tell you to celebrate your adoption the same way you would your biological birth, you know, put the adoption uh, you know, decree framed up on the wall or, you know, just talk to them about their story and how the Lord brought them. Um, which I think is so much, we see that so much more now with social media. And um, but when I was growing up, adoption was still hidden or not talked about as much. Um, so we do, we we we celebrate how the Lord brought every child into our family. Um and yeah, so our boys, they're very vocal about it. Um, you know, they'll tell their classmates, you know, an interesting fact about me, you know, the icebreakers. What's an interesting fact about you? I'm adopted. Um but yeah, there's just so many, so many dynamics to all of it.
SPEAKER_01But yeah, it's gonna what's the thing that's been the most surprising to you?
SPEAKER_00Um I don't know. Uh well as far as our foster care journey, the most surprising to me is that we have stayed licensed this long. Okay.
Adoption. Uh I don't know if I'd say surprising, but something I learned that I think everybody has to learn is it's not fixed when those adoption papers are signed. It's not like everything's done. Oh you know? Um, there's still so much work to be done and learning to be done and things to process. Probably far into our children's adulthood.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Um in our family, the dynamics are one biological child and two adopted. I always worried and thought about our adopted child feeling left out. Now I worry about our biological daughter. She's one of the only biological, like I said, in our extended family. We have more grandchildren adopted in thanks not. Um there's not a lot of conversation around that. Around um but she has genuinely been one of the catalysts that has kept us going. She loves foster care, she loves serving others. My kids were the welcoming committee, they were the greatest icebreaker. Um we were ready to close our home, and our boys looked at us and said, but what about other kids like us? How do you say no to that?
SPEAKER_02You don't.
SPEAKER_00You don't. Um Yeah, we've just learned so much over the years. I don't know. I'm trying to think of like the most surprising. Um there's been a lot, a lot of surprises, but um I think on this side of it. I look back and think, wow. We talked about adoption when we're engaged when we were engaged, dating and engaged. Here we are, 18 years later. This many children through our home we've adopted. Our children talk about adoption and foster care and their future like it's normal, and everybody does it, and they're gonna do it.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00That's a wow. That's that's I'm I'm proud of that. That this is a normal for them. That's awesome.
SPEAKER_01Tell me a little bit about your nonprofit. What do you do?
SPEAKER_00Well, we put rooms into our Department of Social Service offices here. We have one in each county of South Carolina, uh DSS office, and then we have six um regional adoption offices. They handle the children that are already legally free for adoption, but um have an adoptive placement or don't. So we have um our 46 counties in South Carolina and then six regional adoption offices. We Mostly fostered uh infants because of my background in labor and delivery and a lot of infants that needed to go through withdrawals and beyond medication plans. Um, but about 10 years in, um I shared with you that we were fostering a little one. We had her through COVID, she was an adoptions case, and that case really broke us emotionally when she reunified after two years. And it was through that time period where we were thinking, okay, Lord, we can't turn away from this. We still want to help. Not sure we can keep bringing children into our home because the grief extends out to our children, our family, our church family. Uh and she was doing transitional visits back and forth with her biological family on the weekends, and I didn't want to look at an empty room. And I knew that older children oftentimes were spending a lot of time in our offices waiting for placement. And so I just reached out to our local placement agency and said, if there's a child, a teenager even that you know would be safe to come to our home with our age children on the weekends, please let me know. I don't want them to have to stay there late into the night or even sleep there. And of course, the very first weekend they had somebody. Sure. Um, her name was Ash Flynn, she's 15. She had been um in foster care since very young, three or four years old, survived neglect in her biological family, and then um was coming back into care at the age of 15 because she had been surviving abuse in her adoptive family. She was the oldest of four. Two brothers had been adopted into different families. One of those adopted moms had done a great job of keeping all the kids in touch with each other. Ashlyn and her sister Lauren had been adopted together. Um, Lauren was not experiencing the abuse Ashlyn was, and Ashlyn shared with me, and and this is all with her permission to share because she advocates with us now at our nonprofit. Um, but she shared with me when she saw him grooming her sister was when she knew she needed to report it. And I would never uh, you know, even want to ask her, well, why'd you put up with it for so long? But she shared with me, she said I we were adopted into a home where we were in school every day. We had food on the table, my sister had parents, we had promises of college. So I was putting up with it so my sister would have family. That thought process never crossed my mind. And then she saw him grooming her sister, and then she reported it. So that's why she was coming to our home. Well, she was only supposed to stay with us for the weekend, and it's not that we thought that we were her saviors by any means, but when our church family learned of this and our descended family, they all said, if you would like her to stay with you, you know, we'll help you. Mind you, we had our three children, then we had our little one doing her transitional visits, getting ready to reunify. Then we had Ashlyn, and then her sister was brought into care just a day later, and of course we brought her in as well. So I put my head on my pillow. It was uh December 31st of 2021. And I thought, Lord, what have we done? These girls are gonna need to be adopted, and what are the chances that a 12 and a 15-year-old are gonna get adopted together again? Um uh our little ones getting ready to leave, which is gonna be so much for my children and extended family and my husband and I. Um, but Ashlyn shared with us her experience over the years in the offices. She said goodbye to her brothers in a conference room. She uh she had reported her abuse this time at school to a trusted counselor at school, questioned by the police, brought to the DSS office. And though she was placed with us
that night, she was in the office for hours and she fell asleep in a cubicle with a stranger. You know, the case managers are there doing the hard work of finding these kids' placement, investigating these cases and working through these cases, but they are strangers to these children. And um when I learned that, uh, I truly, it's like a light bulb went off. Like I had a moment, I can picture myself in that moment still to this day. And I thought we can do better than that. And that is where the idea of Lillipad came from. I reached out to a friend who's also a foster mom. She's an interior designer. I said, Hey, let's go over to our local office and see if they'll let us raise some funds and just maybe they have a conference room or a cubicle that we can just make into a comfortable space for these kids to be away from the office stuff, to have a place prepared for them, maybe even a bed, if nothing else, a comfortable couch, TV to distract. So we're not adding trauma to what is already a traumatic situation. Because Ashlyn shared waking up in the cubicle, hearing conversations of this foster family can't take me. I might be separated from my sister, I might go to a group home. And that's just adding to what is already a traumatic situation. Well, we did. Uh, we just crowdsourced for a room. And because we already had this relationship with our local department, they let us do it and um we put that first one in and then the second one, and then we had DSS offices calling us when can you come do this for us? And we had a wise friend who said you should really consider applying to be a nonprofit. Excuse me. And um, you know, that way if you're a nonprofit, people can donate tax deductible for these spaces, you can partner with businesses. So uh reached out to an attorney and an accountant, and they did the research of how to apply to be a nonprofit, and they said it'll take about a year for everything to go through with the IRS, and it came back in eight weeks. And we just thought, okay, Lord, we see you. Um and so we started putting in what are called lily pad rooms into every DSS office, and they look like a living room space and they are filled with a comfortable couch. Many of the couches pull out into beds. If there's space for an actual bed, we'll include an actual bed. Because you know, kids come into the office day and night.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00It could even be they've had a suicide attempt and they're being released from the hospital midday. They still need a place to sleep, or they're out of school sick, they still need a place to sleep. Um, they come in at 2 a.m. So it's not for the purpose of our department being able to house them overnight there. They're still actively seeking placement for them as soon as possible. But you can't deny the fact that these kids are spending a significant amount of time in the offices and they should have a place prepared for them. And um spoke with an occupational therapist who uh was caring for our little one at the time in foster care and asked her what she thought would be helpful. And she said, include a rocking chair because a child that's experienced trauma or has special needs, if they could rock for five to 10 minutes, they'll retain difficult information better. We include weighted blankets and fidget toys. Um, we use ruggable rugs so that they can be washed and the floors can be cleaned to get down and play and provide toys, TV, uh, gaming system, and a monitoring system so that the case managers can carry on their work, but they can still have eyes and ears on the child. Um, because just imagine if the child's gonna come to my home, I'm not gonna have a camera in their bedroom. Like they should be able, I'm not gonna be sitting next to them the whole time. They should be able to, especially the older kids, have a space where they can have a felt sense of privacy.
SPEAKER_01Right.
SPEAKER_00Um, so it it was let's just see if we can put a room or two in. And then it grew into, well, let's let's do the whole upstate of South Carolina and then our state. There was no red tape. There was no red tape with our department heads. Um, the state director for child welfare at the time was Michael Leach. He was at our third installation that was in Spartanburg County, which is a a neighboring county to Greenville County where we live. He came to a ribbon cutting at that office. He stayed with us for two hours afterwards talking. And I'm sitting there thinking, I gotta go pick my kids up from school, but like this is an opportunity that I don't want to give up. Um invested in the work we were doing and and just looked at us at one point and said, This is what we should have been doing already and the way these children should be treated. Um and some people might say, Well, you're just you're just decorating a room, but it's treating them with love and dignity and demonstrating the love of Christ for them. Hopefully giving them a sense that they have value and worth. Um like the organizations that are providing backpacks or luggage so they don't put their belongings in a trash bag.
SPEAKER_01Right.
SPEAKER_00Um, just treating these kids the way I would want to be treated and the way I would want my children to be treated if anything like this happened to them. So we are now in 42 county offices across South Carolina.
SPEAKER_01Wow.
SPEAKER_00And by the end of next year, we'll have a lily pad in each each county of South Carolina. Um, we partner with local churches or foster parent associations in each county to then take responsibility for the room and maintain it. We keep a maintenance budget. So if something's broken, wears out, paint needs redone, we will do that. But they uh we connect the Department of Social Services office within that county with that local church or foster pain association. We help build that bridge, close that gap, create that relationship, and then they help maintain that lilypad space for us. Um wow. And we just this week we moved into victim care within law enforcement. We had a sergeant from the special victims unit in Spartanburg County reach
out and say she'd been watching our website. She had just had to take a victim of sexual assault into an interrogation room to interview them. And she said, I never want to do that again. They're a victim, not the assailant. And would you ever consider this in a law enforcement space? And I told her, I said, I don't know if you're a believer, but you're an answer to prayer because we knew that we were coming up on having all the DSS offices done end of next year. And what did the Lord have for Lillipad? Where was our next place to serve? My husband's background in law enforcement. We knew they could be helpful in law enforcement offices. Um, so we were prayerfully considering that. And the Lord took care of that and answered that. So we just cut the ribbon on our first law enforcement LilyPad.
SPEAKER_01So that's amazing.
SPEAKER_00That is our organization. It's called Lilypad a soft place to land, and it is in um honor of our little one that we were fostering at the time. Uh, and so her name was Lily, and it's called LilyPad a soft place to land. So it's amazing.
SPEAKER_01Jennifer, thanks so much for being on the podcast today.
SPEAKER_00It's been thank you for having me.
SPEAKER_01Really good talking to you.
SPEAKER_00It's always a joy to talk to somebody who similar experiences like faith and just understands.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00There's a common language and common understanding.
SPEAKER_01Yes.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.