Behind the Curtain: Honest Conversations about Foster Care and Adoption
Each episode will feature a conversation between host Rebecca Harvin and foster/adoptive caregivers or members of the community who support foster care and adoption.
Behind the Curtain: Honest Conversations about Foster Care and Adoption
Breaking Cycles, Building Support: How Safe Families Helps Families in Crisis
This episode is Part 2 of Rebecca's conversation with Tammy Pulsifer. Here is the link to go back and listen to Part 1: Part 1 with Tammy Pulsifer
Tammy Pulsifer, Director of Community Engagement at Safe Families for Children Tallahassee, shares how their organization builds support systems for vulnerable families to prevent children from entering foster care. The conversation explores the profound isolation that leads to foster care placement and how Safe Families creates communities of support for parents in crisis.
• Safe Families provides a "circle of support" for families who have no one to call during crises
• Children enter foster care when parents have absolutely no support network to help them
• The organization helps parents develop critical thinking and problem-solving skills rather than creating dependency
• Trauma affects how people respond to challenges - what appears as simple to some may be overwhelming for others
• Family coaches help parents set achievable goals while volunteers provide practical support
• Small "1% changes" compound over time to shift the trajectory of families' lives
• Safe Families operates in 42 states and 3 countries, with various ways to volunteer
• Children in foster care experience PTSD at 2-3 times the rate of veterans returning from war
Visit safe-families.org to learn how you can get involved in your state.
Hey guys, thanks so much for joining us today. On Behind the Curtain I'm your host, rebecca Harvin, and this is where we have honest conversations about foster care and adoption. I'm really excited to share my guest on the show with you today. Her name is Tammy Pulsifer and she is the Director of Community Engagement at Safe Families for Children in Tallahassee. Tammy is the youngest of three girls to a foreign missionary. She was born in Guam, lived in Saipan, Guam, korea, hawaii and England. She went to Bible college in Tennessee and then moved to Tallahassee in 98 to teach and ended up meeting her husband now of 23 years. They have two girls One is currently doing an internship at Disney and another daughter who is at home in her senior year of high school.
Speaker 1:On the show, tammy talks about what it was like getting to Safe Families, what Safe Families does and how you can be a part in helping children avoid going into foster care. Tammy and I had a great conversation. It was so good, in fact, that we are going to split it and go over two podcasts. So today, here's part two of my conversation with Tammy. If you missed part one, please feel free to go back and hear it. We'll link to it in the show notes. Enjoy the conversation.
Speaker 2:When we have an issue, I mean it used to be I'd call my mom. I've lost both mom and dad over the past three years, but for all we have sisters. We have an issue. I mean it used to be I'd call my mom. I've lost both mom and dad over the past three years, but for all we have sisters, we have cousins, we have best friends, we have neighbors. I mean we have all of this, and the moms and the dads that we serve oftentimes don't have one single person in their phone to call, and so you know the the other thing is making sure that we're helping them to make changes in their life, so we're not just pushing them through the next cycle, we're pushing them out of it to something different. And so even when they call us in a panic with something helping them brainstorm, helping them to make critical thinking decisions like helping them you know what can you do next.
Speaker 2:I remember having a mom call me. She was short on a bill and I said I want you to do me a favor. I want you to walk through your house and see what you can sell on Facebook marketplace. I didn't give her the money and she kind of brainstormed through some things and an hour later she called me back. She said I got it figured out. I'm like awesome you. I knew you can do it, you just needed to talk to somebody.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but yeah, the what is it? It's like a proverb, that's like, um, feed a man a fish and you've fed him one meal. Teach him and a fish and you fed him for the rest of his life, exactly, exactly. And you know some, some people can look at that and be like, oh, but they need to eat now. Like what good? And you're like, yes, they do need to eat now and we're going to solve this one crisis, like there's acute and there's chronic.
Speaker 1:And we're going to do both acute and chronic, right, but it's so often and this is what I try to explain to people when they're talking about when when people ask like, well, how does a kid get into foster care? And what I'll say is like if something were to happen to Brad and I, so we something, some tragedy were to strike, yeah, there is 20 people deep in my phone that you could call that would say yes to taking my kids. Yes, at least, like you wouldn't even get to 20, because you would just get to my siblings, right, exactly Right, like my kids would never. They will never go into foster care for the first time, or ever again, because the village around Brad and I would make sure that that didn't happen again, because the village around Brad and I would make sure that that didn't happen.
Speaker 1:In order for kids to come into foster care, it means that there is nobody in their life. There's nobody. The sheer weight of that sentence is so heavy that there is not a single safe person that these parents can call, call and they want to be able to call somebody like they. They don't want their kids in foster care any more than their kids want to be in foster care or any more than foster parents want there to be a foster care system.
Speaker 1:Like nobody wants foster care to exist but the fact that kids have to go in means that there is not a single safe available close person that can take these kids? Yeah, that is devastating.
Speaker 2:That's exactly right. And so when you're, you know, I just had I still have a strong connection to the Ronald McDonald House and I just had, you know the director there reach out to me about a couple of parents and hey, they have no one after they're, you know, done with this crisis, with this babies, these babies. And so you know, that's that's the heart of it is just telling the world you're not alone, um, and you know a guy that works here with with locally and he said, you know, kids really don't care about getting a really cute Christmas gift If they're going to bed cold at night. You know we have this amazing teacher living with her four kids in an extended stay and that's expensive and so finally getting a place for her, helping her get moved in. They're just so excited and happy to finally be able to breathe and stretch their legs and the kids have a room to go to and those sorts of things.
Speaker 2:And then another young lady, single mom, two kids same thing, her, her income was just below the threshold.
Speaker 2:So we're working with a low income housing community here in Tallahassee, got her a space there and helping her get moved in, and so last week I was helping her get some furniture moved in and I said are you having? She was like cleaning and scrubbing her kitchen and putting like little liners and down. And I said are you having fun homemaking? She was like yes, you know, just so she's so excited and so that's like the kind of things that I love, and so we're working on getting both of these families their circle of support. Yeah, and within that circle of support there's also what we call a family coach, and the family coach is really going to help them set those goals. Because if we just come alongside them, yeah, we're loving them, we're filling their circle, we're making sure they're not alone, but if we don't give them goals, we're just circling them forever and we want them to be a part of our community in a thriving sense and not just a surviving sense.
Speaker 2:And so you know working with them, setting goals. You know helping them build their credit, just like this mom that I told you about. She's like 20 points away.
Speaker 2:Like I got her a, a guy who works with home mortgages and he is working with her, showing her how to build that credit, and he's a wonderful man. He also he actually his wife is a medical foster mom and so, um, that he understands the that need for her to have some coaching when it comes to her finances. So he, he took that on. I just said, hey, would you help her look at what she needs to do to buy her first home? And he began to just coach with her and he, um, they call each other like every two weeks and he walks through where she's at, you know, and so it's those sort of things, along with just the friendships and the, the helping through crises and celebrating life and remembering birthdays and all the things. Um, all of that is it's like a full circle full. And I, like you said the word village. It is a village we do, we surround them.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, you don't know what you don't know right.
Speaker 1:Like how we said that about pastors who don't know, like your foster people in this church need some help. In the same sense, growing up if you didn't have people that taught you skills, oh my goodness, and that's not. And that's not that sentence. That I'm saying is just that is across every social construct in the in our society is if your parents didn't know how to do it, you probably don't know how to do it, because if somebody didn't teach you and that could be literally anything Generational, too Generational your parents didn't know because their parents didn't know. And you just go back and it's like, oh, I was talking about that with somebody with money in my own, in my own world. Right, my parents, um, not for any, not for any reason that you can point to and say, um, there's no way that you could look at my parents and say, like you failed in this category, like that's not what I'm trying to say here at all.
Speaker 1:It's more like whatever tools my parents had, they didn't know how to teach their kids, right, and so, as adults, all of their children have had various relationships with money, but in the same, like when you're talking about going to a mortgage guy and going, how do you build your credit? Literally, nobody in my life has ever told me. I've just Googled and been winging it Right, and you're just like, and with enough, like enough chutzpah and enough, like enough knowledge of the rest of the world to go okay and an internal belief that I can figure this out. Right, but how great would it be to have a coach that's like hey, if you don't know how to do it, you don't know. And I remember when I was first teaching myself about money um, I could not. I was terrified of a credit card, terrified because it just felt like free money to me, right.
Speaker 1:And so and this is we're talking, not my kids have never been in danger of removal my kids. I've come from a solid family structure. I have all of the things around me and still this little area had no scaffolding underneath. Something as simple as how to do a budget can destroy a family If it gets out of hand or if it's just, or if you're just working with such minimal pieces to begin with, right Like yeah you have a minimum wage job and you're a single mom with four kids, you you don't have a lot to work with here.
Speaker 1:You need to know how to manage the money coming in so that it's not um. Yeah, you know what I'm trying to say.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, I get it, Cause like even um, and I've learned so much about the trauma brain as I've come on with, say, families over the past three years and, and you know, questions I always had for people in poverty or people who seem to just kind of stay in this, this circle, have been answered because, as I'm like learning more I don't know if you've ever done the Hope for the Journey series through Stephen Curtis Chapman he does that.
Speaker 2:It's a work group, it's a class he does once a year for people in the foster care system Because, remember, Stephen Curtis Chapman lost a child, a child he had adopted. So he works with that trauma brain and the healing of the trauma brain. It's incredible. First time I ever sat through it. I just cried because it made me understand my parents better. Um, but you know if, for instance, if I was to tell my daughter, okay, I want you to go um, submit an application for this or apply for this job, she would go do it. Oh, I haven't heard from anybody. What should I do, mom? I think you should go and contact them again. Okay, I think you should go in person. But someone who is going through what they're doing, like they'll make that phone call. Nobody answers or responds. They won't try again.
Speaker 1:It is an automatic rejection.
Speaker 2:It is an automatic. They don't want me. And so, kathy, you know my director, she's like I've had, you know the girls that I said hey, you need to call about this daycare. Well, I can't do it why? Cause I called and nobody answered. Well, did you call back? No, like it's that sort of like thinking, like even that seems so basic. So when people are like I don't know how someone doesn't have a job, that doesn't make any sense. Yeah, it does, it makes sense. They applied for the job and nobody responded and it shut them down.
Speaker 1:It shut them down and they didn't have anybody around them saying and it shut them down. It shut them down and they didn't have anybody around them saying try again call them back, go show up.
Speaker 2:you know, and so um, you know the same with evictions, somebody I've had people say I would never let myself get evicted. I'd work two, three jobs if I had to.
Speaker 2:Okay, Step into their shoes and feel what they feel and be where they've been and and imagine living in trauma brain all the time. You've been in and out of foster care or you've been in and out of abusive homes or you've been homeless multiple times before the age of five. Like, what does that do? And so I love the first time I heard my director say we are serving the moms and dads, but we're serving the five-year-old in their head. That never got served. That's who we're serving. Yes, little kid, that never got served. Yes, and so it's. It's amazing. I would like to say we have all of these amazing Hollywood endings but we don't. We are. We tell our volunteers all the time if that's what you're looking for, you're not going to get it and you're going to be discouraged.
Speaker 1:What we're looking for is for you to see a mom and dad.
Speaker 2:Take one step forward, and when you've done that, you'll watch them take the next step forward.
Speaker 2:And they may take two back, but be there to help push them to the next step, because you know the volunteers who get frustrated with us. They don't listen to us and they're looking for that and I'm like you never saw that with Jesus. You never saw him give you this ta to da, look what we did. He doesn't do that Like his whole mindset is stepping toward the kingdom of God and if we can have families who are moving forward, they're good enough, is good enough.
Speaker 2:It may not be our good enough, but is there good enough? And so it's like trying to. You know, just walk with families and you just might look at their families, their, their family unit and be like, oh, good Lord, what a mess. Well, for them it's moving forward and it's good.
Speaker 1:And so it's like you know, all the kids ate three meals today and they're good, Like we are moving forward and we don't get to say, from our place of comfort or our place of distance or our place of whatever, we don't get to judge how hard or easy that was for them. Yeah, right, we have had kids in our home and I'm very, very aware of this where I've asked them to sit in a chair at the table for dinner, and that is literally the only thing when I'm I call this like Sarah, parenting I don't think it's an actual word. I think I made it up where I'm like part therapist, part parent and I'm looking at cancer'ts versus won'ts, right, and so can'ts I thera parent, won'ts I parent. I'm not always the best judge, I get it wrong, but this is kind of my system. When kids come into the home, or even now with my own kids, there's still a ton of like I can't like and they don't have words for it. Yeah, but in this particular instance, chairs at a table. I need you to sit at the dining room table, not squat on top of it, not stand beside it, not like I just need you to sit in a chair.
Speaker 1:What I am asking for is the equivalent of an emotional marathon. Yes, right, and so having that awareness that what I am asking for in this moment is an emotional marathon, and so they will not be able to do all of these other things that that I would say would be normal childhood behavior, or this is how. This, these are the rules Like, why aren't you following all 20 of my rules over here? Because one takes everything out of them. And so, like looking at that and applying that same principle to families like this, where it's like we don't get to say what their emotional marathon is, but, by God, we get to stand beside them and cheer for them when they run that marathon that day, right, and then we're going to ask them to wake up tomorrow and we're going to ask them to run another marathon and we're going to cheer for them again and and have so much grace for all of these other areas, right, because you're you're focusing on on this thing at our retreats and I talk about this all the time.
Speaker 1:It's from James Clear's Atomic Habits and it's about 1%, like a 1% shift changes the trajectory of a life Exactly, and the um example that he uses is a plane that takes off from los angeles. If you change one percent, their course and like they're headed to new york, but you change the trajectory one percent, you end up in washington dc. It's crazy. It's crazy like the math of doing one percent over time, of doing 1% over time, changes the trajectory of a life, and here's the thing, though, is that 1%, your muscles will get used to it. It's exactly what you're talking about, right? You will get. They will get used to doing this thing.
Speaker 1:Eventually it's not hard to sit in a chair at the dinner table anymore. That's no longer an emotional marathon. It's not hard to call an employer back and say, hey, I was wondering about that job application that I put in right. Eventually they understand this is not a rejection. They weren't standing by the phone. Right, easy for us to see, hard for them to see, right, totally. There's gotta be grace. Can you tell me if somebody's listening to this and they're like I can do this? I can come alongside, I can be a family friend to somebody. I can. I can teach somebody how to budget. I'm really good at budgeting. I would love to teach somebody how to budget. That would not be me. I struggle, I struggle, I am like I do it, but I am the turtle winning the race. How does somebody get involved? And where is? Where are safe families located?
Speaker 2:We have listeners all across America, so we actually have 42 States and we actually have a Jacksonville chapter. Yeah, families, we have five chapters in Florida, but we're in 42 States and so if they were, if you're nationally looking into it, if you go to safe-familiesorg that's our national, so safe-familiesorg and then there's a get involved and it'll ask you, it'll let you do a state drop down. So I can't guarantee it'll be in their state, but maybe you want to. 42 out of 50 is not bad. It's not bad. And we're actually in three countries. We're in Taiwan we opened a chapter one. I think there's one chapter in Taiwan. There's a few chapters in England and forget where else we're at.
Speaker 2:But it's interesting because there's a famous actor I'm trying to think of his name. He was in the Greatest Showman, he was the main. What's the name? Hugh Jackman. Yeah, he actually called Safe Families and was like, can you come to Australia? Because he had heard about us and we were like we're not in Australia yet, but they didn't call me, they called Arnie, our. You got money, hugh.
Speaker 1:So if you want to bring us to australia, like, get us over there um all it takes is money and a willing body so you got the money and we'll find the people yeah, and it, it's, it's chap, it's state by state.
Speaker 2:Every state has different laws that we have to abide by. Thank you, lord. Florida gives us a lot of freedoms, so we we get to do a lot, like in in New York, you can't host. You can do all the other parts of it, you just can't host.
Speaker 1:Step one is to realize that you can do something to help people without without sacrificing your entire life, without without like you can. You can be involved and you can change people's lives.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:Not the least of which is by helping put a barrier between them and more trauma. Yeah, like the amount of trauma that kids experience in their brain. Children in foster care experience PTSD at like two or three times the amount of trauma that kids experience in their brain. Children in foster care experience PTSD at like two or three times the rate of veterans returning from war.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah Are you kidding me. Yeah.
Speaker 1:A five-year-old experiences PTSD at two or three times the rate of a veteran returning from war. I have veterans in my family who have like I know what this is. It's gonna be a barrier. I'm like I'm on a soapbox heaven today. I told you at the beginning I didn't know if my brain was gonna work. Turns out, my brain went in soapboxes today. Okay, at the end of every episode we do a lightning round.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:Answer as fast as you can. Oh, no, uh. What is on your nightstand?
Speaker 2:My nightstand um a lamp, my sound machine and a whole bunch of memorial to my mom who passed away.
Speaker 1:Okay, um, what is a book or podcast that you are really enjoying right now?
Speaker 2:Oh my word. It's an incredible true story. We'll blow you away. You've got to read it. When God changed his mind by Christina custodian.
Speaker 1:Okay, and then the last question is what is bringing you joy right now?
Speaker 2:Um CrossFit, it's my mental. It's like a go. I've been doing it for years. I love CrossFit.
Speaker 1:Well, tammy, thank you. So so, so much for trusting a stranger and jumping on a podcast. This has been incredible.
Speaker 2:Yes, thank you, you as well. You've given me some a lot of things to think about too.