Quad-Cities Times, May 4, 2009
Kay Luna | Posted: Monday, May 4, 2009 5:50 pm
Keera Johansen says she didn’t know what else to do.
She suddenly had nowhere to live and no way to take care of her 2-year-old daughter as she struggled to keep up with two fast-food jobs. She needed to find a new place to live and to narrow her work down to one daytime job.
So, the 19-year-old mother accepted help she never imagined she would need.
She temporarily left her toddler with people she had never met, trusting them to take care of the girl for several months.
Which they did.
“I don’t know what I would have done without them,” Johansen said before jumping up and running after the little girl — who was reunited with her mom in February.
“It was really hard to leave her,” she said.
Program exists to help
This sounds like foster care, but it isn’t. It’s Safe Families, a program that was quietly begun in the Quad-Cities last year by LYDIA Home in Davenport, following the lead of its Chicago headquarters.
The program allows parents to leave their children in prescreened “safe homes” around the area while they address the issues that led to their distress.
The need for it is huge.
Even in the best of economies, some parents suddenly find themselves in crisis — financially, emotionally or both. But especially during this economic downturn, many more families are struggling to keep afloat, sometimes without a support system of relatives or friends nearby to help.
In worst-case scenarios, those difficult times could lead some parents to child abuse or to lose custody of their children in the event their circumstances were found unfit. That’s why Safe Families was born, to ease those burdens, said Jean Heard, the program’s Quad-City director.
Some parents are afraid to seek help from authorities because they fear a permanent split from their children. With the Safe Families program, the intent is to reunite families, she said.
Each case is different, including the child’s length of stay. Some children live with prescreened volunteers for a few days or weeks. Others stay for months.
Parents maintain full custody of their children despite them being placed temporarily in others’ homes, and the parents are encouraged to participate in decisions regarding their child’s care — as well as to visit and call them as a means of maintaining that connection.
If volunteers are leery about giving their personal information to the parents, LYDIA staff serves as the liaison, keeping in close touch with all parties and organizing opportunities for parents to see their children in a neutral place, Heard said.
Parents are not charged anything to use the program, which Heard and LYDIA Home/Quad-City director Joyce Gibson said would not exist without the tremendous help of volunteers.
Word of mouth
Over the past year, Heard has been working to recruit volunteer host families and let social service agencies know that Safe Families exists so they can refer parents in need.
Until now, however, the marketing has been low-key. She relied mostly on churches, parent groups, hospitals, schools and other agencies to help spread the word and refer placements from both the Iowa and Illinois Quad-City regions.
So far, about 20 safe families have been chosen or are in the screening process around the Quad-Cities, and about 40 children have been placed in those homes over the past year.
Now, Heard and Gibson are bracing themselves and rallying more volunteers to help as the program receives media attention.
The Chicago headquarters of LYDIA Home’s Safe Families program recently was featured prominently in the Chicago Tribune, and a news crew from CBS-TV visited the Chicago site to get video footage for a possible Katie Couric feature that would be shown nationally, LYDIA executives said.
“I couldn’t do this without a faith and hope in knowing that it’s far above me,” Gibson said. “When it’s emotional and physically exhausting, we remind ourselves that God’s given us the opportunity to help people and that our tasks are part of a bigger picture.”
One recent case involved a very young mother who was depressed and trying to go to school. She was put in contact with Safe Families officials, and her infant was placed with a family so she could focus on sorting things out in her personal life.
“When she decides she’s stable, we’ll be there for her,” Heard said, adding that the program will provide ongoing recourse and support for the young mother, even after the baby returns to her custody.
‘I fell in love immediately’
Keera Johansen would not have known about the Safe Families program if her social worker from the Genesis Bright Beginnings program had not told her of it. The social worker is the same one who contacted the LYDIA Home and met Johansen there that first night.
Heard at Safe Families quickly secured an emergency overnight home for Melissa, Johansen’s daughter, and took her there. Johansen had never met the family and did not go with Heard to drop off the toddler that night.
“I was crying,” Johansen said. “It was really hard.”
The next day, Melissa was transferred to Sara Gassman, a 30-year-old single woman who works as a third-grade teacher in the Pleasant Valley School District. She had volunteered to help the program after seeing it mentioned in the weekly bulletin at Harvest Bible Chapel and agreed to take in Melissa.
The two quickly bonded.
“She’s a child you just fall in love with immediately,” Gassman said, gushing about all the sweet things little Melissa would say or do while in her care from about Thanksgiving until Jan. 9. “She became a very special little girl in my life. I still pray about her every single night.”
The adoration was mutual. Even now, if someone mentions Gassman, Melissa’s eyes sparkle and she says, “My Sara? Wanna see pictures of my Sara.”
While Melissa stayed at Gassman’s house, Johansen did not have a telephone number to call and check on her. She had to go through Safe Families officials to find out how things were going, and that was OK. She understood about the volunteer privacy concerns, she said.
More than a month later, the toddler was moved to another home in Bettendorf. Laura and Tony Fuhrmeister are married, older than Gassman and have other children, ages 11, 9 and 6 years.
Melissa was the second child they had taken in temporarily through the program, and each came under very different circumstances. The first child the Fuhrmeisters accepted stayed only two days, and the parents involved are no longer connected to Safe Families, so they do not know what has happened with the child since then.
But Melissa stayed a month or so in their home and soon “felt very much like a part of our family,” Laura Fuhrmeister said.
But the girl missed her mommy.
Her mommy missed her, too.
As soon as Johansen got a better daytime job with a denture business and secured a permanent home in which to live, she went to get her daughter.
Now, they live with Johansen’s boyfriend in northwest Davenport. They have a new puppy and plenty of time to play together again.
“I want to color, Mommy,” Melissa says, bouncing around the room, giggling over and over again.
“Why don’t you sing, ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star?’ ” Johansen asks her daughter, who sits and thinks about it for maybe one second.
Then she begins jumping around again, giggling even more.
Posted in Local on Monday, May 4, 2009 5:50 pm Updated: 7:32 pm. | Tags: Keera Johansen, Safe Families, Lydia Home, Jean Heard, Joyce Gibson
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