Christmas Beyond the Village

Caring for the Families Who Show Up Every Day

Our TruLight family doesn't stop at the Village doors. 

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Throughout our community are foster, adoptive, and kinship families doing the hard, beautiful, and often unseen work of loving children from hard places—24 hours a day, 7 days a week. ​

 

• They are there for the middle-of-the-night fears.

• ​The behaviors that don't always make sense until you understand the story underneath them.

• ​The appointments, school meetings, caseworker visits, therapy sessions, court dates, paperwork, medication schedules, family visits, phone calls, transportation, advocacy, and endless calendar juggling.

• ​They are learning how to parent children whose experiences may have taught them that adults aren't safe, food isn't always available, people leave, or love comes with conditions.

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And they keep showing up.

That matters.

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Foster, adoptive, and kinship parents are doing much more than providing a bed and putting food on the table.

​They are helping children experience consistency.

• Safety.

• Connection.

• Belonging.

And the sometimes slow, sometimes messy process of learning that an adult can be trusted to stay.

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For many of these families, there isn't really an “off” button. Trauma doesn't take Christmas break. In fact, holidays can bring more emotions, more memories, more questions, and more complicated behaviors for children who have experienced separation, loss, abuse, neglect, or multiple moves. ​While much of the world is slowing down and celebrating, these caregivers are still doing the work.​

24 hours a day. 7 days a week. Even on Christmas morning.

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This Christmas, Let's Care for the Caregivers Too

Sometimes supporting a child means supporting the adults who are doing everything they can to care for that child.

• A grocery gift card can mean one less expense to worry about.

• Christmas presents can mean a foster parent doesn't have to figure out how to stretch an already tight budget for another child who arrived unexpectedly.

• A restaurant or activity gift card can give an adoptive family an opportunity to make a memory together.

• ​Helping with Christmas dinner can take one thing off the plate of a kinship grandparent who suddenly found themselves raising children again.

And sometimes the greatest gift is simply knowing: Someone sees us, too.

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We want our foster, adoptive, and kinship families to know that the community standing behind TruLight127 sees the work they are doing.

• We see the sacrifice.

• We see the exhaustion.

• We see the appointments and advocacy no one posts pictures of.

• We see the victories that might look tiny to everyone else but are enormous in their home.

• We see the parents who keep learning, adjusting, apologizing, trying again, and showing up.

• And we see the love.

Not the picture-perfect kind. The kind of love that stays when things are hard.

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Wrap Around a Family This Christmas

When you give through Be the Light This Christmas, you're not only putting presents under a tree.

You're wrapping around a family that has chosen to wrap around a child.

Your generosity can help provide Christmas gifts, groceries, gift cards, meals, family experiences, and other needs that give caregivers a little breathing room during an already demanding season.

Because if we want children from hard places to have strong, healthy families surrounding them, we have to take care of those families, too.

They show up for our kids every single day.

This Christmas, let's show up for them.