by Mike Peercy, Executive Director of Fostering Grace

In early 2023, as the vision for this work/ministry/service organization was forming, we knew that we needed a short, memorable statement to identify our objective. Through a lot of conversation and reflection, I landed on this sentence:

Fostering Grace seeks to equip, support, and connect the people impacting kids from hard places.

Through so many great opportunities, conversations, and connections along the way, we have become increasingly aware that we needed to focus that statement in to some degree. It always left people asking, “but what do you do?”

This weekend, after a couple of months of discussion among our board, we went through an exercise that brought us to a stronger, clearer, more focused sentence to articulate what we feel called to do. I’m excited to share with our friends, supporters, and encouragers our new and (I believe) greatly improved mission statement.

Fostering Grace provides trauma-responsive tools, resources, and training to empower communities serving kids from hard places.

So I feel like an explanation is in order so that our intentions in revisiting this important piece of our organizational culture can be clearly understood.

First, we knew that we needed to point out our primary motivation in all that we do is the need we have recognized for trauma-responsive skills and understanding among the great number of well-intentioned folks that care about and serve kids with trauma in their stories. This term, “trauma-responsive,” is important because it is vital that we be more than simply informed. We believe that compassionate people need to learn how to respond with skill to those they serve.

From our first days in this adventure we have tried to simply share the tools that we have found in our own journey that have been pivotal in our success. As we continue to learn and connect with others in this arena, we continue to collect resources to share. Along this road, we have been helped in incredible ways to pursue the training needed to be able to effectively train others in responding with great grace and compassion to people marked by traumatic experiences. Thus providing “trauma-responsive tools, resources, and training” is the ideal expression what we do.

Tori and I have background and training in 3 particular areas that have informed this mission. We both have degrees in education with all the training that entails. We have more than 3 decades of vocational and bi-vocational ministry experience under our belts. And we have spent several years as foster parents.

While our hearts began this journey with fostering families in mind, we recognize that that is just the tip of the spear in changing our cultural climate. Indeed fostering families need these things that we seek to provide. But in our journey we have recognized that the close friends and extended family of each fostering family need some understanding and skill to serve well. We recognize the powerful presence of faith communities that surround these loving families. We see the pivotal role of educational partners in the community of trauma-impacted kids. We even recognize how important caring and compassionate neighbors can be to these kids and those caring for them. We believe that good trauma-responsive tools, resources, and training can be transformative for all of these relationships surrounding kids from hard places.

We long for weary parents and worried grandparents and frustrated teachers and terrified Sunday School teachers and daycare workers to be truly empowered with skills and understanding that can be genuinely transformative in the lives of kids with trauma in their stories.

Fostering Grace provides trauma-responsive tools, resources, and training to empower communities serving kids from hard places.

This is our mission of bringing greater compassion and patience—truly Fostering Grace for Kids from Hard Places.

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