Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: We know we don't want children in sheltered care long term. We know that we want them in families.
But in the absence of that, I do believe it's better than what we did before, which was place them over and over and over again until we hopefully land the right place or hopefully their brothers and sisters can be with them. I think that multiple transition is significantly more harmful than having the shelter place where there's a continuity of care and consistency.
[00:00:25] Speaker B: This is Fostering Conversations with Utah Foster Care where we have insightful conversations about parenting for bio foster adoptive or blended families to better understand the experiences we all face as families.
[00:00:47] Speaker C: Thank you for joining us for Fostering Conversations. I'm Amy Smith, your host and today we have a guest co host, Jenny shepherd, who is the director of recruitment.
[00:00:56] Speaker D: That's right. Thank you for letting me join you today.
[00:00:59] Speaker C: Yes, we're so happy to have you. Our guest today is Celeste Edmonds. She is the executive director, executive director of the Christmas Box International and also the author of the Garbage Bag Girl. Thank you, Celeste for joining us today.
[00:01:10] Speaker A: Thank you for having me. So good to see you guys.
[00:01:13] Speaker C: Celeste has written an incredible book and so why don't you just introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your story and what got you involved with the Christmas Box.
[00:01:23] Speaker A: Oh goodness. So I started almost 30 years ago now when our founder Richard Paul Evans wrote a little green book called the Christmas Box that's a Utah popular book, self published, long story short, and went into becoming at the time the world's first self published author.
Second to the Celestine Prophecy that ever hit the New York Times bestseller list. Wow. And it put him on a national auction after of course many publishers saying they didn't want the book to now lots of publishers wanting the book. And he and his wife received again at the time the world's largest author advance ever been given for that book and two more to be written.
[00:02:07] Speaker C: Wow.
[00:02:07] Speaker A: And they decided they wanted to give back, but they weren't sure the best way to do that. The Christmas Fox book is based on the loss of a child through death and so they knew they wanted to be child centric. As his personal assistant, he knew a little bit about my story pieces here and there, enough to know that I had experience in child welfare from foster care to drug rehabilitation centers, living with different, we call it kinship today. At the time it wasn't called that, just living with family members. So we talked a little bit about that and we decided to partner with the graduate school of Social work up at the University of Utah. And we had a really cool opportunity of inviting about 160 child welfare advocates. And this was at a time when Utah was one of many states, I think about nine, that were being sued by the national center for Youth Law for the mistreatment of children. And interestingly enough, the Utah Foster Care foundation was also formed out of that lawsuit. And all of that stemmed from this lawsuit that was happening. And at this child welfare conference, we had this really great opportunity of taking a significant need and a significant amount of money and asking what is the single most important thing we can do for Utah's abused children. And we realized a lot that day. One, we had a lot of partners that are, were very territorial, that weren't even sitting together, which is a whole other conversation. So after we got everybody cozied in and we asked this important question, we talked about what was happening to children and child welfare, which was that a police officer told us once when he picked up a baby. And Richard and his wife Carrie saw him at Primary Children's Hospital because he walked in with a little boy. And Carrie, Richard's wife, had their little boy, same age, at the same hospital. I know intervention was happening. And the boy the police officer was holding had most of his hair completely ripped out of his head. And Richard walked up and asked him what he was going to do with the boy and introduced himself and he said, Mr. Evans, if your shelter was finished, no pressure, that's where I take him. But right now I'm honestly going to take him to whomever can answer the phone the fastest. And so we know a lot of that had to happen out of necessity in child welfare. And it was obviously not the best place for most of the kids. There wasn't the due diligence that needed to happen. There wasn't just time for the system to ask the right questions and make the right decisions. And so the Christmas box houses really evolved. One based on the name of the book and out of that need at that time. And so we opened in a nine year period. One in Moab, one in Salt Lake and one in Ogden. And this year. Yeah, this year we celebrate 29 years, which is crazy.
[00:05:08] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:05:08] Speaker A: But I shifted over. He looked at me and said it was. I had been his assistant at that time for about two and a half years. And he said, I guess I'm gonna lose you for this. And I was like, it's not like I'm going very far. You are the chairman of the board and the founder of the organization. But I moved over and helped to Found and build the nine shelters. And then I actually left and went into the corporate space for about 14 years and just served on the board of the Christmas Box International. And then I came back about four and a half years ago as executive director. So I've made this long path back to where I am today, which is awesome.
[00:05:51] Speaker C: That is awesome. And I didn't realize you were so integral in the beginning of it that.
[00:05:57] Speaker A: Yeah. Wow. I mean, it's. He and I often we don't not argue, but discuss who the charity is more important to. And I always tell us from a funding perspective, you hands down have it. But from personal, passionate perspective, which is why I wrote Garbage Bag Girl. It's. I mean, I couldn't personally have a more personal job. And I also wanted to wait to become executive director and then write my memoir because I knew it would require a heightened level of bandwidth, especially emotionally, that I didn't want to take away from raising my children, my biological children. So I waited until they were out of high school, the three of them, before taking on these two roles that have been both heavy and like the best thing I've ever done. I next to raising my children, it will definitely be my legacy. I want to be able to say I left the world better than I found it in this area. And I think as a state we have that lawsuit really made a lot of shifts in our state. And attorneys have told me we went from being one of the worst in the nation for the treatment of children to one of the best. And we all know we still have a ways to go. Everybody does. There's always progress that needs to happen in any system. But children, sadly, shouldn't be raised by a system. They should be raised by homes and villages. And unfortunately, we're just not going to be in that place. We're mandated to remove children if there are confirmations of abuse, and we are mandated to take care of them in a certain way as a state and as nonprofit organizations. So we all know our job's not going to go anywhere. But it doesn't mean it's easy and it doesn't mean that there doesn't need to constantly be an evaluation of where we are and where we want to be and the milestones to get there. And so with my role at Christmas Box International, my hope is that there's some influence that gets to happen there on certainly my experience, but shining light on the 2,000 of them, which are in foster care in Utah, but 500,000 in our nation always at one time. There's about a half a million children in foster care. And I just think it's mind blowing. That number never changes. There were 504 to 500,000 children in the 80s. So it's like that number just stays because of the necessity that we have to remove children and the growth in population. And I think as we increase, unfortunately, our issues with substance abuse that we also don't see going away. I just don't see the need for our kind of organizations really going anywhere. So the book is to help shine some light on let's not forget who they are. Let's remind people that just because you're being a good citizen and paying your tax dollars does not mean that when children are taken from their homes, everything's fine. We all know there's so much more to it. And there's places that there's so many go. And they're not just a number. They're not one of 500,000. These are human beings whose lives, whether we agree they should be disrupted or not, just got highly disrupted. There's no coincidence that 50% of our foster children, after they age out of the system, go home to biological family members. There's a biological connection that just never goes awry that, you know, there's a part of you like I did. I circled back when I was 20 and found my biological family. I waited till my sister, who I lost from because we didn't have a Christmas box house. So I lost my brother and sister. We couldn't keep brothers and sisters together until we found placements for them when I was in the system. And so now we get to do that. With the three shelters alone, we keep about a thousand siblings together every year, which is phenomenal that we get to do that. That's been one of the most significant shifts that I've seen that the Christmas box houses benefit.
[00:09:52] Speaker D: I'm curious about that. With the Christmas box house. Celeste, do you guys hit capacity often? Does the Christmas box house stay at capacity of children coming and how long do children have a tendency to stay there?
[00:10:04] Speaker A: It's a really good question. We do not hit capacity because as you guys know, but I don't know that the public knows it. The state does a really good job. They try really hard at the kinship placements. It's a priority. We know that children should stay with family members if it's safe and there's healthy dynamics in the whole family to do that. So there's such an emphasis now more on that. When I was in child welfare, there was also this crazy Belief that, okay, you're an older child, you're likely not going to be adopted. That's just the reality. Everybody wants little kids, so let's shift you every six months.
So the reason I called the book garbage bag girl is because of that reason, every six months, Right. I transitioned with my stuff in the garbage sack. So I had two places a year, which we know is minimal. We meet some kids who've had a lot more places than that. But two years until I was about 16, so I lived in about 31, 32 cities. I went all over the nation from different states, had my shots redone over and over again because nobody could find my records. It was just a time of complete chaos when we didn't have things systematic. We didn't identify kids quickly that could go into kinship placements. So because of that awesome shift that we've really made in those areas, not all children need to stay in a shelter. Some can go immediately with a family member. And sometimes we do identify they are going to be in a long term foster care situation and we have a home that can take them and their siblings. So sometimes that can happen. But for those kids that do come to the shelter, there's. We average about 12 to 18 kids at a time. We can hold up to 33 at the Ogden and Salt Lake shelters. So we don't max out that way in terms of number of children to beds kind of thing. But they stay with us. When we first opened, the acceleration is that when we first opened we averaged about 12 to 16, and now we're upwards of 18 to 22 kids at a time. We also averaged kids staying with us about two weeks to a month. Now that's about 30 to 45 days. So that, that is, that's a long time.
A long time. And the reason is because of also with this awesome prioritization of putting kids in kinship. That means the shelters have more difficult to place children for longer periods of time.
[00:12:33] Speaker D: Sure.
[00:12:33] Speaker A: Or bigger sibling groups. We know Utah's have got large families, so I always remind people, if you have families that have four or five, even six children and you remove a family of siblings that have four, five, six kids. Think about what you're asking. Yeah, like you becoming a full time stay at home mom, like all of a sudden you have a whole bunch of kiddos, you're like, oh, I guess I'm not working outside of the home right now. You're managing five, six, seven, eight kids. It's a big, it's a big ask for even all the super moms. We have like, it just is a very big asset. It requires time. And that is where the Christmas box houses come in as a benefit is to keep, again, keep those siblings together until we can hopefully find a place or when we know that their family have been identified that live out of state and there's time, there's time to go through the process and make all that happen and do they need to be relocated? Are those. Is that family going to come back to Utah? There's just time that has to happen there and the shelters are really great for that. We know we don't want children in shelter care long term. We know that we want them in families.
But in the absence of that, I do believe it's better than what we did before, which was place them over and over and over again until we hopefully land the right place or hopefully their brothers and sisters can be with them. I think that multiple transition is significantly more harmful than having the shelter place where they call the staff uncles and aunts and the other kids, they always say, or cousins they just didn't know yet like that. That does become a sense of family and there's a continuity of care and consistency that happens at the shelters. I do like to remind people that shelter care is not what makes Christmas walks unique. Because there's a lot of shelters. There's a lot of shelters in our state that have different names. One of the greatest uniquenesses is that we take the child all the way to the age of 18.
Most shelters can only license to the age of 12.
[00:14:33] Speaker D: Right.
[00:14:34] Speaker A: Meaning those brothers and sisters cannot stay. We have kids that will come all the way from grand county, in up in Park City, wherever those other counties are, because the Salt Lake Christmas box house will take all those siblings or the Ogden Christmas box house will take all those siblings. And so that also is a reason that extension of stay can be longer that 30 to 45 days. It's just going to take a while to find homes for all those kids, certainly.
[00:15:01] Speaker D: And I know that the state of Utah is doing fairly well as far as minimizing the amount of times that children are placed in different homes once they come into foster care. But I don't think that I realized how big of an influence the Christmas box house may be having on that number as they have that ability to stay there until that kinship is identified or that right family, as opposed to getting them in and then getting them into a home asap. It's gives the ability to find the right spot or get those families that's amazing. I hadn't realized how that happened.
[00:15:31] Speaker A: It's a time. It's a time challenge. And we know when it comes to like med management and the mental health visits and their, well, childcare visits and they'll. Dental visits, I mean, we just think of medical needs that the kids have many of those services, not all of them. Many of them are actually brought to the shelter.
[00:15:49] Speaker D: Sure.
[00:15:50] Speaker A: The Salt Lake Christmas Box House can. We can do anything but oral surgery on the children that come to the shelter. They don't have to wait that time frame to find a dentist in the meantime of maybe not being on like Medicaid yet or waiting for services to kick in. We have that ability. We have two, well, childcare visit offices on site. We have a partnership with the University of Utah to do the med management on site at the Salt Lake Christmas Box House. So that partnership with this, with Salt Lake County Youth Services and developing those contracts and relationships is substantial. That is so meaningful that by the time a child can be placed from here, those visits have happened. Those permanent teeth have been sealed for future cats. Just some of those prevention services that become so critical and hard for foster families to get it all in. Yeah. At some point they. You have to take out all those appointments and all those services for all those children that you serve. It's just my kudos always to those families that can. Are able to foster children because I. People just don't realize how taxing and how much work you also have a beautiful part to that of the children's lives you touch. But I think there's also this fundamental reality of recognizing how much work really happens in the lives of children that are not your biological children. I think it's so admirable.
[00:17:19] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:17:19] Speaker A: Thank you. I know. That's what you do.
[00:17:23] Speaker C: We all contribute in the community.
[00:17:26] Speaker A: Right.
[00:17:27] Speaker C: It does. I would love for you to share. I think a lot of people, even some foster families, don't know what happens when a child comes into custody. I personally have taken many kids in the middle of the night from cars, from police, and they come here. But how does the Christmas Box house, the different locations, how do they play a part when children come into custody? You just explain that for people. I think it's very eye opening.
[00:17:53] Speaker A: Yeah. It's the same that you would have. Right. You probably either have a police officer or a caseworker most likely is going to drop a child off to you. So the same thing would be for the Christmas Box House. So on the nonprofit side, because our role is the partnership with the State. When children come into state custody, we know they're technically wards of estate. They become. Right. The temporary guardian of the children. So they're in charge of the day to day programming. The shelter care, the food programming, the nonprofit, the Christmas Box International. We work with community to fill gaps that the state and the county are going to have a very difficult time filling. Things like keeping all the essential items that the kids need. I say if your kids need it, so do Christmas box house kids. So.
[00:18:40] Speaker C: Right.
[00:18:40] Speaker A: Books, toys, hygiene kits, clothes, shoes, back to school stuff. Already thinking about summer. Are we going to have swimsuits and sunscreen and all the things so we can't change anything up until what has happened to a child when they come stay at one of our shelters. I believe, though strongly that what we can do is impact their ability to start to see that they deserve a childhood. I think there are, are moments that you see as the oldest sibling, when I was a child, taking care of my younger brothers and sisters and that level of responsibility of cooking and doing homework and cleaning the house and taking care of my mom, all by the big age of seven. Yeah. I didn't, I wouldn't even have been able to tell you what like childhood looked like. All I knew was what, surviving and.
[00:19:33] Speaker C: Making sure your siblings survived.
[00:19:34] Speaker A: Yeah. To make sure they were protected and people coming in and out of the home that could have harmed them. Like putting myself in a position to be harmed before they were harmed. So when they come to the Christmas box house, we remove those elements and the very first thing they see is a tree that's decorated, whatever the season is. So right now it's St. Patrick's and then a room full of stuffed animals. That's the very first thing they see when they come into the Christmas box house. They choose one, two, whatever, really, honestly, however many stuffed animals they want, that's the very first interaction. And I can tell you now that we're 29 years strong and we have alumni, which is awesome. Come back and say, here's how your program made a difference in my life and I want to give back. When I start asking them to tell me about their experience, it is not a coincidence that 100% of the kids that come back as alumni talk about the tree, the stuffed animals. Matter of fact, if they come to the shelter and talk to me, they want to touch it. Yeah. 100% of the time they have this very nostalgic, like they, they always take a deep breath and many of them have lots of tears and they're touching and they're reflecting and they're remembering those moments of the very first impact they had. And then they will talk about the other big impact, which is new items that they received, not used.
[00:21:01] Speaker C: I am with you on that.
[00:21:03] Speaker A: It's the craziest thing, because I'll have people be like, why do you only take new items? And I'll say, first of all, for the record, we did try the gently used. Yes. And everyone's version was a little different in the beginning. And my staff spent a ton of time separating out what we would not be able to use. It should never have been donated. And then there was the shifting to this dignity piece that really matters, which is my own kids grew up on hand me down jeans from cousins. I can't even tell you how many pairs of those we had. So I'm not personally opposed to it. But when you are a child like I was, that always had to borrow, always had to ask for things that, by the way, you had to return. If I had a visit with my dad on a Saturday, I had to borrow from a foster daughter's clothes, barter and say I would do chores and then give them back. Or hygiene items. Like, how embarrassing is it to go and ask for hygiene items when you're a teenager? Because you don't know where they are or they're not yours. And it's not even like you're borrowing those. Right. You're asking just to have them.
[00:22:13] Speaker C: Right.
[00:22:13] Speaker A: And it's those moments where you're like, man, I'm really not a whole lot more important than the stuff I'm putting in my garbage. Sad.
[00:22:20] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:22:21] Speaker A: And it's super humiliating. It just is. There's no way around that. It's not a. Like my mom told my kids when they were little, get what you get and don't throw a fit. We're not talking about that kind of situation. And it's not that kind of party. It is a humiliating. I always have to ask. I don't know what it's even to have anything that just belongs to me. That's new, right? So in 29 years, no child has ever left a Christmas box house with their stuff in a garbage bag. Very proud of that. It's. If we run low on duffel bags, you can tell my team is like this. Celeste know we only have five. Like, exactly. So there's like a. There's like a rush on. What gift cards do we have? Are we not getting any donations coming in? Because it's just a priority that they get everything new when they come in and then they get everything new that they need when they go to their next placement. And those moments these alumni talk about, they talk about, I have my stuffed animal. We had a 17 year old boy say he came to the Christmas fox house and bless his heart, he did so well. He was a student body officer at a high school here and he said, this is Ricky the raccoon. And I got him when I was six at Christmas box house and he still had him. And he was 17 years old in high school. We have kids that say, I still have the prom dress, the yellow prom dress that you guys made sure I have. And you got my hair done. And I got to feel pretty like all the other girls that were going to prom. And it's just those moments of reminding them that they get to capture a childhood like other kids get to have, that they've been taken away from those environments. And I mentioned it earlier that we can argue all day long that we're taking them to a better place or that we should remove them, but I think there's a fundamental thing to remember which is still they have loss and they're grieving and it just. That has that level of empathy that comes with that, that I'm, I'm sorry that you're hurt that you're losing out on family and people that do love you because they do love you.
[00:24:35] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:24:35] Speaker A: But we want you to be safe. That's our priority, is your safety. I think it's okay to acknowledge that hurt is so incredible. I was so aware my parents were drug addicts. It's not like I didn't know. I was so aware people were coming in the house and hurting me that should not have been there. Very aware. But I loved them. They loved me. I still had my family unit for what it was. And there was a loss with all that being taken away. And I think it's okay to acknowledge that.
[00:25:07] Speaker C: Yeah. So, no, it's very true. I've experienced that with the kids that have come and stayed in my home. Just I've had one particular one. I had a kid that was just literally infested with lice and just so unwell, not taken care of. And she just cried every night for her dad who was severely mentally ill and very unable to parent. And that's all she wanted, was her dad. She didn't care that I didn't care. No. She didn't care that I took her to the life. That's all they want.
[00:25:39] Speaker A: By getting him back. Yeah, exactly.
[00:25:41] Speaker C: And I think that's really important to remember that it doesn't matter what these kids are getting or that it's prettier or better or any of those things. This is their life that just got disrupted. And it's painful.
[00:25:52] Speaker A: So painful. And they're hurtful. They're hurt. Is. They're hurt. I. When people read my book and they walk up to me and they go to tell me I get a book signing, they go to tell me something about their life, and they'll stop themselves 100% of the time and say, it was like nothing compared to yours. They will immediately start to back out. And right away I'm like, please don't. Please don't do that. Please don't diminish the pain that you have.
[00:26:18] Speaker C: Right.
[00:26:18] Speaker A: Because you think my pain is greater one. The brain doesn't psychologically make that separation. That's not actually a thing. Everybody's pain is theirs.
[00:26:26] Speaker D: Sure.
[00:26:26] Speaker A: Everybody's hurt is theirs. Everybody's trauma belongs to them. And I think the moment we compare each other in that way, we lose the whole point of what we're trying to change. That whole dynamic shifts in what the difference we're trying to make in the lives of other human lives. The moment we discount ourselves to someone else, we're teaching someone else that what happened to them doesn't matter. And it does.
[00:26:53] Speaker C: And it does. Exactly.
[00:26:55] Speaker A: It just looks different. It just feels a little different. But it matters. I promise. While your pain matters as much to you as mine does to me, Celeste.
[00:27:04] Speaker D: I'm curious that as people hear about this and hear about how sometimes these kids aren't feeling seen and that their stories aren't being told, et cetera, what are ways, though, that just general public could be involved to help these kids to feel seen, to help them to feel a part of something or that people acknowledge them in some way? How can the public do that?
[00:27:28] Speaker A: I think that everybody usually has three ways in life. They can make a huge impact in your own home, in your community, and policy.
So if. If. And policy's not for everyone. But I bring it up because for some people, that activation is really important to them. But I think with community, I think it's important for people to remember that the nonprofit sector serves such a significant gap in what government and home can do. There's a. The nonprofit sectors really do fill this significant void. And so I think people getting involved with their nonprofits is. And by the way, most of us will have you bring your kids in and be involved in some capacity, depending on their age. And I think that those. That level of belonging. And again, it's not just, I pay my tax dollars and everything's fine. It's not actually. Everything's not fine. I think you getting actively involved in your community, reaching out to Utah foster care and the Christmas Box International, and finding out how you can volunteer and be involved or donate money or time or items. I just think as families, there's such a substantial message that happens to our own families when we do that, when we create that level of impact. And so I just. For me, that's the best way that I think families can create meaning in their own home is to actively engage in their community physically showing up and.
[00:28:56] Speaker D: Learning about the needs and perhaps donating items as are needed. That's amazing.
[00:28:59] Speaker A: And we all can't donate the same things. And I think that's okay. It doesn't matter. I'm like, if you don't have time, money, or things, you can go onto our Facebook page and share our social media posts. Like, to me, that level of engagement is selling. Everybody has something to give. I just don't. I think sometimes they just don't know the best way to do that. Everybody can do something. There's something that, you know you can do and you can give. And so I think as nonprofits, we also have to recognize that all of that does matter.
All of those efforts in the way people give matter significantly. And no, not one of them is greater than the other one.
[00:29:38] Speaker C: Great. So where would be the best place for people to go to learn more about how they could get involved?
[00:29:44] Speaker A: So for us, it's the Christmasbox.org or Google the Christmas box or Celeste Edmonds.
[00:29:50] Speaker C: And then I would love for you to share where people can also find your book, because I've personally read it, and I know we didn't talk about it very much, but it is. Yeah, it's really, as we said before we started recording, very raw, and it's intense to read. As someone that hasn't experienced similar things, but does take kids in to my home. Very emotional.
[00:30:10] Speaker A: My hope is that Navy gave you some insight into the way they feel. If nothing else, it ended so great. Look where I am today. Look what I.
[00:30:20] Speaker C: It's a happy ending.
[00:30:22] Speaker A: Yeah, it is hard. This girl right here that, uh. So I was seven. And in the book, there's a picture of me and my sister, but on the COVID you don't see. She's holding my hand, my sister Tawny. And like I mentioned earlier, I lost her and my brother because we couldn't find people to take us and that that loss is so significant. We did rekindle years later and tried very hard to stay in touch and all the things, but it's such a loss that you just can't ever recapture. So the Keeping the brothers and sisters together is by far my. Probably the most special thing to me that we do. But the book is on Amazon. Garbage Bag Girl. Also, if you're a foster parent, I have given enough coffees to Utah foster care for foster families to have one.
[00:31:06] Speaker C: Oh, awesome. Okay.
[00:31:07] Speaker A: Free of charge. I dropped off like 500 books, so there's plenty there for that. Because I do tell people if you had anything in your life similar to this, it can be triggering.
[00:31:18] Speaker C: Yes, I can see that for sure.
[00:31:19] Speaker A: Which means that there's. I say triggers are your friends. It's just something you haven't. You have to manage still.
[00:31:24] Speaker C: Just prepare yourself.
[00:31:26] Speaker A: Yeah, there's a little gap there that has to be filled, sure. But even not like you said, even if it's still a hard read and. But I think it's important that we continually remind people how these kids feel and a little bit into even though their story is different, what it uniquely might look like and the feeling of the loss and the tough decisions that we make when we're put in those places as kids, when we. We act out later. There's a reason for that. And I think the understanding just creates not excuses for bad behavior, but creates empathy that I think is. Is important to understand when we're like in your situation, when we're taking children home to our homes.
[00:32:05] Speaker C: So as usual our time has flown by. But we so appreciate your time and willingness to just share with us what you're doing and a little bit about your story. And I hope that listeners can go and find ways to contribute and see the good that's happening. I something that I'll just end with is it always fascinates me that as a foster parent these kids are living in our neighborhood, these families are in our communities. And my friends who don't foster are constantly shocked at how many kids will come through my home or what the ages are of these kids or what town they were from. And it's like this is happening all around us.
[00:32:45] Speaker A: And they're not someone else kids.
[00:32:48] Speaker C: No they're not. They're in our kids schools, they are in our neighborhoods. I've had kids coming from cars without homes and I've had kids coming from very affluent homes. And so I just think it's so important what you guys are doing to provide these shelters and resources for kids and also what foster families are doing because like you say, it's, it's no small feat.
[00:33:08] Speaker A: So we need both. We need all.
[00:33:09] Speaker C: Yes, yes, yes. It takes a village, like you say. And we need all of the people in all of the places. But thank you so much for your time.
[00:33:16] Speaker A: Thank you for having me.
[00:33:17] Speaker D: Thank you so much.
[00:33:18] Speaker A: I appreciate you guys so much for all you do.
[00:33:21] Speaker C: So head over to the Christmas box.org to learn more about them. You can also head over to utahfostercare.org to learn about ways you can get involved with us as well. Thanks so much for joining us.
[00:33:35] Speaker B: This has been Fostering conversations with Utah Foster Care. Thank you for joining us from for more information, go to utahfostercare.org we'll see you next time.
