Glassla - Gay and Lesbian Care Services
There are thousands of children and youth placed in the foster care system every year in Los Angeles. The vast majority of the children and youngsters in the LA foster care system are either abused, neglected or are lesbian, gay, and bisexual, and are in a need of having loving, permanent family just like ours to take care for them and guide them through life. With an adoption and fostering, a child's life can change forever but those who do not get any foster or prospective parents are forced to remain in the foster care centre that would look after them on a permanent or temporary basis. By some estimates, hundreds of thousands of children in the United States are without permanent homes, and therefore have been languishing within LA foster care systems. Many of these homeless children are waiting for foster families to raise them, but the hard fact is that there is a critical shortage of adoptive and foster parents in the United States.
What is Foster Care Center?
Foster care is 24-hour temporary care for children who are placed away from their parents or guardians due to various family circumstances, such as abuse, neglect, and parental substance abuse. The lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) youth enter the foster care system after their family rejects and mistreats them because of their sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression. A foster care center provides these homeless youth with a safe place to live and fulfill all the necessities they require. Children remain in foster care center until the court orders or a child protection professional determines that it is safe to reunite them with their birth families. While most children return to their home after a specific time period, many LGBT and non-LGBT children and youth may never get the chance to have a permanent family. These children and youth are then taken care of by the centre staff. The Los Angeles foster care centers provide world class foster services, and advanced programs for foster parents and LGBT people. Their sole purpose is to find available foster homes and beds for the children and youth in the foster system of Los Angeles County. Besides adequately fulfilling the role of parent or family for children placed in their foster care, the centres also work 24x7 to create a world where gay and lesbian youth thrive as healthy, equal, and complete members of society. They continuously search for a foster or adoptive parent to provide the children with safety and stability. For this, they urge people – gay, straight, women and men, couples and singles, young and old – to open their heart and home for abused, neglected and homeless children.
Gay and Lesbian Foster Care Services
There are many local foster care agencies in Los Angeles that take at risk, abused child and lesbian and gay youth in their care, and continue to look after them as their own child. Fostering of such children in a care center may take two weeks, two years or even twenty years depending on the situation. While many straight children are returned to their birth families, sadly, many young lesbian and gay men never got adopted and end up alone and unwanted. Rejected by their own families and by prospective foster parents because of the sexual orientation, LGBT youth are forced to survive in group homes and other substandard care facilities that cannot sufficiently fulfill the role of parent or family. There are many independent foster care agencies in the LA city that do a really good job of caring for children and place the rejected unwanted children with their in house foster carers. With support from each other and from their highly experienced staff, these agencies provide daily care and 24 hour supervision to the children placed in their care. Besides fulfilling the children's basic physical and emotional needs, they teach them to follow rules, learn discipline, as well as values and self- direction.
But as a matter of fact, every child first coming into foster care, be it newborn or young children or LGBTQ youth, need a loving family, and permanent home. They need a family or an adult with whom they can feel safe and live forever. Many times children in foster care fell prey to substance abuse or suffer from trauma, grief, depression and face academic problems. Therefore, foster care agencies continuously look for and encourage people- straight or gay/lesbian- interested in building families through fostering and adopting kids. They urge people to step up to be foster or adoptive parents in order to meet the needs of the thousands of children in the foster care system. The foster care officials also promise the prospective foster and adoptive parents to support them and walk with them through the process of adoption. Many states in the United States have granted second-parent adoptions to gay men and lesbian couples. Several state agencies and courts now allow the LGBT couples to adopt kids through state-run or private adoption agencies, ensuring that the children can have the advantages of having two legal parents who will guide them through different stages of life, and ensure they have a lifelong safe environment to live.
Adoption and Foster Care Services
There are many independent agencies in the Los Angeles that will pay the families allowances for taking care of a child. They get this allowance on per week per child bases. The allowance amount raises if you are looking after a child with special needs. Those who work as a foster carer in the agency itself can get more money. But the agencies hand over the kids to prospective foster carers or adoptive parents only after a careful and thorough verification of the foster/adopt families. The first and foremost requirement for an adoptive family is having an extra room or rooms in their house. The family members should be healthy, and they must have enough time to take proper care of the foster child. The agency verifies the information provided by the prospective foster/adoptive parents. A criminal record check is mandatory. The collected information is then presented to a panel, which will decide whether to approve a foster carer or adoptive parents. Once placements in foster family is done, a social worker is deployed to visit the foster or family to support, educate, and motivate them and to oversee how they look after the children, take care of their wellbeing, education, and physical and mental health.
An established foster care service provider in Los Angeles works with its associate child welfare agencies to reach out and find more and better foster parents for children without homes. They design, produce and implement adoption and foster care programs in order to educate and motivate prospective foster and adoptive parents. An estimated 500,000 children are currently in foster care across the United States, of whom 100,000 need to be adopted. But due to the shortage of adoptive and foster parents in the country, many children have no permanent homes, and are forced to survive in substandard foster homes. But it seems people’s perspective on fostering and adoption is changing rapidly. Thanks to the implementation of LGBT nondiscrimination laws and policies, and increased inclusiveness of advanced educational and motivational adoption and foster care policies, many qualified parents and individuals are now coming forward to raise unfortunate children, and that is why thousands of children without homes now have safe, loving and permanent homes.