FAIRMONT — Blueprints, the Washington, Pa.-based nonprofit that helps families across the region – foster kids, especially – is marking its 60th anniversary this month.
And while Emily Tannous, Hannah Haught and Lauren Stewart love a good celebration, work was still to be done for the staffers who make the Fairmont office in I-79 Technology Park run.
That’s why – as they chatted with visitors who dropped in at their open house Friday – they were still working, working, working.
Laptops were buzzing, phones were chirping and the morning was full.
All the days at Blueprints are full, actually, said Lauren Stewart, who coordinates caseworker visits to the homes of the people who take in the kids, who, for the moment, have nowhere else to go in the Mountain State.
“We get attached to our families and our kids, especially,” Stewart said. “You want their experiences to be positive.”
Right now, in a state that has a population of 1.7 million people, give or take, there are more than 6,000 children and teens in foster care, according to numbers culled by the state Department of Health and Human Resources and other sources.
Compare those numbers to, say, Oregon, which charts close to 5,000 kids tended to by foster parents – among its more than 5 million residents.
“And we’re looking at different makeups of families,” Tannous, who, with Haught, is a literal home-finder for Blueprints.
Tannous and Haught recruit and screen the people and households hosting the foster kids, be they veteran caregivers or newbies just coming in – such as grandparents suddenly being parents to their grandchildren because of circumstances.
“It’s really a different world for them,” Haught said of the grandparents in particular.
Either way, said Trenna Passalacqua, the chief executive officer of the outreach agency founded in 1965, it’s going to come down to families – foster, or otherwise.
“This journey has been driven by the shared vision of making the world a better place, one step at a time,” the CEO said, from her offices in Pennsylvania.
“Over the decades, we’ve had the privilege of working alongside passionate individuals and organizations,” she continued, “building lasting relationships and creating meaningful change.”
The work can be daunting, Tannous and Haught said, and sometimes, living arrangements just don’t work out.
But the ones that work, really work, they said. Such as the one child who was successfully reunited with his birth family, but still gets to have monthly sleep-overs with his foster one.
And the one family that turned fostering into forever.
A longtime foster mom associated with Blueprints took in a child on a temporary basis – only to have her grown daughter adopt him.
“That’s the stuff we live for,” Haught said.
Visit myblueprints.org for the full rundown on services and counseling offered by the agency.
