Child & Family TN

Hey everybody,

The other day we visited with Child & Family Tennessee, and that was a just a great visit. Child & Family's mission is to "enhance family life through prevention, treatment and advocacy." They got a lot of great programs, like the Family Crisis Center, Kids on the Block, Safe Place, and others. And they run a couple of group homes in Blount County. I liked hearing about the youth, too. The staff seems energetic and excited, and it takes people like that who can relate to each other to fix a lot of the issues in our community.

One thing I’m learning more and more as we visit these United Way partners is that as a community we need to spend more time, money and energy at the source, not just at the problems. I think we’re starting to do that, but we need to do more, like we need to spend more money when the kids are first born – on the families – helping them learn what it is to be a family and what they need to do as parents, instead of us having to spend money later on finding foster care for these neglected, abused children.

We’ve just got to be more proactive as a community. Think of the millions of dollars we spend in this country on just reacting to issues. If we spent a tenth of that being proactive, we wouldn’t have as many problems. But how do you change that? It’s a shift in society. It’s a change in everyone’s thinking. How do you change a culture’s way of thinking?

United Way is trying to do with community impact, like with the Firm Foundations for Self-Sufficiency Grant they gave to Child & Family to help them turn around several families in Blount County and get them to become self-sufficient and get them off welfare and government programs. They’re trying to get to the root cause of the problem and not just put a band-aid on it.

And that’s what it’s gonna’ take more of!

I better go for now.

Blog y’all later,
Dave Bennett