Child Bridge expands offerings into Great Falls

Child Bridge has extended its reach into Great Falls in hopes of offering foster and adoptive resources and support to the community with the second-largest need for foster care in the state.

Mike Ammons joined the Child Bridge team about two months ago as the Community Director for the Great Falls area, and based on the reaction he has gotten so far, he said he expects the organization’s impact to grow rapidly.

Based in Bigfork, Child Bridge is a faith-based organization that focuses on finding and equipping foster and adoptive families for the journey ahead through partnerships with local resources like child and family services, churches and schools.

Great Falls joins a total of 22 counties served by Child Bridge since it began in 2010. Over the past two months, Ammons and his team have begun establishing connections throughout the community to find specific needs and how to best address them.

So far, Ammons said, he’s found that the most prevalent needs of foster and adoptive families are respite care, community support and strategic tools that will allow them to most affectively nurture the children in their care.

One of the biggest challenges Ammons said the organization faces is a lack of awareness among communities of how big of a need Montana has for non-kinship placement families.

“The need is huge and the awareness is small, and I want to bring a balance to that,” Ammons said. “Children need homes that are going to love them. They need homes that are going to accept them for what God has created them to be and not try to fix them,” he said.

His goal for the next year as Child Bridge picks up steam in Great Falls, he said, is to connect with at least 30 local pastors and at least 20 churches and faith communities to bring awareness and allow them to step up to be a part of providing a family for the suffering children in their city.

“We tend to, as a faith community, want to fix people, and that’s not necessarily our responsibility,” Ammons said. “Our responsibility is to enter into relationships with other people, to love them with the love of Jesus, to see them with the eyes of Jesus and to allow God to work through them.”

Ammons said he has already seen a positive response with 70 people signed up to attend the first foster/adoptive family resource group meeting scheduled to take place next week, with more coming in.

With the support of partners such as the local schools to help identify children in need, state resources to provide protection and information and churches and faith communities to help fill the physical and emotional needs of each family, Ammons said he hopes to be able to begin to alleviate some of the challenges they face.

For more information or to become a partner with Child Bridge, visit https://www.childbridgemontana.org/.

Reporter Mary Cloud Taylor can be reached at 758-4459 or mtaylor@dailyinterlake.com.