THE church’s pro-life position against abortion has led Family Life Ministries to start a programme targeting Christians to become foster parents.

“The church over the years has been very critical and has spoken out so much about abortion [but] there challenges. If you are against abortion, what are the alternatives?

“So we have challenged the church: If they are really serious about abortion, provide alternatives, and one such alternative would be foster care. So, we are looking to them to be able to become foster parents for these children,” chief executive officer of Family Life Ministries Dr Barrington Davidson told the Jamaica Observer following Wednesday’s launch of “For the Child” Foster Care Programme at Terra Nova Hotel in Kingston.

Dr Davidson said, however, that proper background checks would be made to ensure that the 15 children who will be placed in foster care each year, as part of the pilot project, will be placed in safe homes.

“If we find parents who we have been screened and we see them to be parents who are not likely to molest children or to hurt children and they are not church people we are still going to (allow them to become foster parents) because our concern is really about the child.

“We are (also) screening church people, because we don’t assume that because there are church people they are OK. We believe that there are paedophiles in the church and so we are making sure that our screening process is not about you being a Christian or not; it’s about you being a healthy parent who will be able to provide a safe environment for our children,” Dr Davidson explained.

He explained that the non-denominational organisation will be collaborating with the Child Protection and Family Services Agency (CPFSA) to find suitable families for children in State care. In addition to the CPFSA, the organisation will be partnering with Nairn Homes in Canada to implement a programme that will train and develop foster parents.

“We started recruiting parents about three months ago and we are now engaged in screening some of them. We have a pool to draw from because, remember now, there is a matching and so we have to make sure that the parents in this pool match with the children the Government is offering,” Dr Davidson said.

CPFSA policy planning and evaluation director, Newton Douglas, told the Observer that a little over 1,000 of the approximately 5,000 children in State care are in foster homes. According to him, the private-public partnership is in line with agency’s vision.

“One of our objectives is to, at least, have 75 per cent of our children in State care in a family environment and so we see exploring this relationship as a step in helping us to engage other families and bringing them on board,” Douglas said.

He maintained, however, that the agency will ensure that the 19 standards of foster care are maintained.

Minister of state in the Ministry of Industry and Commerce, Floyd Green, told the House of Representatives last week that under the arrangements, Family Life Ministries “will seek to do recruitment and training of prospective families, all of whom will be vetted by the Child Protection and Family Services Agency”.

Green, who formally had responsibility for the youth portfolio, said that Family Life Ministries will be providing additional stipends for families who are recruited through the programme, “while the children will remain our children and their progress will be tracked through continuous assessment”.

The state minister, during his contribution to the 2018/2019 Sectoral Debate in the House of Representatives on May 8, had also announced that the Government had doubled the monthly stipend paid for the care of each foster child from $4,000 to $8,000.