A Community Opens Its Heart: Fostering Family Ministries Celebrates 10 Years of Helping Children Find Home
ASHLAND — Sometimes, love looks like opening the front door to a child who needs a safe place to sleep. Sometimes, it looks like delivering dinner, providing a bed or standing beside a tired parent and reminding them they are not alone.
On Thursday evening, October 1, those acts of compassion took center stage as Fostering Family Ministries celebrated its 10th anniversary during the Made for Home fundraising banquet at Mount Vernon Estate in Ashland.
With a full house and what organizers described as record-breaking registration, the gathering brought together foster, kinship and adoptive families, church leaders, volunteers and community supporters. They came to celebrate a decade of service and to consider how they could help write the next chapter.
For founding Executive Director Sherry Bouquet, the heart of the evening was the children and families behind the ministry’s work.
“You’re the heroes in the room,” Bouquet told foster and kinship parents as she invited them to raise their hands and be recognized.
Applause followed, honoring families whose daily acts of love often happen far from public attention: comforting a frightened child, navigating appointments, helping with schoolwork and offering stability through uncertainty.
Adoptive parents also received recognition, along with the pastors, church leaders, staff and volunteers who help make that care possible.
Founded in 2016 in response to the need for foster homes in Ashland County, Fostering Family Ministries began with a vision of churches working together to support vulnerable children and the families caring for them.
Ten years later, Bouquet said the ministry serves 10 Ohio counties and is growing into an 11th.
Its approach connects foster and kinship families with care teams, volunteers who surround them with practical help and encouragement for a year or the length of a placement.
The goal is to help families continue fostering with the support they need.
According to figures shared during the banquet, care-team volunteers contributed nearly 24,000 hours of service in 2025, with an estimated value of nearly $864,000.
Behind those numbers are meals, relationships and people willing to keep showing up.
Bouquet recalled one team that began serving during the COVID-19 pandemic, leaving coolers on a family’s front porch, waving through windows and exchanging cards with the children. When circumstances limited personal contact, the volunteers found ways to build a connection.
That team continued supporting the family for four years.
Another moment of celebration involved Rooted in Christ Church. After more than two years of preparation and efforts to connect with families, Bouquet said the church was forming four care teams to serve three foster families and one kinship family.
For those who had trained, prayed and waited, the opportunity to serve was deeply meaningful.
One of the evening’s most powerful activities asked guests to imagine the difficult decisions involved in finding homes for children entering foster care.
Participants received cards representing children, sibling groups, foster homes and placement limitations. As Bouquet guided the exercise, guests tried to find suitable homes while keeping brothers and sisters together and meeting each child’s needs.
Some simulated placements worked. Others did not.
The exercise illustrated how a shortage of available homes can mean children leaving their communities, facing separation from siblings or traveling long distances for visits with their parents.
It also showed why supporting existing foster families matters, and why additional families are needed.
Bouquet emphasized that helping children can also mean providing practical assistance to their parents before a crisis deepens.
She described a current request in Richland County for a full-size bed, frame and bedding for parents facing difficult living conditions. Meeting needs like that, she explained, can be part of helping children remain safely with their families.
The ministry also provides trauma-informed training to help parents, churches, educators and other professionals understand children’s experiences and respond with care.
A child’s behavior, Bouquet reminded the audience, may reflect fear and survival rather than simple disobedience.
Guest speaker Jamie Finn, Executive director of Foster the Family, author and host of Real mom podcast, foster-care advocate and adoptive mother, offered an honest account of the joy and heartache involved in caring for children.
Finn said she has fostered for 12 years, welcomed 30 children through foster care and adopted four.
She spoke about loving children through trauma, navigating complicated needs and enduring painful goodbyes, including a recent farewell to a child who had lived with her family for two and a half years.
Her message recognized the weight foster parents carry and the importance of people willing to support them.
“You are seen and well done,” Finn said.
For those considering how to help, she urged continued involvement through service, prayer, financial support and practical care.
Finn also shared something that had stood out to her while preparing for the event. When she asked Bouquet about her goal for the banquet, Bouquet’s answer focused on encouraging people to step into foster-care ministry.
That desire shaped Finn’s message: caring for vulnerable children and families is an opportunity to put faith into action, even when the work is difficult and the outcome uncertain.
She encouraged guests to consider what they could offer, trusting that their willingness to participate could matter in the life of a child or family.
The birthday cupcakes on the tables celebrated the ministry’s anniversary, but Bouquet invited guests to consider another meaning.
For some children entering foster care, she said, a birthday cake with candles may be an unfamiliar experience. Some have never been celebrated that way, and some parents have grown up without that care themselves.
The cupcakes became a reminder of the small moments through which children learn they are valued.
A safe home. Someone remembering their birthday. A family making room at the table.
Bouquet asked guests to think about their own next step, whether that meant fostering, joining a care team, meeting a material need or contributing financially.
“What is your next yes?” she asked.
She also emphasized that families do not have to belong to a local church to receive care-team support. The ministry’s work reaches into the broader community.
Ashland County Commissioner Jim Justice presented a county proclamation recognizing Fostering Family Ministries’ decade of service and read a congratulatory message from Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose.
Near the evening’s close, Bouquet herself became the focus of a heartfelt tribute.
Her husband, Pastor John Bouquet, invited community leaders to recognize the commitment she had made long before the organization formally began.
Justice, Steve Workman and the President of the Ashland Ministerial Association Tim Bright offered words of appreciation for her leadership and service.
Workman recognized the personal sacrifice involved in spending a decade leading an organization devoted to others.
“You are truly a blessing,” he told her.
The ministry’s board also expressed gratitude and presented gifts that included time in Amish country and a trip to hear the Cleveland Orchestra.
Bouquet responded with humor and a reminder of where she wanted the attention directed.
“This is not supposed to be about me,” she said.
She credited the many people whose encouragement, faith and willingness to serve had helped build the ministry.
The anniversary celebration also offered a look ahead.
Bouquet shared plans for a mobile app designed to help families and care teams communicate, coordinate schedules and access resources. She said the completed mobile app was expected to be submitted to Apple and Google the following week, with plans for other ministries to eventually use the platform.
She also highlighted Hope Family Camp, which brought families together for trauma-informed learning and support, and thanked the Ashland County Community Foundation for helping make that work possible.
The evening included prayers for children, families, caseworkers, churches and the ministry’s future.
Throughout the celebration, the invitation remained personal: take one step toward a child or family who needs support.
After 10 years, Fostering Family Ministries’ story is still being written through those decisions, the family that makes room, the volunteer who delivers a meal and the neighbor who answers a request for help.
Each offers something a child needs: a place to belong, a dependable relationship and the assurance that someone cares.
To learn more about fostering, care teams, volunteering or supporting the ministry, visit www.fosteringfamilyministries.org, email info@fosteringfamilyministries.org or call/text 419-496-2507.
