May is Foster Care Awareness Month.

In Kentucky, more than 8600 children are currently in foster care, and more foster parents are needed to provide safe and stable homes for them.

Katie's Christy Daughton tells us how Kentucky is striving to become a foster friendly state with the help of a new tool designed to improve outcomes for foster families.

Being a foster parent can be exciting and rewarding, but many foster families find that they need more support and resources throughout that process.

Nationally, nearly half of foster families quit within the first year.

Valerie Buerkle is here from Kentucky.

Kids belong to tell us how her organization is working to change that.

Thank you for being here, Valerie.

For having me.

So tell us, Kentucky is striving to be a foster friendly state.

What does that mean?

So foster friendly.

Basically, it was provided by America's Kids Belong, which is our parent company.

And we provided that in order to help foster families have more resources to help feel supported and so that they don't quit within that first year.

Our mission is to dramatically improve the outcomes and experiences of kids in foster care, and we do that by kind of helping out the families as well.

For example, they could have discounts akin to military discounts to restaurants, different services activities, even just to name a few.

We have the Louisville Slugger Museum, Waterfront Botanical Gardens.

There's Jets, pizza, just any kind of thing that would help, you know, families feel supported.

And you all are connecting foster families to these resources by this new app.

So you launched you all had a launch party for this new app.

It's called Foster Friendly.

I was on the app and it has everything from cupcakes to oil change discounts.

So tell us how that helps to support these families.

Right.

So speaking from personal experience, you know, sometimes as a foster parent, we would go to bed at night as a family of six and we would wake up the next morning in the middle of the night phone call and we could wake up with a family of eight.

So that does kind of impact your financial stability.

And what are you going to do the next day for dinner?

And you can get on that app and you can feel supported by, oh, we're just going to have pizza tonight.

And you see on there that there's just pizza.

So that, you know, even if it's just a small token of support, you feel seen and you feel heard as a foster parent.

Yeah.

To help get through some of those tough times, I noticed on there, there's also community support and faith community supports, too.

And for support groups.

So to be with other foster families to learn from each other, and that's got to help to retain some of these foster families to correct.

Our mission also is to see how many churches that we can get to come in and say, yes, we will stand up and give that wraparound support for these families.

As far as maybe it's just childcare, maybe it's a night out for the parents to give them a break, you know, or it's training in trauma training so that they know how to help these kids in certain situations.

Okay, so where can we find this app?

So if you go on our website, why Kids Belong, dawg, you'll see our foster friendly site there.

Foster parents can sign up.

It's just a couple of questions.

It is easy to sign up and it downloads and you have instant access to these discounts and businesses.

Are you asking more businesses if they're interested in participating lately?

And if you know a business that you would like to nominate, you can get on there and nominate them as well.

But it's just as easy for businesses to apply as well as just a few questions.

It gets sent straight through to me and it can be posted the same day.

Okay.

Thank you so much for being here, Valerie.

Again, that's foster friendly app.

You can download it straight to your phone from the App Store.

Back to you.

Thank you, Christy Jordan.

And as she said, the foster friendly app is free for anyone to download in the Google Play or the Apple app Store.