HILLSBOROUGH COUNTY, Fla. — Local foster mothers are shopping for gifts for more than 600 children in the foster care system this holiday season.
"Christmas for Fosters" started in 2017. The program allows people to sponsor a child and reduce the financial burden Christmas may create for foster families.
Sarah Weaver works for A Door of Hope, a non-profit that recruits foster families. She is also the founder of "Christmas for Fosters."
Weaver created the program after adopting three children and fostering two others.
"My husband and I have been fostering since 2016. I am unable to biologically have a child traditionally and we knew we wanted to be parents and we wanted to do something to better our community, so we signed up to start fostering. We’ve been doing that for 6.5 years and now we’ve fostered over 25 children during that time. We’ve adopted three beautiful children and we’re still continuing to foster two," said Weaver.
Each child who is sponsored receives at least one outfit, jacket, shoes, pajamas, socks, undergarments and three to five items off their provided wishlist.
"This Christmas, we are sponsoring over 600 children in the Tampa Bay Area for Christmas and we are actively seeking donations and people to go shop on our wish list to go help put more gifts for these kids under the trees," said Sarah Weaver, Executive director and founder for Christmas for Fosters.
The organization also takes monetary donations and has a group of foster mothers who go shopping with the monetary donations they receive.
"So what we need the most from them right now is to just go online to our website and shop our Wish List or even make a monetary donation and we can go out and shop for these kids and fill in the gaps," said Weaver.
Weaver hopes to raise $100,000 by Christmas to give children a brighter holiday.
"600 is about on average of where we are this time of the year, but we serve children all the way up until Christmas Eve, so we’ll see probably close to 700 or 750 kids being served this year," said Weaver.
"Foster care is the heartbeat of our family. We know it's our life mission as a family to continue supporting foster care, bringing awareness and mobilizing the community to wrap around," added Weaver.
For more information on how to help, visit theChristmas for Foster's website here.
