Hello. Good Morning, Everybody. We Are So Excited to Have You Here. My

Hello. Good morning, everybody. We are so excited to have you here. My name is Amina Cruz. I am the President of the Florida Foster and Adoptive Parent Association. We have been an Association for about 27 years almost, and we are so excited to just continue growing and enjoying with you. If you need anything outside of these conferences, please feel free to reach out to us. We are there as a support beyond this education. A little bit about Me I am just recently a fulltime federal child welfare consultant. That means I spend a lot of my time working in different States on how to better engage with family leaders. This could be foster parents, birth parents, kinship caregivers and youth. I've been the President of Florida Papa for about three years, and I really love the work in progress that we see around Florida. We partner with so many amazing and creative programs that either your local CBCS are doing, and that also come with a lot of support and partnership from the state level. Our first thing this morning is to have a chat with Secretary that Paul. I'm so excited that he's here today and that we're going to have this time to have some questions and answers and really just talk about the state of child welfare in Florida. file:///centervideo.forest.usf.edu/video2$/jit/florida/2021FLFAPA/welcome/transcript.txt[3/23/2021 9:26:26 AM] So Secretary Powell, for nearly 20 years, he's dedicated his time to serving Florida and the local government. He's dedicated to ensuring that families have the highest quality of service available in the time of need and that they are delivered with the best value of taxpayer dollars. That's all from the website. And that's all true and fantastic. But I want to tell you the real things that I know about sex far propel. He's a foster parent champion. I've gotten text from him multiple times in the middle of the day, in the middle of the night, in the middle of a meeting, asking our input. He's a champion for youth and making sure that you have the right variety of services. And he is also a really good champion for good barbecue, making sure that he has tried barbecue in all areas of Florida. Secretary Papa, I want to turn it over to you and tell us things and what we should expect. While I'm excited to address you next week is Florida Foster Family Appreciation Week. And so I think it's a perfect time for us to get together and have a conversation. And there's a lot of activity going on in Tallahassee in regards to foster care and foster parents in particular. So I wanted to be able to kind of walk you through that today and talk a little bit about some of the work we've been doing file:///centervideo.forest.usf.edu/video2$/jit/florida/2021FLFAPA/welcome/transcript.txt[3/23/2021 9:26:26 AM] and then answer questions because we deal with we deal with the most vulnerable in our state. Kind of pause here because you guys make the system go. Frankly, the system wouldn't work without you. So it's very important what you do. And that's another statement. But but we rely on it. We count on it. And so any time you start talking about making changes and things of that nature, it's very important for us to engage with you and make sure that we're doing things that can be helpful. And so I've got a couple of things I'll walk through. I'm guessing they'll trigger some questions, and then we'll go from there. But I'll start with you may have seen I announced my resignation yesterday, and so I absolutely value our partnership here. Didn't want to not attend today, but I just wanted to let you all know I had made some commitments to my family coming in. And now it's time to kind of step back and let somebody else drive the ship. It's a big ship and be a little bit more focused on my family and my kids. I have a 16 year old, so I've got him for two more years before he's out of the house. And that weighs on you as you're kind of looking at your day to day activity. So with that all as well, I'm looking forward to that next file:///centervideo.forest.usf.edu/video2$/jit/florida/2021FLFAPA/welcome/transcript.txt[3/23/2021 9:26:26 AM] chapter and being able to take a big, deep breath. But I'm also really sad. I love the job. It's the best job I've ever had. And just the feeling that every second of every day mattered, all your decisions matter. There's no throwaway decisions. Anyway. It's an amazing job. I would do what I did a hundred times again, even the hard parts. It was awesome. So I'll start with that, and then I'll jump in. I hope you guys have seen one of the big things the agency has done is started statewide recruitment campaign. As you know, our system is kind of broken up with lead agencies across the state. We work with them. But we wanted to have kind of a corporate recruitment campaign starting with the first Lady. And so as a state agency, we built some infrastructure to try to I'm using terms that you guys. I hope you guys don't get mad at me to drive traffic. I know foster parents are more important traffic, but we wanted to be able to recruit and drive traffic through a process that was thankful for interest. That was high quality, that we could track that was very responsive. And so we had a lot of demands. file:///centervideo.forest.usf.edu/video2$/jit/florida/2021FLFAPA/welcome/transcript.txt[3/23/2021 9:26:26 AM] And so what we wanted that first impression to be with an interested foster family. And so the person that designed this thing is Eric Deli backs the governor's faith in community, basically Aison. He said, we want somewhere between Disney and Chickfila experience for folks as they you are just reaching out. And then we want to give them a great first impression and then do a hand off to that local lead agency. And then half of the follow ups. And so we launched what we call the Flora Foster Information Center. And we have also launched the recruitment campaign around the state. So we had the first Lady, Chris Tomlin, Tony Dungy. Some celebrities really work with her to kind of get the word out. And so we're starting with that faith based community. There's about 16,000,000 faith based or people that identify the fates in Florida. So by far the biggest kind of group grouping in Florida. And so we're starting there. But our plan is to keep moving through the different kind of groups in Florida and have targeted campaigns for them. But now we have the infrastructure for those folks to kind of plug into in a meaningful way. The Information Center FFIC is actually staffed at DCF. We hired a current foster mom to run it. It is staffed by either current or former foster parents file:///centervideo.forest.usf.edu/video2$/jit/florida/2021FLFAPA/welcome/transcript.txt[3/23/2021 9:26:26 AM] answering the phone. And they are very committed to having a tremendous first phone call with anybody that reaches out and is interested. So you guys have probably picked up on this, but the plan was challenge the faith based community in Florida to step up. And we provided a menu of options for them. So it's not just be a foster parent, which is the ultimate goal. But you all know that's a big ask. Some people may not be able to do that. And so what if it's just bringing meals? What if it's just checking in on a family that the child is just reunified? Man? So we present it and put together a list of nonprofits on what we're calling a menu of options to get involved. And we had 5,000 churches attend those kick offs around the state. And so I am Super excited that the Information Center was already up and running. They've already had thousands of calls, one that's working great. And I think having that perspective of a foster parent being on the other end of the phone is very big. The hand offs to the lead agencies have gone well. We've already had people that started with a phone call and have gotten licensed. So we're very excited about that. But now we've got the ad campaign, the recruitment campaign. We have 5,000 churches that attended. file:///centervideo.forest.usf.edu/video2$/jit/florida/2021FLFAPA/welcome/transcript.txt[3/23/2021 9:26:26 AM] And so it is our sincere hope that we're going to start to have more and more folks reach out, and we're going to be able to build our foster parent ranks. That all of that.

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