CHARLESTON, W.Va. — Chestnut Mountain Ranch Executive Director Steve Finn says the state can’t tackle the ongoing foster care crisis in West Virginia alone, and it’s up to the church to step in and help do foster care differently.

He said churches are equipped to guide foster parents and families in the right direction in caring for the displaced and often troubled youth they take in.

“Equipping them, surrounding them, being the community that they need, maybe giving them a date night, providing meals, providing supplies, cribs, clothing, diapers, or just giving them the knowledge of somebody who’s got their back,” Finn said.

And that was the message at this year’s All In Foster Care Summit in Charleston Wednesday– “A Shared Vision for Foster Care.”

The event focuses on uniting churches with child welfare professionals, businesses, and community organizations together under one mission of ensuring every displaced child in West Virginia has the care and support they need.

This year is the fourth year of the summit, which is hosted by Chestnut Mountain Village Ministry out of Morgantown.

Steve Finn

Chestnut Mountain Village is a ministry of Chestnut Mountain Ranch, a boarding school and home for youth foster boys that Finn and his wife started 20 years ago after seeing a great need.

After working as a Gangs Special Unit police officer in Atlanta, Georgia for 12 years, Finn said he saw the need firsthand, seeing hundreds of children in and out of the system and nothing being done to truly address the problem head on.

“I saw a lot of tragedy, I saw a lot of situations where children were making really poor decisions that frankly, it landed them in the grave or it landed them behind bars for the remainder of their youth,” he said.

Finn said that’s when he and his wife were introduced to a children’s home called Eagle Ranch in northern Georgia that was addressing the need to house, mentor, and provide for displaced youth in an impactful way while alleviating the burden on the foster care system.

He said that’s when they got involved with the program and became house parents through the organization.

After doing that for a few years, Finn said God was calling him to make an even bigger impact in the movement and focus on an area where the need was greatest– West Virginia.

Chestnut Mountain Ranch

He said they decided to move to West Virginia and open Chestnut Mountain Ranch on a 300 acre property in Morgantown.

Along with fostering youth boys, Finn said they have made it their mission to get more and more churches in the state involved in assisting with foster care programs. Starting out with just two and three, Finn said they have now reached a total of 50 churches that are a part of this ministry.

He said for thousands of years, the church has taken care of displaced youth, and it wasn’t up until the 1920s where the government stepped in to create the foster care system we see today.

Finn said while it was for good reason, as there were a lot of orphanages that were no longer being run well, the foster care system became inundated with children, and the church found it was helpful when they stepped back in.

“Here we are a hundred years later, and the pendulum is starting to swing back the other way,” he said. “We’ve watched this in states like Florida, Texas, and Oklahoma, and there’s a movement for the church to start helping the state provide workers, helping foster families stay engaged.”

Finn said the state has been doing what it can with the resources it has, but at around 6,000 children in the foster care system to date, the number is outpacing the number of foster families they have available.

What the state and the church can do together– Finn said that became the question.

He said, say, there’s a couple in a church congregation who has been on the fence about becoming foster parents, when the church comes in alongside them, then he said they often see that as a gamechanger.

All In Foster Care Summit

“When that couple sees that they’ve got some support behind them, they’re going to engage that space, they’re going to get certified through their local placement agency and they’re going to step in to being a foster family,” said Finn.

Wednesday’s event provided continuing education opportunities for foster care and potential foster care families and caregivers.

Community Coordinator for Chestnut Mountain Village North Central West Virginia Melissa Cargill said not everyone will be called to foster, but that doesn’t mean they still can’t help in some capacity, and at Chestnut Mountain Village, that’s exactly what they do, help provide volunteers to assist those foster families.

“At Chestnut Mountain Village, we want to come alongside and equip and enable them to launch what we call Family Advocacy Ministries at their church, and so it’s just a big term for a ministry that’s designed to support foster adoptive families in their community that are right there and local to them,” she said.

Cargill said they do this under a care community model where four or five volunteer families from a church surround vulnerable foster families with support, often by providing them with meals, clothing and supplies, transportation, prayer, and encouragement.

She said this event is meant to help get everyone moving in the same direction with tackling the issue.

“With the foster care crisis in West Virginia being so huge, it’s really too big for any one organization to solve, but when we come together and start moving in the same direction and working collaboratively, we can just make a much bigger impact,” Cargill said.

The summit was host to several guest speakers and breakout sessions and workshops offering hands-on strategies and spiritual insight.