The Community We Will is a community engagement campaign working to safely reduce the number of children in foster care by ensuring every child in Southern Nevada has a safe, permanent home.
This campaign was designed to impact a serious issue in Southern Nevada- the large number of children entering foster care who might have been able to stay in their homes, with their families, had things been different in Southern Nevada.
In 2007, Nevada ranked 2nd in the country regarding the percent of children in substantiated reports of child abuse and neglect who were removed from their families. Surprisingly, we are 7th in the country for the percentage of children removed and returned to their parents within 8 days. For the large percentage of children who come into foster care for neglect, this means they are removed from their homes, traumatized and returned home in a week.
This staggering phenomenon suggest that if our community had a stronger array of critical family support services, and a community ethic of investing in children and families before crisis hits, many children could remain safely with their parents, instead of entering foster care. Studies have shown that we can save taxpayer dollars and increase our return on investment by re-directing the exorbitant costs of foster care into child abuse preservation and family support services.
We know that by investing in children and families, and in the outcomes of foster youth, we invest in our communities and, ultimately, the future of Southern Nevada. We are making the case funders, government and stakeholders in the community that the return on investment is clear, and the cost of doing it wrong is too high. We will make the case for:
We will focus our work on these three key strategies:
