Esmé Home

The Story of Possum Trot is the vision of the Esmé Home.

According to the National center for Juvenile Justice, Its estimated that 60% of child sex trafficking victims in the USA have histories in the child welfare system. Youth without stable families are particularly vulnerable to being exploited by traffickers. Traffickers are targeting and recruiting youth directly from foster care, group homes, and residential placements. The Esmé Home is combating this by being a guarantied safe place for foster children. But the vision is not for just the one Esmé Home.

The Esmé Home vision is that the children in foster care - and those who are waiting to be adopted - shouldn’t be shuffled from home to home, facing multiple placements. Rather, an active and loving church can come around one or more foster-to-adopt families in the congregation and empower them to become great foster families. This allows parents to be there for those kids who can go back to birth families, or become forever families to children who can’t. The Esmé Home multiplies in the local church. There are nearly 600,000 kids in foster care right now. There are about 300,000 churches in America. If these churches catch the vision, the foster care crisis can be solved!

Not everyone needs to foster or adopt! There are many ways to help. These include:

• offering to be in the nursery or kids programs at church so that when families with foster and adoptive children come to church, they know they are welcome.

• offering to help a foster or adoptive family with things like baby-sitting, cleaning, servicing a vehicle, household maintenance, date night, lawn care, music lessons, or throwing a ball in the back yard!

• being teachable, and willing to learn how to handle the kid’s trauma in a way that will bring healing.

• volunteering time so that foster parents can take the required monthly classes to keep up-to-date, and drive kids to doctor’s appointments, and find time to do the extensive paperwork to file documents to keep records accurate.

• donating things like diapers, wipes, and gas cards … or asking what the greatest current need is.

• foster families like and including the Esmé Home walk by faith. These bring on the best testimonies! One foster family in our circle of contacts was just given a home! Another was handed a turkey. Another received a vehicle because they had outgrown the one they had. The Lord knows just what is needed and He uses His Body to achieve His goals!

The MAIN POINT is that IF EVERY CHURCH equipped it’s families to foster kids well, and adopt those who couldn’t go home, we would end the foster and adoption crisis in this nation. It currently IS A CRISIS because, roughly 40% of foster children have trafficking allegations which are recorded in the child welfare administrative data. MOST OF THESE HUMAN TRAFFICKING EXPERIENCES WERE PRIOR TO THE AGE OF 18. Most of these WERE SEX TRAFFICKING. 79% of cases indicated that the trafficking occurred during a child welfare placement. Roughly 34% of youth who ran away (either from home in the first place - or from foster care) or were kicked out of home had their first sex trafficking experience at that point. (Office of Administration for Children & Families) Thank you for being willing to step into the gap and partner to end childhood trafficking, trauma and suffering!