Serving families throughout Arizona, the Lodestar Family Connections Center helps adoptive parents, kinship caregivers, and guardians connect to the services they need—and to each other.

It provides a gathering place in the heart of Phoenix for meetings, classes, and social events sponsored by any agency.

The Center is a partnership between the Lodestar Foundation and Aid to Adoption of Special Kids.  Casey Family Programs’ Phoenix field office provides staff support for co-facilitation of support groups and development of new trainings and programs.

Improving the odds of stability for children
By providing access to a resource library, and information and referral to a safety net of family support services, the Center seeks to:

• encourage more prospective parents to provide a loving, permanent home for a child in foster care
• maximize the likelihood that adoptions will succeed

Support for families after they’ve taken a child into their home helps to ensure a stable future for that child. Although many services are available, adoptive parents and guardians are often bewildered when trying to find the help they need.

Help families connect to each other
Whether a family provides foster care, kinship care, adoption, or guardianship, the center offers support groups and trainings to help parents and children make the adjustment.

The most popular trainings focus on positive discipline, navigating the child welfare system, and common mental-health diagnoses in adoptive children, such as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and Reactive Attachment Disorder. Although adoptive parents learn about child development and discipline during their certification process, the material has a whole new meaning once there’s a child in the house.

For more information, visit the Lodestar Family Connections Center Web site.