“This parenting journey is hard, and it’s so nice to laugh when there is not much to laugh about in our day-to-day lives right now.”
“The laughter was healing, and the worship was sweet.”
“As newbies, my wife and I had no idea what to expect and left with hearts filled, encouraged, with gut pains from laughter.”
“All the attention to details made it a personal experience and not just attendance at a big conference.”
“This is just what our spirit needed to continue this calling God has for us.”
We have a lot planned for Together Called 2024 in addition to hearing from J.R. Briggs and Graham + Abby Allen throughout the weekend.
Relationships are hard. Arguably, foster and adoptive parents know this more than most. We invite you to start your Together Called weekend experience here, joining with others to reflect on our experience of relationships, explore what the term attunement means, and practice in real time how we can offer and receive it through the tool of reflective listening and thoughtful repair. Our goal is for this workshop to be experiential, practical, and a helpful bridge into the weekend..
About the facilitator:
Kelly Raudenbush and her husband Mark cofounded The Sparrow Fund with the mission of caring for foster and adopted children and their grownups by empowering relationships within and between families. What started as a small ministry where they could serve together has grown into full-time work for them both. With a Master’s degree in counseling from Missio Seminary and a certificate in Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health from Georgetown University, Kelly has a particular interest in partnering with parents to help children process and understand their histories in healing ways; encouraging, equipping, and empowering parents as they navigate the effects of trauma; and helping caregivers and teachers in her own neighborhood and across the world best experience the power of relationship. But, her biggest passion resides in glorifying God within their own family, as a wife and a mother to their four children…and their two dogs.
Oh no, here we go again! Another flare up, just a different day! Our children’s tough situations often become our tough situations as we try to manage their meltdowns and our own. In this workshop, we will unpack frustration in children, the whys and wherefores, and offer you tools to help you manage your own anxiety and regulation and equip you to support your children in the same. Sounds like magic? No, it’s not magic, but it is an effective method that has empowered many families in managing all the meltdowns while maintaining respect for themselves and promoting self-respect and positive identity in the children they love and care for.
About the facilitator:
Maude Le Roux, OTR/L is an occupational therapist and director of A Total Approach, a private therapy center in Glen Mills, PA since 2001. She opened her online academy in 2019. She trains extensively nationally and internationally, empowering both professionals and parents in their care of children. Maude is a great believer in the human spirit and believes that God created the human brain and, therefore, holds the key to true healing of body, spirit, and mind.
Teenagers are hard to care for. Teenagers with a history of trauma are hard to understand. Parents often ask: Is it trauma? Is this the stage of adolescence? Is it our parenting strategy? In this session, we will unpack how adoption trauma can manifest itself within a teen’s unique developmental stage. Sara will lend personal insights and offer practical ways parents can support teens to grow their sense of feeling seen, valued, and heard and connect in ever deeper ways.
About the facilitator:
Sara Odicio is a licensed social worker and an adult adoptee who was adopted from an orphanage in China when she was 13 months old. Sara has worked with adoptive families since 2018 in various capacities including post permanency case management, parent education, mentoring, support group facilitating and clinical therapy. Through these opportunities, Sara felt challenged to engage with her own adoption journey on a deeper level. Sara founded CORE of Adoption, LLC in 2021 to combine her life experience, skillset and passion in supporting teen adoptees through coaching and support groups. Aside from CORE, Sara works in a local foster care and adoption agency as an outpatient therapist with the goal of earning her clinical license in social work. Sara currently resides in Lancaster County, PA with her husband Jared and two fluffy cats, Misty and Milo. She enjoys finding hole-in-the-wall food places, taking walks, deep and edifying conversations, and serving as a worship leader at her local church.
We may know what it is to be in love; to share hopes, dreams, and desires with our spouse. But, life has a way of filling up and crowding out the deeper connection that many of us envisioned in our marriages. How do we build intimacy in the midst of life’s chaos and challenges? How do we find our way back to one another when seasons have changed us? How do we make space for pleasure in a world where “doing hard things” has become our way of life? Together, let’s unpack these questions and more as we reimagine our relationships with greater pleasure, connection, and desire.
About the facilitator:
Adriane Dimmitt and her husband Mike, have been married for 14 years, and together are raising four wild and wonderful children. As former foster parents, they know firsthand the struggle of staying connected in the midst of life’s demands. As a writer and speaker, Adriane is passionate about advocating for foster care, parenting children with neurological autoimmune issues, and grieving well. And, oh yes, she’s also passionate about having a marriage that gets better with age and helping others do the same! This year, Adriane has launched a new initiative, Redeeming Childhood, to better equip families facing behavioral and mental health struggles as a result of underlying autoimmune conditions. Her work has given her the privilege of connecting with many families as they pursue wellness for their children. Most days, you will find her at her dining room table, homeschooling her kids, taking long walks in the fields nearby, or dreaming up a new project with her husband.
We gave the 29 families in our Sparrow Family Care Grant program an invitation to enjoy a date night on us this month. It’s one small way we can care for them. We also created and offered them this resource of date night conversation prompts that we’re now sharing with all of you. We hope it can be a tool to prompt smiles, nods, listening noises, and a sense of togetherness.
We invite you to delight with us in the outpouring of financial support we have received for Giving Tuesday! We joyfully anticipate all the ways those dollars will help foster and adopted children and their grownups in 2024.
Good things are coming!
For us, Giving Tuesday has always been more vision-raising than fundraising. When we engage more people’s hearts with a shared vision, we are stronger in all the ways. Our mission is to care for foster and adopted children and their grownups by empowering relationships within and between families. It is our hope that as we share images and stories on Instagram and Facebook over the next 2 weeks, more people will embrace the vision for what are doing now and where we are headed as we care for families.
Our giving goal by Giving Tuesday on November 28th is $60,000: $20,000 for general operating needs so we can keep all of our lights on, $20,000 for our Sparrow Family Care Grant program currently supporting 29 families until they are home for a full year, and $20,000 for new opportunities because it has become more and more clear that we are being called to grow. To help us get there, a few generous, committed donors have pledged to match all gifts dollar-for-dollar up to $20,000. What that means is that whatever you give–small, medium, or large–will be doubled until we reach $20,000 to give us a strong start towards that $60,000 goal.
Home. Connected. Grateful. Satisfied. Filled. Energized. Ready.
This is Together Called.
Here is a little more information about what we have planned for Together Called 2023 in addition to hearing from Skye Jethani and Ross and Staci King throughout the weekend.
We learn who we are and how the world works through our experience of relationships. Hurts experienced in the context of relationships can be healed in the context of relationships. But, what exactly is a healing relationship? Leaning on Empowered to Connect’s connecting practices, in this workshop, we will start to explore how we can better understand “good” parent-child relationships and grow in our own relational practice.
About the facilitators:
Mark and Kelly Raudenbush have been married for 25 years this Fall and have four children, three biological and one adopted as a toddler from China in 2010. Together, they have been committed to caring for caregivers since they cofounded The Sparrow Fund in 2011. With background in ministry and previous experience on Young Life staff, Mark currently serves as The Sparrow Fund’s Director of Operations. Kelly holds a Master’s degree in counseling from Missio Seminary and earned her Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health Clinical Certificate from Georgetown. As The Sparrow Fund’s Executive Director and Sparrow Family Services clinician, she has a particular interest in (a) partnering with parents to help children process and understand their histories in healing ways; (b) encouraging, equipping, and empowering parents as they navigate the effects of trauma and build connections with each other and their children, and (c) helping caregivers and teachers in our own neighborhood and across the world best experience the power of relationship and grow it.
We have an opportunity as parents to move our family’s emotional temperature as we learn to better manage our own internal state and practice presence with our children. In this session, Dr. Monica will share about the neurodevelopment of the brain and how that knowledge can help us and our children regulate our emotions more effectively. And, she will guide you to experience a few relaxation and stress reduction techniques yourself in real time that you can share with your children.
About the facilitator:
Dr. Monica Pentony is a clinical psychologist who specializes in treating trauma across the lifespan. She is passionate about helping people understand the impact of trauma on the brain and body and teaching them to build new adaptive neurology to support a healthy integrated self. She is a certified eye movement desensitization and reprocessing therapist, registered play therapist, safe and sound practitioner, and animal assisted therapist. Dr. Monica practices in Frederick, Maryland where she lives with her husband and four children on a farmette in the Catoctin Mountains. When she isn’t in session or wrangling her children, she enjoys quiet time on her porch swing with a hot cup of coffee, chocolate pretzels, and a good book.
Experiencing the impact themselves of transformational community, Evan and Stacey have been practicing intention to integrate vulnerability and build community within their family. In this session, they will share how they have been doing that, what has worked (and what hasn’t), and help you imagine ways you could do similar things for your family. While the content is an organic expansion and application of Curt Thompson’s messages at Together Called 2022, anyone is welcome to the table and can benefit from the conversation.
About the facilitator:
Evan Snyder currently serves as Pastor of Spiritual Formation at Grace Hill Church in Herndon, VA. He and his wife, Stacey, have three kids: Ezekiel, Micah, and Brinley. They adopted their son Ezekiel from Ethiopia in 2011. Adoption and foster care continues to be a significant area of focus for their family and ministry. Evan serves on the advisory board for Foster the Family D.C. which seeks to support and encourage foster and adoptive families, mobilize and equip the community and church for foster care and adoption, and advocate for vulnerable children. He is also a founding member of The Redwood Collective, an organization whose mission is to create spaces of connection and being known for people who are isolated by the nature of their work.
As biological, adoptive, and former foster parents, Ken and Carolyn know hard. Parenting alone is hard. And then, there’s marriage; that is hard too. Sometimes in the hard, we can lose each other. Ken and Carolyn can’t offer you three steps to a happier, healthier marriage. However, they can give you a glimpse into the raw and real of their 37 years of marriage, share some wisdom and tools they have gathered along the way, and help you find hope and encouragement for your own.
About the facilitators:
Ken and Carolyn Ruch have been working at their marriage for over 37 years and have been finding their way through parenting seven children (three bio, one adopted, three fostered) for over 35. They know what it’s like to wait in police stations, psych wards, and emergency rooms and sit through IEP meetings, court hearings, and counseling sessions. They also know what it is like to celebrate small milestones, cheer at graduations, and dance at weddings. Now, they have the blessing of being grandparents to four. Ken is the former president and CFO of George Didden Greenhouses, Inc. and is now retired and delighted to be mentoring his sons at Wedgewood Gardens in Glen Mills, PA. Carolyn is the steward of The Rise and Shine Movement: Equipping Adults to Protect Kids from Sexual Abuse, and a writer and speaker. Together, they spend their Fridays delighting in their grandchildren as they give their mamas a much-needed break and their Friday nights thanking God for the sounds of silence.
For us, Giving Tuesday has always been more vision-raising than fundraising. When we engage more people’s hearts with a shared vision, we are stronger in all the ways. Our mission is to care for foster and adopted children and their grownups by empowering relationships within and between families. It is our hope that over the next 2 weeks as we approach Giving Tuesday, more people will share our vision for what are doing now and where we are headed as we care for families.
It is a hard season for many. We have set our Giving Tuesday 2022 funding goal high, in spite of and because of this season of heightened need for the families we serve. Our giving goal for Giving Tuesday on November 29th is $60,000: $30,000 for general operating needs so we can keep our doors open, $15,000 for our Sparrow Services Grant program currently supporting 32 families until they are home for a full year, and $15,000 for new opportunities because we want to keep growing. To help us get there, a few generous, committed donors have pledged to match all gifts dollar for dollar up to $20,000. What that means is that whatever you give–small, medium, or large–will be doubled until we reach $20,000 to give us a super strong start towards that $60,000 goal.
We often think of screentime as being disconnecting relationally. But, it doesn’t have to be. Your phone can be a tool (that you almost always have in your back pocket) for connectivity with your child newly home or home with you for a while.
Here are some of our favorite mobile apps for supporting parent-child and sibling-sibling relationships.
Developed by the Harvard Graduate School of Education, this app is designed to create back-and-forth interactions between grownups and kids. With your child, you can take turns choosing facial expressions expressions and recording dialogue (or noises) for silly animals in different scenes. It can be used with children who do not yet speak English.
This app is appropriate and helpful for all kids. In this app, you can help your child create artwork using shapes. It can be used with children who do not yet speak English.
Breathe, Think, Do With Sesame
Developed by Sesame Street, this app is designed to create back-and-forth interactions between grownups and kids. The goal is to help a Sesame Street monster calm down and solve problems. It can be used with children who do not yet speak English and can be used with English and Spanish.
A personal favorite, this app has dance videos, brain breaks, games, and mindfulness activities for grownups and kids to do together. It gets everyone moving and laughing like all the GoNoodle materials do.
Remember those hidden picture puzzles in Highlights magazine? Now they’re in an app. This app encourages a monthly subscription program that delivers new puzzles weekly. But, the app is free and includes a limited number of puzzles that you and your child could have fun with over and over again sans subscription.
Developed by the Harvard Graduate School of Education, this app is designed to create back-and-forth interactions between grownups and kids. With your child, you can take turns decorating selfies or photos already on your phone and playing hide-and-seek with the photos. It can be used with children who do not yet speak English.
Developed for toddlers, this app is fun for grownups and kids to do together and use as an English-language learning tool as you narrate words for simple things. There is a cost, but it’s nice to have no ads and be able to play without wifi. Watch a little trailer HERE.
This app offers ideas for over 130 games you can initiate with your child in “real life.” Games are organized into three categories: Keep Busy, Move Your Body, and Calm Down. This can be helpful for when you feel like you need some fresh ideas.
Developed by the Harvard Graduate School of Education, this app is designed to create back-and-forth interactions between grownups and kids. With games and songs, it can be used with children who do not yet speak English. Watch a little trailer HERE.
You may hate us for recommending this app as the song is kinda catchy. But, this app really is a lot of fun for grownups and kids to create a musical number (and then play it over and over again!). All the Toca Boca apps are pretty fun, so check out their other apps too. It can be used with children who do not yet speak English.
Exactly what it says it is, this app is includes all sorts of mini games that can be played on the same screen by two players—bowling, race cars, ping pong, soccer, etc. It can be used with children who do not yet speak English.
When traveling on an adoption trip, don’t forget the impact of your own photos and camera. Consider flagging photos of particular interest so you can easily scroll through the flagged photo folder to show your child photos or allow your child to scroll himself or herself. These photos could include ones he or she may recognize from a photo book you sent before traveling; photos or a video tour of your home, a playground you visit, or pets; photos you received of your child while you waited; etc. And, use your camera not only to take pictures but to communicate to your child how important they are to you and to have fun! Quite possibly, selfies are a universal language for fun. There’s no need for silly filters; simply taking turns mirroring each other’s funny faces with the camera capturing it all really is enough. Ridiculous creates laughter, and laughter is contagiously connecting.
How do you use your tablet and phone for family connectivity? We’d love to hear about your ideas and know your favorite apps so we can keep growing our list and sharing them! Email us at info@sparrowfund.org.
Since the start, we have experienced God meeting us in all the various places we may be at our annual marriage retreat Together Called. We are no longer surprised by it; we come with expectation of it. Our 9th Together Called is months away, but we are already filled with great expectation.
Skye Jethani and his wife Amanda have been friends since high school. They were married in 1999 and currently live in Wheaton, Illinois with their three children. Skye’s father immigrated to the United States from India in 1970 to complete his medical training in Chicago. His mother was a nurse and native Chicagoan. Growing up in a multiethnic home gave Skye a diverse outlook and broad exposure to cultures that continue to influence him. Before college, he had already traveled to nearly 30 countries on five continents. Skye went to Miami University in Ohio and studied History and Comparative Religion with a special focus on Islam. He went on to earn a Masters of Divinity degree in 2001 from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. He served as a church pastor for 8 years before founding Measure the Clouds, a nonprofit organization devoted to helping a post-Christian generation discover a ravishing vision of life with God. He has authored 11 books and served for over a decade in numerous editorial and executive roles at Christianity Today. Skye is a cohost of the popular Holy Post Podcast, a weekly show that blends astute cultural and theological insights with comical conversation. We can’t wait to have him join us at Together Called 2023 as our keynote speaker with his wife Amanda. If you are on Twitter, look for him there and get to know him @skyejethani.
Ross and Staci King have been married since 1998 and have been making music together even longer than that. They met in 1997 when they were both a part of the Breakaway Ministries worship team at Texas A&M, quickly fell in love, and sealed the deal. In the 20+ years they’ve been together, they planted a church, adopted 4 kids, traveled the country leading worship and doing concerts, and have had plenty of adventures. They currently live just south of Nashville, TN where Staci homeschools their children and Ross continues his career writing songs, producing music in his studio, and leading worship. They feel called to help regular people have honest conversations about real things. Since they still love singing together and we love experiencing it with them, we are thrilled to have them back for their fourth (official) Together Called.
Registration for Together Called 2023 will open on Sunday, October 16th. Join our mailing list to get an email reminder. We don’t want you to miss it.
We need sponsors. If you own a business and want to be a part of supporting foster care and adoption by supporting the moms and dads in it, email us. We’d love to tell you more about why we need you and what sponsorship looks like.