Benny Westcott
Main Street’s sidewalks may have been a little more crowded than usual Saturday morning, April 2, but it was all for a good cause.
About 20 people took part in the annual March for a Child, waving blue pinwheels and “All children matter” signs to launch Child Abuse Prevention Month. Afterward, participants were treated to a free lunch, donated by Thriftway.
Police Chief Jeff Lynn addressed attendees before the event.
“To me,” he said, “the pinwheels are a symbol of hope for the children, communities, and our society.” Child Abuse Prevention Month, he added, “reminds people, educates them, and promotes awareness of abuse that does occur, within our community and our nation.”
“I wish I could say that Sweet Home was immune to abuse and child-abuse issues, but we’re not,” he continued. “Throughout the year we work diligently with a lot of community and regional partners to address the abuse that does occur in Sweet Home.”
According to Lynn, the Sweet Home Police Department investigated or reviewed roughly 433 instances of child-abuse concerns or allegations in 2021.
“That’s a huge number,” he said. “That’s over one a day that we are actually looking at and trying to figure out if there’s abuse, and what we need to do to serve the family or that child, and to make sure that child is safe. … We cannot do this by ourselves. Not all of it is a law enforcement issue. So we really work hard with a lot of partners in the area.”
One of those partners, Every Child Linn Benton – which, according to its website, everychildlinnbenton.org, “gathers the community to provide love, care and support for vulnerable children and families in Oregon” – was represented at the march by its executive director, Jen O’Connell-Barker, who was excited to see recognition of Child Abuse Prevention Month as she drove into town.
“It’s awesome to see these communities come together,” she said. “Working for a nonprofit, without the community, we have nothing.”
O’Connell-Barker, who has been a foster parent for almost 15 years, has hosted about 13 kids, most of whom, she said, “have just kind of stuck.”
“Being a foster mom is not an easy job, but I would say that it’s one of the most rewarding and hardest things that you could ever do,” she said. “Sometimes I describe it like, ‘If you don’t know how to swim, you’ve got to jump into the deep end and you’re going to figure it out.'”
She said that Every Child works to provide because “Oftentimes, when kids come into care, they come with nothing.” Its team of volunteers can secure such items as frozen meals, diapers, wiggle cars, beds, clothes and grocery gift cards.
“Fostering is hard – not just the emotional part of fostering but making sure that you have all of the tangible items that you need for these kids,” she said. “So we really like to jump in and supply as much as we can when it’s needed.”
Ultimately, she said, “The goal is to reunify the kids with their parents. When a parent is like ‘Help me learn how to parent my kids; help me learn how to do better,’ the police department, Oregon Department of Health Services [ODHS] and Every Child love walking alongside those parents any way that we can. Sometimes that means getting them set up in a clean apartment.”
Every Child also recognizes child welfare workers with hospitality events and recruits new foster families.
“It’s a little easier to come to somebody who is either currently a foster parent or in association with one of these community partners than to go to the state,” she said. “Once we work through that recruitment portion and get the word out about what’s needed and what foster care is like, we work really hard to retain those foster families.
“Right now, kids are hoteled. There aren’t enough homes,” she continued. “There are hundreds of kids in foster care in Linn, Benton and Lincoln counties (the organization began serving the latter about three weeks ago) and not nearly enough foster families to cover the need that’s there.
“Our heart is to get to a place where we’re not in crisis mode anymore. Our heart is to have not just enough foster families, but to have so many foster families that when a child comes into care, we can say, ‘This is a good home for this child.'”
Every Child Linn Benton offers regular volunteer opportunities, and is always on the lookout for monthly donors at $36 a month.
“All of your donations go back right into our community to help support things like tangible needs, recruitment and retention, and hospitality,” O’Connell-Barker said.
The organization can be found online at https://everychildlinnbenton.org/, on Facebook at “Every Child Oregon – Linn Benton” and on Instagram at everychildoregon_linnbenton.
As the ceremony wrapped, Lynn thanked volunteers for helping with the event and placing blue pinwheels around town.
“Without all of them, very little of this would have been done to the level that it is,” he said.
“Gregory Home Team really stepped up and helped us put out a lot of the pinwheels and decorate the downtown area, as well as the Sweet Home Rotary Club, who made contact with a lot of the businesses.
“Without everybody here, it just wouldn’t have happened.”