Grant Applicant: Heart of Courage

The feature below is brought to you by Heart of Courage, an organization that is in the running to receive a See Beautiful Grant. For more information about all of our giving initiatives, please click here. 

To learn more about Heart of Courage, please visit their website: here.

Uniting Families. Changing Futures.

Heart of Courage focuses on mentoring and advocating for women who have had their children placed in Child Protective Services and wish to be reunited with their children and create better lives for themselves.
 
Since our inception, we have been able to extend our reach to working with mothers who have aged out of foster care and whose children are either in foster care, or have a strong possibility of being placed in foster care themselves. The overall purpose of our program is to help the mothers in our program become self-sufficient both mentally, emotionally and physically so that they can become better individuals and better mothers to their children. The end result being children united with their mothers into loving and sustainable environments
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Our original goal was to help with the large number of placements in foster care. We believed that if possible, children should be with their mothers if their mothers are willing to work hard to make the changes in their lives to create positive and sustainable futures for their children. What we begin to learn, and continue to learn, is that these mothers need a voice. That many of them have a story and their story deserves to be told. We learned that these mothers have incredible strengths, strengths they don’t realize that they have until you as their mentor point it out to them.  These mothers have fought abuse of all kinds, teen parents at 12 and 13, addictions, homelessness, abandonment, mental health... and yet they continue to fight for their children. They continue to desire to provide a better life for their children than they had. They just need the support and encouragement- encouragement that they may have never had. We try to offer that to them.
 
Heart of Courage is completely volunteer based. We know that the women in our program, genuinely want to benefit from our array of services, such as education and advocacy, one on one mentoring, parent support groups, job readiness, educational services and community outreach.
 
When we mentor these mothers, they become so excited to have our support because many feel alone. But it is a reward for all of us.  The joy we feel when we see a mother, 9 months clean from meth, and know that her child will be coming home to live with her next month is amazing.  When we witnessed first-hand the sacrifices she made by making the decision to not go back to the friends and family that she knew would try to keep her in that negative environment. Or the excitement as a few of our mothers enrolled in school, and you watch tears in their eyes because people in their past had told them they weren’t smart.  We have one mom, whose goal is to get her GED before she turns 30, which is later this year. She is now in a GED program!
 
We work with each mother to see how she can become self-sufficient and come up with her own set of goals. Each week we work on those goals as well as talk about other things going on in her life. Sometimes it is just listening to her, sometimes it is encouraging her, and sometimes it delivering her tough support and telling her she has to be patient. Telling her to be patient is probably the most difficult because she can easily get disappointed or discouraged. Sometime she gets tired of fighting because she feels like she has been fighting most of her life. It’s during those times that we show her how special she really is and that she has to ignore people’s misjudgments of her and that negative voice inside her head. Instead we tell her to look at how far she has come and to remember that child who she is fighting to make a difference for. That child just sees her as his or her beautiful mommy.  We want her to see that same beautiful inside herself and see beautiful in the world. Instead of just living each day as it comes, we see her now living for the future.
 
To get further insight into Heart of Courage and meet one of the mothers we are helping you can watch us on Plugged Into DFW: https://dfw.cbslocal.com/show/plugged-into-dfw/video-3804719-heart-of-courage-3-4/

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Written by Dania Carter, Founder/ CEO of Heart of Courage

Edited by Rachel McLeroy for See Beautiful