Foster Dad Reflection from Pickens County

Additional Pickens County article published May 3, 2015: http://www.greenvilleonline.com/story/news/local/pickens-county/2015/05/03/foster-dad-love-child/26644023/. 

EASLEY – Here's the problem: There are only 40 foster homes in Pickens County and more than 120 children in foster care.
Here's the solution: Convince just one family out of every three churches in Pickens County to become foster families.
That's the way a coalition of faith-based foster care advocacy groups in the county see the situation.
"A problem that government agencies have struggled to solve for years can be solved by the local church," says Chris Wilson, executive director of the Dream Center of Pickens County.
The center is inviting the public, and especially people from churches, to come to the Dream Center, at 111 Hillcrest Drive, Easley, at 6:30 p.m. on May 12 for a program called Fostering Hope. There, attendees can learn about how they can live out their faith by helping address the foster home shortage, she says.
It is an outsized problem for Pickens County.
Although Pickens is the 14^th most populous county in South Carolina, it ranked seventh in the number of children in foster care during the 2013-14 fiscal year, with 282, according to state Department of Social Services figures.
Out of all the counties that had at least 100 children in foster care as of last November, Pickens County had the third lowest ratio of foster homes per child, about one home for every three, according to the same source.
It had the fourth highest number of children placed in foster care because their parents abused drugs, behind only Spartanburg, Charleston and Greenville counties.
The shortage of foster homes in Pickens County means that many children get sent to other counties, far from anyone they know. Or they end up in group homes, without a family environment where they could more easily reshape their lives.
According to Easley foster parent Charlie Crumpton, it doesn't necessarily take a heroic effort to make a huge difference in the life of a child from an unstable home.