Alongside my life as an artist, my amazing husband and I have built our family through birth, adoption, and foster care.
I’m the founder of BeTheRefuge.com.
CLICK HERE to visit
BE THE REFUGE
One of the biggest gifts I have received, is being a mom…This is us
I care deeply about children, and I believe every child deserves a family where they can feel safe, loved, and wanted.
Yet in many countries, there is an urgent shortage of foster parents and families willing to open their homes to children who need them.
Being a foster parent myself, I have had so many people ask me what fostering is really like, how someone becomes a foster parent, how adoption works, and where they should even begin.
What I began to realize is that there are many people who truly care and may even be willing to open their home to a child, but they simply do not know what the first step is.
That is why I created BeTheRefuge.com, the website is currently under development.
My hope is to create a place where people can find clear and simple information about foster care and adoption, wherever they live in the world. Every country has its own system, requirements, and process, and sometimes simply figuring out where to begin can feel overwhelming. I want to make that first step easier.
This mission has also become closely connected to my artwork.
Transformation has always been an important part of my work. I am interested in what happens when something changes when the way we see something shifts, when a person begins to see themselves differently, or when someone starts moving beyond what has happened to them.
I recognize some of that transformation from my own life.
I was severely bullied for years as a child, and for a long time those experiences shaped the way I saw myself. Growing older meant learning that what happened to me did not have to determine who I would become. It took time to build confidence, recognize my own worth, and begin to see myself differently.
My experience is not the same as that of a child in foster care, and I would never suggest that it is. But through fostering, I have come to recognize some of those same ideas of transformation in a very different way the need to feel safe, to feel wanted, to learn to trust, to recognize your own worth, and to begin imagining a different future.
That is where Be The Refuge comes in.
I want it to become a starting place for people who care about children but are unsure what they can do. A place where someone can learn about fostering, understand the process, find resources for their own country, and take a first step.
Every child deserves to feel safe, loved, wanted, and to know that they belong.