Vancouver foster mom Rochelle Gilbert often does emergency placements where children stay with her briefly while waiting for their long-term home. They typically come to her with nothing, creating a difficult and costly challenge to gather items they need — and items that may comfort them during a confusing time.
Enter The Boxes of Love Project.
The Troutdale, Ore.,-based nonprofit provides boxes full of clothes and books for children entering the foster care system. Boxes of Love started a partnership with Legacy Salmon Creek Medical Center last week, expanding its reach into Southwest Washington at a time when foster care placements are on the rise statewide.
Boxes of Love is the brainchild of Lyndsee Wunn, a pediatric nurse at Randall Children’s Hospital.
“I was seeing firsthand all the babies and kids coming through, going into foster care with nothing,” she said.
Wunn started Boxes of Love in 2014 after she and her husband adopted their youngest son, whom they had fostered for two years. It started small; she asked Facebook friends to help gather some items for kids at Randall. Along the way, she formed partnerships with other hospitals and groups. Now, Boxes of Love is an initiative of Embrace Oregon, both of which operate under the Portland Leadership Foundation. Besides Legacy Salmon Creek and Randall, the nonprofit supplies boxes to Doernbecher Children’s Hospital, Providence St. Vincent Medical Center and Providence Portland Medical Center. As the boxes are given out, they’re replaced.
Each baby box contains about $500 worth of brand new stuff, mostly clothes and diapers. Boxes for older children are made-to-order. Every box stays with the child, wherever they may end up.
“Our mission is to provide these kids with items to call their own, first of all, and just to let them know that they’re loved,” Wunn said, adding that the boxes provide comfort and security during a scary time in their lives. “The box is a way of telling them they’re loved by someone and they matter and they’re special.”
Beth Kutzera, area administrator at the local Vancouver Department of Social and Health Services’s office, said it’s typical for children to enter the foster system without anything of their own.
The number of children in foster care in Washington state has increased more than 19 percent over the last seven years. Kutzera said that’s a result of the overall population growing; the opioid crisis has contributed to those statistics, too, she said.
“There’s a desperate need for foster homes,” Kutzera said.
She’s seen a lot of foster kids come through her office who have one important item that they carry with them wherever they go. It’s something that’s consistent when their life is anything but. Perhaps, she said, their box from Boxes of Love — a hefty tote filled to the brim — or something in it can serve as that important item.
Organizations like Boxes of Love fill gaps in the child welfare system, and more of those organizations and partnerships are rising to the task. More people, too, are aware of the needs of foster children and want to help, Kutzera said.
Gilbert, a foster parent for the last 2 1/2 years, first heard about Boxes of Love from her cousin, who works with Wunn at Randall.
“At the time, we had two little girls, and they both got amazing boxes full of clothes and toys,” said Gilbert, who also has two biological children. “It was such a blessing for them to have stuff that was just theirs.”
Over time, she’s gotten boxes for babies being discharged from Randall’s NICU and has requested boxes for older kids. At any given time, there are typically one to four foster children at Gilbert’s home.
“It’s just kind of a neat thing to see their eyes light up. ‘All these things are for me?'” she said.
Being a Vancouver resident, she’s excited that Boxes of Love officially expanded to the Washington side of the river. There are also two drop-off sites in Vancouver.
Local giving circle 100 Women Who Care SW Washington donated $18,460 to Boxes of Love in November (and $19,500 to another nonprofit serving foster children, Bridge the Gap, this month). Wunn said the donation was one of the big reasons Boxes of Love was able to expand.
Wunn anticipates giving out 125 boxes this year. In 2014, she gave out 64 boxes, then 86 the next year and 117 last year.
“The need is clearly out there, unfortunately,” she said.
