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Earl Aagaard’s opinions about everything that interests him. Og also enjoys gardening, travel, reading, woodbutchery, and lots of other stuff.

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CHRISTY OBIE-BARRETT—A REAL OREGON HERO!

Brian Obie, Eugene’s mayor in the late 1980s, says his precocious daughter, who had just one brother, planned on a big family from the time she was 5 or 6.

“I didn’t think she was serious,” he says.

She was serious…..
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Even before she married,
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she says she was clear about her goal. She wanted 12 children, some adopted….

Once the wedding was taken care of, she got pregnant right away, and birthed her first child in 1987. But, she was just beginning.
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Within months, a relative’s 10-year-old boy joined the family. Jason had been abused and neglected. His stepfather had killed his mother. He and his sister, Maleah, needed safe homes. She went temporarily to her grandparents. He moved in with the Barretts and they adopted him.

Then came Molly, their second biological child. Jason’s 6-year-old sister, Maleah, arrived next, followed by Mike, a neighbor boy with a difficult home life; the Barretts never formally adopted him but count him as one of their children. Mason, the couple’s third biological child, made six.

The couple had been married five years.

By 1999, 8 years later, Christy had her dozen - a motley crew that included the three she birthed, 8 they adopted, and the one who came to live and stayed on. He’s as much family as any of the rest. Then one day in 2006, the youngest kids went off to kindergarten.
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Some stay-home moms relish the quiet that blankets a house when the youngest children finally head off to school.

It made Christy Obie-Barrett itchy.

Seven of her 12 children still lived at home, so she had no shortage of laundry, grocery shopping, cooking, cleaning and carpooling. But once twins Delaney and Lilly Barrett enrolled in kindergarten five years ago, Obie-Barrett, who was 40, remembers wondering, “What do I do with myself now?”

What she did was to buy “Non-profits for Dummies” to learn how she could start her own, A FAMILY FOR EVERY CHILD, whose aim is “...finding permanent and loving adoptive homes for Oregon’s waiting children.” The lady is serious, and so are the people who work with her.
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A sliver of a woman with a cascade of red hair and a no-nonsense attitude, Obie-Barrett sits on a donated chair at the head of a donated conference table in the donated office space on Eugene’s west side, where she and her staff of 10 work. Their offices are bright, spacious and cold. The one month they turned on the heat the bill was $900—money better spent, they decided, on connecting children in foster care with permanent, nurturing families. So now, Obie-Barrett’s bare feet aside, she and the others simply bundle up.

READ ABOUT HER, about the family, about the non-profit, and about the wonderful work they do facilitating adoptions out of the Oregon foster-care system. HERE ARE SOME PICTURES that I’m not permitted to copy, and here is the HEART GALLERY OF LANE COUNTY site, where they make up photographic displays of kids who need a family, and hang them in malls, markets, airports, and other public places. The success rate for adopting featured kids is amazing.
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Those children most urgently in need of families, mentors and advocates are the ones A Family for Every Child aims to help. Operating on donations, grants and a state contract—Obie-Barrett takes no salary—the organization has worked with more than 400 children and has 400 more in its current caseload.

In three years, the nonprofit has blossomed beyond the photo exhibits.

It enlists 25 volunteers, always recruiting more, to mine case files and track down dozens of members of a foster child’s family, or those such as teachers, neighbors or Scout leaders who may once have been close to them. Ideally, the people found commit to support the child as they can, from offering as much as a home to as little as periodic phone calls and birthday cards.

The desired result: Children in foster care feel less alone.

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 02/07 at 11:10 PM

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