childbridge center for children and families: Foster Care & Adoption

There is nothing like the love of a family environment to bring smiles to everyone’s faces.

Why should you foster and/or adopt?

To provide hope for a child with special needs in a home-based, family environment
To become a parent or to expand your family
To make an invaluable and immeasurable contribution to your community
To enhance knowledge and relationships with a strong training program and proven emotional, financial and clinical support
To engage in potentially one of the most rewarding and fulfilling experiences of your life

Little City Foundation’s ChildBridge Center for Children and Families' Foster Care and Adoption Program provides services to children in substitute care who are Illinois Department of Children and Family Services (IDCFS) wards. (Wards of the State are children whose guardian is the state of Illinois and currently live in foster homes, group homes or institutions).

As a subcontractor with the state of Illinois DCFS, we receive referrals of specialized children who are between the ages of 0-21, with majority of children eight years old and older and teenagers. Our children often have global developmental disabilities (e.g., gross motor, fine motor, speech and communication skills are delayed), autism, reactive attachment disorder (difficulties making meaningful attachments with caregivers and other individuals), post-traumatic stress disorder, cerebral palsy, shaken baby syndrome, or sexually reactive behaviors.

We serve the most vulnerable among us and you can too!

As part of our mission, Little City is committed to recruiting and supporting foster/adoptive families for children with special needs—especially children with intellectual and/or developmental disabilities—until they can return to their birth family or be adopted. We look for loving families regardless of age, race, creed, gender, sexual orientation, gender-identification, income or education level.

Why Choose Little City to become a Foster/Adoptive Parent?

For over 15 years, Little City's foster care/adoption program has provided innovative, individualized and community-based treatment to our children and their families
Unique to Little City, we have consistently had over a 95% placement stability rate within our foster care and adoption programs
Little City hosts customized pre-licensing training to all prospective foster/adoptive parents
We offer comprehensive case management services and treatment. We support foster parents who open up their hearts and their homes to our societys most vulneravle children with the following:

1. Generous stipend

2. 24-hour emergency assistance

3. Educational and court advocacy

4. Assessment and service planning and coordination

5. On-going training and support groups

6. Clinical services*

7. Recreational programming including arts and sports

8. Respite and mentoring

*Little City’s In-House Clinical Department provides community-based, intensive clinical services that may include individual, parent-child, or family therapy to children and their biological and/or foster parents and families. The Clinical Department assesses critical problem areas as identified by families that may include, but are not limited to self-care struggles, toileting, behavioral management and setting up routines. A multitude of treatment interventions are available and may include: Play therapy; Sensory integration, developmental, floortime, TEACCH, PECS and applied behavioral analysis (ABA) assessments and plans; Parent coaching; Social stories; Communication assistance and more!

For more information about our program, the children we serve and our upcoming orientation sessions for prospective foster parents, please see the Foster/Adoptive Parent Information tab below.