ANDERSON — For moms like Jennifer Moreno, she will tell you that becoming a foster parent is a calling.
“It's not easy at first, but they adapt and once they are loved, they become whole different people,” Moreno said.
The Anderson native is a single mother of five who says she never intended on fostering children. Now, she currently has four foster children and has been fostering for the last 18 months.
“One of the boys was in a youth center – he had nowhere to go, nobody wanted him,” she said.
She told WRTV that her process of becoming a foster parent took her about 30 to 45 days.
“I went through the process of going through the classes and the home checks and stuff like that,” Moreno said.
Sometimes when children are removed from certain situations and moved into new environments, they sometimes come with only the clothes on their backs.
“They really didn’t come with anything. One of them came with an outfit, the other came with like four outfits,” Moreno said.
When Moreno was short of supplies, she, like many families, turned to Katie’s Closet to bridge that gap.
“It is a shopping experience for foster families to come and shop for their foster littles,” Tracy Walters said.
Walters and her husband started Katie’s Closet in August 2021. The closet is an extension of their non-profit Turn Away No Longer. Their mission is to positively impact the lives of children in the foster care system.
"We have over 500 children in foster care in Madison County alone and there is close to 11,000 in Indiana,” Walters said.
The closet relies strictly on donations and is free for any child in the foster care system. More than 50 kids have been served.
“We only take one appointment at a time and it's a private shopping experience so there is not more than one family for privacy issues,” Walters said.
To learn more about Katie’s Closet, click here.
For more information about foster care, click here.
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