In recent years, Mother’s Choice continued to invest in the quality of our services. The major projects included the following.
Launching e-Case Management for Children’s Services
Leveraging our investments in Salesforce software, a client relationship management tool, and our CANS certification, Mother’s Choice designed an electronic case management system for Child Care Home, Project Bridge and Ordinary Foster Care. This customized system will help us to capture, monitor and analyse client data, services delivered, case trends and outcomes.
E-case management will enable social workers to record the needs of clients, the services delivered, track progress of service plans, incidents and progress notes as well as record outcome assessment results. It systemises case prioritisation and escalation and provides automated standard reports and forms for better efficiency.
Completing Our Intercountry Adoption Project
With three new partners in the U.S. approved in 2019-20, Mother’s Choice completed its three-year Intercountry Adoption Project. We focused on ensuring that our new partners were on-boarded well and supporting the launch of their Hong Kong families recruitment.
As a result of this project, there were new potential families for many children with complex medical and behavioral needs. Our team also continued to progress children who were matched last year following our U.S. visit. This is a hard won and significant increase in finding more families for Hong Kong children with significant special needs.
Increasing Capacity of Current Approved Foster Families in our Project Bridge Program
We were able to recruit and approve 12 new Project Bridge Families in 2019-2020 bringing our total to 89 families since the commencement of Project Bridge in 2016, with 58% of those families being Chinese speaking. We aim to maintain a steady population of active Project Bridge homes and to enhance their capacity to prepare them for matching with more complicated cases, and continue to actively seek and recruit more families.
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*Ordinary Foster Care
The mission of our Foster Care Service is to be a champion for children without families by providing a loving and safe foster family, and developing a permanency plan for each child to ensure they can be in a family as quickly as possible.
In our Ordinary Foster Care program, we support children in the HK government foster care system, whose birth families cannot adequately care for them for various reasons, including incarceration, neglect, abuse, violence in the home, abandonment, or economic hardship. We take a child-focused approach to ensure that the time a child spends in foster care is a short as possible, while also helping children thrive during this time of transition and waiting.
*Project Bridge
Project Bridge is a privately run, short-term foster care program, pioneered by Mother Choice. We recruit, train and support volunteer families to provide children with a safe, loving and temporary family environment where children can continue to thrive in the short-term, despite a temporary crisis at home, or while they wait for an adoptive family. We develop a permanency plan for each child to ensure they can be in a permanent family, through family reunion or adoption, as quickly as possible.
*Adoption Services
The mission of our Adoption Services is to ensure that every child isplaced in a safe, loving, and permanent family as quickly as possible, and to help children and their families thrive during their lifelong adoption journey. We are one of the three accredited adoption agencies in Hong Kong. We support families at each stage of the Local Adoption process, from preparation and assessment, to matching and post-adoption, through training, workshops, events for adoptive families to connect with one another and one-to-one support. In our Inter-country Adoption program, we work with partner agencies overseas to find permanent families for hard-to-place children, including children with special needs and older children, who are waiting for a family.