Open Door recruits, trains and forms a partnership with foster families to meet a wide array of foster care needs.

Traditional foster care is for children who require a nurturing family setting and have few unusual individual needs.

Specialized foster care is for children with special emotional, behavioral or academic needs as well as teens who generally require more time and attention due to the various stages of adolescence. Specialized care also includes casework counseling with the child/teen's biological parents.

Kinship Care provides for placement of a child or sibling group in the home of a relative caregiver who must meet the requirements for licensure as a foster/kinship parent.

Medically Needy foster care provides for children with unusual medical conditions which require foster parents to undergo special training to meet the specific needs.

Mother/Infant foster care facilitates and strengthens the importance of bonding between a teenage mother and her infant child.  The importance of nurturance and physical contact between mother and child is essential to healthy growth and security.

Sibling groups are generally accepted as a combination of specialized and traditional foster care regardless of age or needs to allow for casework with the biological parents or return resource.

Open Door also makes an effort to develop Spanish speaking foster homes in an effort to serve children whose primary language is Spanish. It also reduces the trauma for these children when placed in foster care and also helps to preserve their cultural identity and values.

Open Door makes every effort to be versatile and flexible in an effort to address the current program needs. The government agency should feel free to express interest in new or creative programs that will help address current and future trends or to help fill the gaps in today's programs.

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