The Impact of an Advocate: We All Need Help Sometimes

As foster parents, Karen Phillips and Dana Baker felt a calling to do more than love the children in their homes—they wanted to help birth parents reunify with their children. That shared conviction brought them to Restore Hope, where they met and began translating compassion into partnership with families and the child welfare system.

Karen admits that, despite years of experience, she found it extremely difficult to support the parents of children in her care. She knew there had to be more. Driven by that belief, she went to the Governor’s office to elevate the issue. She had been praying for unity in her town regarding the child welfare system; when she met Paul, she discovered there was a name for what she was seeking: collective impact.

Collective impact has changed trajectories in places like Sebastian County. Through community coordination, the county has seen a 50% reduction in children entering foster care. The lesson is not that the work is simple. Even for experts, Karen acknowledges, it is still complex.

“Child welfare," she says, "can be the most difficult system. Trying to work through a child welfare case alone is impossible.” Yet Karen believes that when the community aligns around families, progress follows.

Natalie Edwards, a family advocate for the 100 Families Initiative and a mother with lived experience offers a powerful testimony of that truth. Her children spent three years in foster care while she battled addiction. She was afraid to be honest and to seek help, worried because the stigma says DHS is only out to take your children.

In time, her parental rights were reinstated. Today, she can walk into the same courtroom where those rights were once terminated and sit beside a participant facing similar circumstances.

She has seen how much it matters to have a steady person at your side—someone you can trust, who will listen, who will help you navigate the steps toward reunification. The value of lived experience is incalculable. Beyond resource lists and referrals, the mental and emotional support of an advocate is often what keeps a parent moving when fear and shame threaten to stop them.

Dana shares her experience of adopting a child after the birth mother’s rights were terminated and speaks candidly about the trauma her daughter carries because her mom could not keep her. That grief fuels Dana’s resolve to help stabilize families upstream. She reminds us that “advocates build a bridge between DCFS and participants.” Advocates also become bridges for the broader community—helping neighbors, churches, employers, and service providers see both the importance of reunification and the humanity of birth parents doing hard work under hard circumstances.

Dana describes how courtrooms reveal this need in real time. When a parent has a trauma response, it can be nearly impossible to comprehend what the judge is saying, much less to remember every requirement. An advocate can slow the moment down—listen, translate the legal language into a workable plan, and then help the parent meet the stipulations the judge lays out. Advocates are always to work with the courts and adhere to what they say. That posture of respect builds credibility and, over time, trust.

Karen keeps the moral center in view: parents love their children. For many, child removal is the worst imaginable sentence. Yes, mistakes have been made. But do they deserve to never see their children again? She challenges advocates to sit with the severity of that punishment and respond with empathy and action.

“If they are asking for help, then we are here to help them.” With the community’s support, situations improve.

“All of us need that from time to time. We all need community. We all need an advocate sometimes.”

That is the aim of the 100 Families Initiative: to surround each participant with a network of support through collaboration and technology.

“When we say 100 Families is working with the family, we mean the community is working with that family,” explains Phillips.

The initiative now operates in multiple counties across Arkansas and beyond. In White County, 100% of children currently in foster care have parents actively working with 100 Families—a powerful sign of trust in advocates and partners. Data continues to show that chances for reunification almost double when parents engage with 100 Families advocates and partner organizations.

In county after county, local alliances are moving upstream—preventing crises, not just responding to them. The work will always be complex. But it becomes possible—hopeful, even—when advocates stand in the gap, courts and agencies welcome collaboration, and communities rally around families. In the end, that is the impact of an advocate: to remind us that none of us were meant to do this alone—and to prove, step by step, that help, offered with dignity, can change a family’s story.