Ep 64: Building Care Communities

In this episode of Fostering Conversations, host Amy Smith welcomes Utah’s First Lady Abby Cox to announce the statewide launch of the Care Communities program. After a successful two-year pilot with Utah Foster Care, Care Communities are expanding across the state to provide essential support for foster families and children in care.

Abby shares how this initiative was born out of a desire to strengthen foster care in Utah and ensure that every child has a safe and supportive environment. The Care Communities model surrounds each foster family with 8–10 trained volunteers who provide emotional support, physical assistance, and trauma-informed care. This helps foster parents feel less isolated and ensures children in care have healthy, lasting connections with caring adults.

Key highlights from this episode:

• Statewide Care Communities launch – a first-of-its-kind effort in Utah.

• The top three benefits foster families experience: emotional support, physical help, and positive impact on children.

• How Care Communities prevent burnout and keep families fostering longer.

• Success stories from the pilot program, including mentorship moments, adoption celebrations, and lifelong community bonds.

• Practical ways listeners can get involved, even if they aren’t able to foster themselves.

Abby emphasizes that Care Communities not only support foster families but also give children the community connections they desperately need. This initiative is backed by faith organizations, nonprofits, local businesses, and state agencies—all working together to improve outcomes for Utah’s most vulnerable kids.

•  Learn more or sign up at utahcarecommunities.org
•  Explore Utah Foster Care programs at utahfostercare.org

Transcript

Fostering Conversations Podcast

Episode 64: Building Care Communities

Amy: Thanks for joining us for Fostering Conversations. I’m your host, Amy Smith, and today we have our amazing guest and First Lady Abby Cox. Thanks for joining us, Abby.

Abby: Thanks so much for having me.

Amy: So we are excited. Today is a special episode because, there is an exciting announcement that Abby is going to share with us.

So go ahead and share that with us and we’ll dive in.

Abby: we are super excited to announce that we are having a statewide launch of our Care Communities program. So we have been doing a two year pilot, around this Care Communities program. We’ve had. Great successes. We’ve had some incredible stories. we are thrilled with the outcomes, frankly, of what we’ve been seeing, and we are ready to launch statewide, which is very exciting.

Amy: It is so exciting and honestly for me as a former employee, this is flown by, so I can’t believe it’s already out of the two year pilot and ready to go, so that’s exciting. So would you just tell us a little bit about why you started the Care Communities program, why you joined up with Utah Foster Care to create this specific program?

Abby: Yeah, so when I got into this position,and wanted to see where in child welfare, really didn’t know that much about it, but knew that I wanted to, see if there was. Somewhere that I could have an impact or that my team could really maybe help in ways that, that some of the other organizations needed.

And so for us, it was, it really was a learning thing. and the more I got into it, and the more I started learning about it, the more, I learned great organizations like Utah Foster Care and others throughout the state that are doing the really tough work of, Helping to minimize the