AUGUSTA — Maine Department of Health and Human Services is seeking families to foster the approximately 1,800 Maine children in foster care. 

According to the Office of Child and Family Services, the number of children younger than 5 in state custody has nearly doubled in the last decade. 

Children must be placed in suitable foster homes in appropriate locations, to ensure a child’s life is disrupted as little as possible.

Additional foster homes are urgently needed to meet targeted recruitment of families who can:

• Provide temporary care to babies and young children who are in the process of reunification with their birth families;

• Accommodate larger sibling groups to allow these siblings to remain connected in the same home; and

• Provide care for older youth with challenging behaviors resulting from their exposure to traumatic events.

Families are also needed for older children for whom reunification with their birth families is no longer an available option, and for whom an adoptive family is being sought.

FMI, foster: 1-844-893-6311, AFamilyforME@spurwink.org, maine.gov.