Heather Bellamy spoke with Krish Kandiah about his experiences in fostering and adoption and the level of need for new foster parents and parents who would adopt in the UK

Krish Kandiah

Krish Kandiah is the president of the London School of Theology and director and founder of Home For Good, a not for profit initiative that is passionate about children finding loving homes. He has released a new book of the same name with a focus on making a difference for children in need and Heather Bellamy spoke with him find out more.

Heather: I believe you and your wife actually foster and have adopted children yourselves. How did you get involved in giving children in need a home?

Krish: We became birth parents and had three children in three years. We were just loving being a family and then we realised we wanted a larger family and we thought about fostering and adoption as a possible route to that. We'd always talked about it when we were engaged and first married, but it had never come to anything. We thought, well, maybe this is the time and we need to consider it.

We became foster parents first of all and it was quite a long process to become one, but we found it very helpful. We learnt a lot about what it meant to parent children that were coming from traumatic backgrounds. We became foster parents and started to make a difference in kids' lives and then our first foster placement - it turned out she needed adoption and so two years after looking after her she became our adopted daughter. She's now eight and we're loving having her in the family. Since then we've had dozens of lovely little foster children coming through our home - sometimes it's a little baby, sometimes it's a teenager - so we've looked after all sorts of wonderful children.

Heather: In the book, you write about a 12 year old girl who God used in your life with her question, "What do you care?" Can you tell me about that?

Krish: Yeah, that was probably our shortest ever foster care placement. She came to our house on a Friday afternoon with the social worker, she was wearing a hoody - I only ever saw the back of her head - and before the social worker had finished dropping her off she ran for it and was missing for the rest of the weekend. The only thing I remember her saying to her social worker and to us, having barely met us was, "What do you care?" That made me wonder what a lot of the kids in care are thinking about the church; do they know that the church cares for them, that we're a loving family and that we're the kind of people that will take them seriously, love them for who they are, but also I wonder what they think about God, whether he has any sort of love or compassion or concern for them.

Heather: So overall, how would you describe your experience of fostering and adoption?

Krish: Both fostering and adoption are probably the hardest things that our family has ever done. We've got as I said three birth children - they've been exposed to hearing stories about some pretty horrific things that have happened to some of the kids in our care, whether that's physical abuse or emotional abuse, whether it's witnessing violence between their parents, whether it's to do with substance abuse - our kids know a lot about the world. In one sense that's really bad isn't it, that our kids are exposed to these kind of things, but in another sense, they've been involved in caring for broken and vulnerable children and I think it's transformed them. They've been caught up in God's amazing mission for the world and all the love that he wants to show to all sorts of people. We can say that fostering and adoption are one of the hardest things our family does, but we also think it's one of the best things our family has done.

I remember coming home and I'd had a crazy long day in the office. It was a summer's evening. I'd got home exhausted and a little foster boy that we'd been looking after asked if we could go to the park and so we went across the road to our local park and that was the night he nailed it - he was able to ride his bicycle without stabilisers for the first time. I remember him zooming around the park shouting, "Awesome!" while punching the air and I thought, 'You know what God, it's a privilege to be involved in caring for kids, watching them flourish, helping them reach fulfilment in some areas of their life. So although it's the hardest thing, I think it's one of the best things our family does.

Heather: How big a need is there in the UK for foster parents and also parents who would adopt?

Krish: There's a massive need. You might have seen the recent statistics saying that adoptions are on the up and that is great news, but sadly there are still a whole bunch of kids, 6,000 kids at the last count that are waiting for adoption. Most of these kids are older children; they're in sibling groups and they come with emotional or educational needs and some of them with additional physical needs. They also come from a variety of different ethnic backgrounds. These are the kids that everyone's overlooking. There's a little book called 'Be My Parent', which potential adopters look at and these are the kids the page gets turned over; it says how old they are, or some of the challenges they have. So we're really calling the church to engage with these 6,000 left-behind children.

On top of that there's a need for another 9,000 more foster families, so that's sibling groups who then have to be split up and looked after by different families across the city, or kids have to commute a long way to go to the same school they've been in. So again we're calling the church to step up and become the foster parents these kids need.

The Government's thinking that's a colossal need - 6,000 left-behind children and 9,000 more foster parents, but we did some maths and worked out that our collective database of churches is around 15,000. When you think about it that way, that's only one family per church that steps forward and is encouraged and wrapped around by the wider church and the church could meet the entire need for foster carers and adoptive carers at the moment in the UK.

Heather: So do you think anyone could foster or adopt? What is needed from a parent going into this?