YNET Campaign to find Host Families
 
"These are our children" is the name of a new project which was initiated by the "Yediot Aharonot" website as part of their newspaper's community service. During the past few months the website has displayed several shockingly disturbing cases of children in distress who are in need of foster care, and of children in residential group care who need host families for weekends and holidays.
 
Hila Yigal Izun, the producer of "Parents", the channel responsible for the website project, stated that there were several thousand responses to the website appeal. A strategic decision had been made by the website producers to bring about social change through disseminating the concept that every child should have one responsible adult who encourages and supports him or her.

This is a procedure that is not connected with economic gain. On the contrary, what is involved is a great deal of hard work without gain, and yet the subject has received prime space on a central site of Ynet. "As soon as we realized" says Hila. "that there are so many children that have no one to accompany them, that no one witnesses what happens to them in their lives, then I and the editors of Ynet thought that this is not acceptable. I, myself, an experience producer to ten years, had a difficult time dealing with the stories that reached my desk. From time to time I would get up and hug my own children. Yes, this is a difficult subject to write about, and it is no less difficult to read about, but isn't it even more difficult to sit and do nothing!"   
 
Within the next few days the second stage of the project will take place – the stage of mobilizing host families. A host family is a family that becomes an emotional anchor for a residential group home. The host family volunteers to host at their home children who live in residential group care, who, for various reasons, are temporarily or permanently unable to go to home to their biological family on weekends and holidays.

These children are generally hosted every other weekend and on holidays at the host family's home, but the frequency of visits is flexible and changes according to the circumstances and needs of the children. During the next few weeks "Fair Chance for Children" will hold three conferences in various regions around the country, and will invite those volunteers who registered at the Ynet website and expressed an interest in hosting children. 
 
More details here: http://www.ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-3638815,00.html