Jenn Nafsiger-Yackanech of COBYS Family Services, 1417 Oregon Road, Leola, PA 17540 makes a Life Book available for families. COBYS Family Services phone number is (800) 452-6517. Here is a letter explaining her work.

Dear Family:

COBYS Family Services is a Christian family service ministry whose mission is "to express Christ's love and concern for the physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being of people." In addition to foster care and adoption services, COBYS also offers counseling at three locations; provides family life education in partnership with church, school, and community groups; and operates a teen mother and child group home. To learn more, log on to www.cobys.net.

As an agency we place high priority on documenting a foster and adopted child's history. While out foster care and adoption programs have utilized other resources for many years, we now have developed this Life Book as a central tool to help children preserve and record important events and information about their childhood years.

Children who have fallen into the world of foster care and adoption often find themselves with little or no information about where they came from, their birth family, previous out-of-home placements, and other missing pieces of their lives. Most of us take for granted that parents and grandparents will document important events and achievements with family photo albums or scrapbooks. For many foster children, however, that is not the case. As adults involved in these children's lives, foster care and adoption workers, foster families, adoptive families, and therapists, we hold the keys to unlocking precious information for our children.

Completing a Life Book for each child who enters foster care is a gift we can and must provide. Our goal is to help children bring the pieces of their lives together so that they can have a chronology of their life, learn more about their birth family, and identify connections between their past, present, and future. To accomplish this we have divided this Life Book into five major sections: All About Me, School, Birth Family, Out-of-Home Placements, and Adoptive Home. (If you are working with children who will be reunited with their birth family, please remove the Adoptive Home section.) The beginning of each section includes a brief description of information to be documented on these pages. we recognize that obtaining some of this data will be a challenge, but hope that the majority of the information can be found.

We also have included several examples of family trees for your use. Children often are assigned projects at school, where they are asked to fill in their family tree. This exercise can be extremely difficult for foster and adopted children since their story does not fit into the "traditional" family tree. These examples may help in such situations and also can be used to help children visualize the various families and relatives who are part of their history.

Thank you for joining us on this journey as we help bring the lives of foster and adoptive children together. For additional All About Me, Birth Sibling, Foster Home, or Caseworker pages, contact us at 800-452-6517, and these pages will be mailed to you free of charge. To order Life Books, please call for an order form.

Sincerely,

COBYS Family Services