Turning awareness into a meaningful next step.
The Forgotten Initiative helps churches support the foster care community. I joined as a Creative Content Producer and grew into the Communications Director role, leading strategy while staying close to the work across podcasts, video, campaigns, fundraising, email, social, and the web.
TFI was growing. The opportunity was to build a stronger communications system around a complex, emotionally sensitive mission, helping people feel seen, understand their part, and know how to respond.
Total downloads during my tenure
We Have Forgotten the Foster Care Community brings the mission into focus through a public-facing story of awareness, urgency, and response.
Built content people could return to.
I recorded and edited episodes, created promotional assets, supported distribution, and helped launch podcast brands and content pathways. The work included The Forgotten Podcast, Just Neighbors, and the material that kept an episode useful beyond its publish date.
The Forgotten Podcast surpassed one million total downloads during my tenure, the strongest verified audience signal from this body of work.
Make people feel seen, help them understand, and give them a meaningful way to respond.
Awareness had to lead somewhere.
A moving story could create attention, but the communication still needed to guide action for churches, Advocates, donors, foster parents, agency workers, and staff.
That idea connected individual deliverables into a larger system, from a podcast episode or launch video to the email, social post, web page, resource, and next step that followed.
A resource built to move with the conversation.
Foster Care & The Church became a four-part video resource supported by a participant guide, promotional assets, event materials, and a clear path toward local engagement.
The progression mattered: understand foster care, connect belief to action, see the foster care community as neighbors, and identify a next step.
Sensitive stories required more than a camera.
For a Kentucky production, I coordinated interviews with a pastor from Florence Baptist Church and planned two days of filming inside the church. That meant aligning schedules, learning the ministry context, identifying the right interviews, and capturing material for multiple deliverables.
Stories involving children, families, trauma, agencies, and caseworkers had to be emotionally honest without becoming exploitative. The work had to help people feel seen, not used.
The role grew with the system.
As Communications Director, I worked with leadership and donor development on year-end giving, Giving Tuesday, recurring-giving communication, event promotion, donor email, social, and video. I also managed direct reports and contractors, created briefs, reviewed creative work, and coordinated deadlines.
The work was deeply collaborative, involving Jami Kaeb, executive leadership, staff, podcast guests, TFI Advocates, churches, foster care agencies, and people throughout the foster care community.
I can direct the system and still personally make the work.
What I would change now
I would establish stronger measurement from the beginning: documented baselines, campaign-specific conversion goals, consistent link tracking, clearer attribution, and a central archive of finished assets and results.