2019 begins our 28th year of ministry. Our Executive Director and Founder, Larry McDaniel, reflects on where we’ve come from and where we are going:
On a Friday evening, April 12, 1991, Cathy and I sat at a little kitchen table and committed everything we had or hoped to be to the work and ministry of Coyote Hill Foster Care Ministries. In some ways, as happens when things grow, Coyote Hill Foster Care Ministries in Harrisburg, Missouri has changed a lot since then.
We’ve changed as individuals. We have grown as a staff and as a board. We have changed location. We’ve even changed in some of the ways we carry out our mission. Yet the foundational concepts upon which this ministry was birthed remain very much in place. In these fundamental and important ways, we haven’t changed at all.
A couple of Coyote Hill Foster Care Ministries’s first “kids” – Calvin Temple and Anna McDaniel
The following are some of the foundational blocks upon which Coyote Hill Foster Care Ministries was founded and which will continue to remain constant in our future:
- From my very earliest memories of this ministry, I believed and said to everyone I knew that Coyote Hill Foster Care Ministries was not to be just another place of maintenance, but a place of professional ministry. Coyote Hill Foster Care Ministries was to be a place where we would marry the concept of Christian ministry and professional services, believing that either one by itself would fall short of what we were called to be.
- There has always been a firm belief that everything invested in the life of a child today is going to have an eternally significant return on investment for generations to come. That child will be able to contribute all the truth they learn to their own marriage and family in the years to come, as well as to their own work place, school, church, civic group, and community at large. We believe and are mindful of the charge to break down the vicious cycles of abuse and neglect and in their place build cycles of success.
- I believe there is room at the top for children in foster care who have been abused, neglected and oppressed. They just need the chance, the opportunity, the support…someone who really believes in them and tells them it’s okay for them to succeed. They don’t have to fail. They don’t have to live under the oppression into which they were born. In fact, they can be as great as any of us…hopefully better.
Coyote Hill Foster Care Ministries will continue to make an eternally significant difference in the lives of generations to come by making an every day difference in the lives of abused and neglected children. Your support is helping to make a difference in the future, in addition to the here and now in the life of a child. As we hold fast to our foundational beliefs and look forward to the future, our hope and prayer is that you and many others will join us on this journey.
~~Larry McDaniel, Founder and Executive Director
Related Stories View All
