Doors Are Open: Jefferson City Family Connections Home
At Coyote Hill Foster Care Ministries, we are grateful to celebrate the opening of our new Family Connections Home in Jefferson City, a space designed to strengthen families, support reunification, and provide children with a safe, welcoming place to spend meaningful time with the people they love.
This home represents an important step forward in meeting the needs of children and families navigating foster care in our region.
Across the foster care system, there is a consistent need for stable, supportive environments where children can maintain and rebuild relationships with their biological families. Our Jefferson City Family Connections Home was created to meet that need in a more intentional and relational way.
This space also helps ease the workload of case managers by providing trained volunteers who help facilitate visits, support supervision, and maintain appropriate documentation, ensuring that families receive consistent, quality support throughout the process.
As Jefferson City Family Advocacy Manager Hannah Riggs shared, “We saw a need to partner with Children’s Division and help give some of those hours back to caseworkers.”
Every part of the space was designed to feel warm, familiar, and inviting. Families can cook meals together, share conversations around the table, and spend time in an environment that feels much more like a home than a formal visitation setting.
“Use the space as you would your own home…we make it as comfortable to a home environment as possible,” Riggs added.
The goal is to reduce pressure during visits so families can focus on what matters most: being together and rebuilding relationships.
We recognize the demands placed on caseworkers and the importance of strong support systems around each child. The Family Connections Home provides added capacity through trained volunteers who help ensure visits are consistent, safe, and well-supported.
These volunteers often become a steady presence for families—offering encouragement, care, and continuity during a season that can otherwise feel uncertain.
Our ultimate goal is reunification whenever it is safe and possible. This home was created to support that journey by giving families a consistent space to reconnect, communicate, and rebuild trust over time.
“The Jefferson City Family Connections Home provides a safe, warm, inviting, and home-like environment for biological parents and foster children to connect and continue developing healthy relationships to move toward reunification faster,” Kristin Milligan, Jefferson City Development Manager shared. “The Family Connections Home will hopefully live up to its name: connections will be made between biological and foster families and community members who volunteer.”
We believe that healing happens in relationships, and this space is designed to make those relationships easier to nurture and sustain.
This work is only possible because of the support of our community. Volunteers, partners, and donors all play a vital role in making the Family Connections Home a place where children and families can experience stability and care.
There are many ways to be involved, through volunteering, sharing about the work happening here, or investing financially in the mission. Every contribution helps strengthen families across Cole County and beyond.
As we open the doors to this new home, we do so with gratitude and hope. Gratitude for the community that made it possible and hope for the families who will walk through it in the days ahead.
Our belief remains simple: when families are supported and children are connected, stronger futures are possible.
