CHARLESTON, W.Va. — Over $154,000 dollars will be going to help support the welfare of children and families in need.
The $154,258 dollars was the outcome of the West Virginia Oil Marketers & Grocers Association’s (OMEGA) 15th annual “Every Child Deserves A Loving Home” Mother’s Day Campaign.
It’s OMEGA’s statewide fundraising initiative developed to help children and families in the care of the Children’s Home Society of West Virginia, a non-profit organization that provides foster care and adoption services, family support, behavioral health programs, and more.
Children’s Home Society of West Virginia CEO Mary White said these funds will be used for their efforts to find foster and and adoptive homes for children, provide assistance for emergency child shelters, and to support their resource centers.
White said these funds are crucial.
“There are just no words to describe our excitement, $154-thousand dollars goes such a long ways to help children in foster care in West Virginia, 100-percent of the funds raised will go to our foster care program,” White told MetroNews.
The campaign that spanned across multiple months featured the sale of brightly-colored paper flowers in honor of Mother’s Day at nearly 500 OMEGA convenience and grocery stores throughout the state, including Little General Stores, Inc., Go Mart, Par Mar Stores, among others.
President of OMEGA Traci Nelson said that since their relationship with the Children’s Home Society formed in 2011, they have helped raise over $1.8 million for the organization. She said OMEGA has raised over $3.6 million for charities benefiting children in West Virginia overall.
However, Nelson said that this with the Children’s Home Society has been such a longstanding partnership simply due to how close to home they truly are.
“We were doing things, we were raising money for Children’s Miracle Network, the Make a Wish Foundation, and all of those are great charities, but Children’s Home Society is local,” Nelson said. “Mary proposed to us one day and said this is what we do could you help us, and we thought, well, we’ll try it, we’ll try it with the Mother’s Day campaign, and we have been a team ever since.”
White said they hold fundraising efforts all year round to help keep their foster care program funded and going, and OMEGA helps them with those efforts all year long as well through various fundraising campaigns.
She said OMEGA’s efforts mean a lot to them.
“It’s just amazing and they do it with their heart,” White said. “There’s not a place in West Virginia where you can go to one of those convenience stores that they don’t tell you thank you for letting us help children.”
There are approximately 6,300 children in some type of foster care situation in West Virginia and nearly 1,000 children in need of adoption. White said they have a little over 200 children in their foster care program alone.
White said being a non-profit, any outside funding source they can get is crucial to them and their mission of helping displaced children find a loving home.
“The state does not fund foster care sufficiently to cover the cost for our foster families and to have staff to meet that need, so we need to fundraise to cover the cost to take care of West Virginia’s children in foster care,” she said.
White said everyday, more and more children are in need of a foster placement.
Nelson said as this is such a prevalent need locally, it’s important to help fund a local organization that helps foster children.
“There isn’t anyone in this state that isn’t effected by the foster care program, and it’s all trickled down from the drug problem in the state like it is everywhere, we have so many children in foster care or who need care in the state, Children’s Home Society takes care of these children,” Nelson said.
The Children’s Home Society was founded in 1896.