25 Weeks of Gratitude: Restoring Hope, Reuniting a Family

Sarah Lehr

Today, Jermaine Smith is doing what he loves best: being a hands-on dad to his two young daughters.

But not long ago, Jermaine was fighting for the chance to tuck them in at night, hear their voices in his home and rebuild the life that had been taken from them.

After a family crisis led to his daughters, now 6 and 2, entering foster care, Jermaine found himself in a court process that required him to meet a long list of expectations before they could come home. For nine months, he saw his daughters just once a week for four hours, often right before he had to go to work.

“I’d go to work, but then when I came home, I knew they were not going to be there.”

Still, he never lost sight of the goal.

“I was just like, I gotta do it. No way around it. I love my girls.”

That determination, paired with support from 100 Families of Independence County, helped Jermaine work through the steps required to reunite with his children.

100 Families is an initiative of Restore Hope, which serves families through a coordinated, community-wide approach. Participants enter the program with different goals and needs, and the program helps meet those needs by connecting families with the right community resources.

For Jermaine, that meant support as he worked through the requirements of his case plan. He needed reliable transportation, stable housing and important documents, including his birth certificate and identification. He had already been working for years and was determined to provide a safe home for his daughters, but 100 Families helped connect him with resources and gave him a place to turn when he needed support.

“I knew I could come to them,” he said. “It feels good to know that people care.”

The process was not easy. Jermaine had to attend court hearings, make visits, secure housing, maintain his job and stay focused despite emotional setbacks. Over time, his visits with his daughters increased from supervised visits at the office to home visits to weekend getaways. Eventually, after a home trial and a final court date, Jermaine received full custody of both girls.

Jennifer Rogers, Independence County coordinator for 100 Families, said that while the organization provides support, participants like Jermaine do the hard work themselves. She watched him stay committed to his daughters through every obstacle.

“He did what he needed to,” Jennifer said. “His girls are his number one.”

Fulfilling a Need

That kind of support is exactly what 100 Families was created to provide. According to Karen Phillips, chief operations officer for Restore Hope, the organization exists to help communities solve complex problems through a collective impact model. Rather than addressing one issue in isolation, Restore Hope helps communities build local alliances that look at the full picture of a family’s needs.

Karen said families are assessed across 13 areas of social determinants of health, including housing, employment, transportation, childcare, mental health, recovery, physical health, food security and legal issues. From there, a plan is built around the family’s needs and strengths.

“The full picture” matters, Karen explained, because families in crisis often need more than one kind of help. A family may come in asking for transportation, but the deeper need may also include housing stability, employment support, food security or access to childcare. Restore Hope’s model is designed to identify those needs, sequence the right help and connect families to real people in the community who can work together on their behalf.

On average, Karen said, each person’s support team in Arkansas includes about 10 providers from different organizations and sectors. The team is developed based on the assessment and action plan, and the model focuses on connecting families to people, not just organizations, because people are the ones who communicate, build trust and help move families forward.

Restore Hope began in 2016 in response to the growing prison population and rising foster care numbers in Arkansas. Its mission was to reduce the need for foster care and incarceration. In 2018, the organization began putting the model into practice in Sebastian County, where the need was especially high. The idea was to serve 100 families in a new, collaborative way and see whether the approach worked.

But Restore Hope grew well beyond 100 families, spreading throughout Arkansas and beyond.

Today, Restore Hope serves families in 19 Arkansas counties and will expand to 43 counties by the end of 2026. In the last year, 4,601 participants have been served in Arkansas, with 1,069 moving from crisis to career.

Foundation Support

The Blue & You Foundation for a Healthier Arkansas helped make that growth possible in key communities. The grant from the Foundation provided the initial investment needed to get 100 Families started in Jefferson, Mississippi and Independence counties.

“We were able to start in these communities because of the funding from the Blue & You Foundation,” Karen said. “We were able to do the initial investment in these communities to get them started.”

In Independence County, where Jermaine was connected to support, 156 families have been served in the last year. Karen said the community saw increases in full-time employment, housing security and stability among families served through the model.

But the impact of the Blue & You Foundation went beyond the grant. Karen said the funding helped launch local alliances and brought attention to their work. It strengthened Restore Hope’s ability to build influence, trust and relationships in the communities. In collective impact work, she said, influence matters because organizations are being asked to look beyond their own day-to-day work and collaborate in a deeper way.

“Influence is very important,” Karen said, “because it’s basically all you have: influence, trust and relationships.”

Participants can remain enrolled in 100 Families as long as they want, re-enroll if needed, or stay connected to the community for support. For Jennifer, Jermaine’s story is a reminder of why the work matters.

“To see somebody just keep pushing through and pushing through, it really is just such a rewarding thing to see that come full circle,” she said. “It’s good to just be a little part of that, because it’s them doing all the work. We’re just here for the support.”

In celebration of the 25th anniversary of the Blue & You Foundation, 25 Weeks of Gratitude spotlights 25 stories of Arkansans whose lives have been impacted by Foundation-funded work.

*The Blue & You Foundation was established in 2001 through an initial gift from Arkansas Blue Cross and Blue Shield. Since its inception, the Foundation’s financial base has grown through wise and prudent investment strategies. This has enabled the foundation to support its mission by making grants funded by the interest earned on those investments.