Our Mission
The mission of Equipped & Encouraged is to improve positive outcomes for children touched by the Brevard County child welfare system by strengthening and equipping foster and adoptive families through the engagement of the local church and community and the provision of peer-to-peer trauma-informed support and encouragement.
Our Vision
We envision a community where every foster and adoptive family is equipped and encouraged through holistic care, empowering children impacted by trauma to grow, heal, and flourish in abundant lives.
Our Inspiration
Bonnie Ferguson, founder and executive director of Equipped & Encouraged, has more than a decade of lived experience as a foster and adoptive parent in Brevard County. The story of the beautiful baby girl whose impact on her life created the spark that would lead to the launch of this nonprofit is one she is blessed to be part of and privileged to tell.
People often ask me why Equipped & Encouraged exists. The answer begins around our family table.
Over more than a decade, my husband and I have answered countless placement calls, welcomed children into our home, grown “too attached”, said goodbye, and answered the next call … again and again. Every single child has had an impact, but it’s one little girl’s story that ultimately led me here.
In early 2015, we welcomed a three-month-old baby girl with no special needs into our home. Within months, however, she was diagnosed with a rare condition considered "incompatible with life."
Our days quickly filled with specialists, therapies, hospital stays, and medical procedures, and she continually defied expectations, teaching us more about courage and hope than we ever thought possible. Loving her was one of the biggest blessings that I’ve ever been given.
The two and a half years we fostered baby girl, though, were some of the hardest we have ever experienced. Our church and community cared, but they struggled with knowing how to come alongside us. The demands of fostering left us overwhelmed, isolated, and unsure how to ask for help.
We often felt unseen and unheard.
That experience changed the way I viewed foster care. I began to see that the responsibility of caring for children in foster care shouldn't just fall on those who are called to be foster parents. I also saw how essential it is for children to be placed in stable, well-equipped, and encouraged families.
The heart's desire of foster and adoptive parents is for the children they've been entrusted with to have the best possible futures, but fostering is hard, and raising children who have experienced trauma is hard.
Foster and adoptive families need a strong network of support to equip and encourage them, and it's the local church and community who are uniquely poised to fill that need. The difficult part is really knowing how to support these families.
That's where E&E steps in ... to bridge the gap between the local church and community and the foster and adoptive families who need them.
My prayer is that together we can create such a huge network of support that no foster parent in our county will ever feel unseen or unheard.
Meet the Fergusons
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