Can’t Buy Love, But You Can Pack It

And that would certainly be a tall order as there are currently more than 11,000 children in foster care in Missouri.

“That number right there is just staggering to me. There’s not enough foster families to take care of these kids,” Fox said. “It’s just a very broken system, so we want to get in there as much as we can and try to help fix the problem.”

Fox’s heart for foster children stemmed from an early age through her family’s experience with the foster care system.

“I have a lot of siblings, and eight of those siblings have come to our family through foster care. They’re now adopted, so they’re officially part of our family,” Fox said. “My parents did fostering for years when I was in high school and in my early teens.”

After marrying her husband Jay in 2008, the Foxes began their own family with children, Parker, age 9, Penny, age 6, and Clayton, age 4.  

“Jay and I came to a place where we were done having our own kids biologically. We had always talked about adoption or possibly fostering. We really felt that God was speaking to us about a year ago and just kind of working in our hearts and finding where He wanted us to be,” Rebecca Fox said.

The Foxes are now designated as a “safe family,” which is part of a national movement called, “Safe Families for Children,” where families volunteer to temporarily host children in critical circumstances.  

However, Fox did not want to stop there.

“I wanted to do more. I felt fostering was great and God was calling me, but that was only helping one child out at a time,” Fox said.

After a conversation with her mother expressing her desires to help children immediately instead of waiting for more approvals as she experienced as a foster parent, Fox said she found her inspiration through her mom.

“She kind of just threw some ideas out for me,” Fox said. “She said she gets her [foster] kids backpacks at the beginning of the school year that have school supplies and that kind of stuff and I said, ‘Well, that’s such a great idea.’ She’s like, ‘You know, maybe some sort of a backpack for kids because they usually don’t have anything when they come into foster care.’ That kind of gave me the idea.”

Fox continued: “I was just thinking of making backpacks myself and then delivering them just personally. Then my husband, of course, stepped in and was like, ‘We gotta think bigger. Well, why don’t we start a non-profit?’ And, that’s kinda where it started.”

Since officially starting SafePacks in May 2017, Fox speaks positively about bright outcomes.

“It just seems God is making every last little detail fall into place for us and it really hasn’t been hard. Everything has been easy, just a blessing and such an outpouring so far. It really hasn’t been that long, but God’s really working.”

SafePacks board member, Rachel DeGroot, said, “Rebecca and Jay have such a love for others. I knew as soon as she asked me that this was something I wanted to be a part of.”

Fox’s young children are hands-on with the organization, helping to deliver backpacks to the drop-off locations and carry and organize supplies as well as asking important questions about the foster children and why they are in foster care.

“I think it’s hard for kids to understand when they’re in a healthy home,” Fox said. “It’s hard for them to imagine what it’s like for a lot of kids out there where it’s not the situation or if they just have a mom, they just have a dad or kids who have been through trauma. It’s hard to explain that to kids.

“But, I feel that with us being a Safe Family, my kids have been able to see how to just be a servant and have a servant’s heart — just be the hands and feet of Christ and give things to them that we take for granted each and every day.”

Fox explained how in many foster situations, the children arrive to their Safe Families with very little, if anything, and at times nothing at all, as five of her adopted siblings experienced.