KC-area foster care nonprofit reeling after $1.3M in cuts: ‘Most devastating year’
Financial cuts in Kansas and Missouri have one local child welfare agency, which helps kids in foster care and those who have been adopted, struggling to shoulder the impact.
FosterAdopt Connect, which services thousands of families in both states, has had $1.3 million in cuts for this fiscal year, leaders at the nonprofit said. They fear that children and families will suffer from what the organization is calling the most devastating year in its existence.
“We’re going to do more with less as we always do,” said Josh Hollingsworth, chief advancement officer at FosterAdopt Connect. “With reduction in funding come reductions in service. … it’s so fresh we don’t know how many youth are going to be affected.”
But the impacts have already been severe.
In recent days, the nonprofit laid off 15 workers across both states and scaled back services in some areas.
Included in the cuts, the nonprofit said, was Missouri’s decision to not renew FosterAdopt Connect’s funding for Behavioral Intervention expansion. The BI expansion money allowed the nonprofit to start up programs in rural parts of the state where a behavioral intervention specialist could go into a home and help a family with a child who has endured trauma.
“Without those dollars, this year kids and families in some of those areas will lose access to our in-home Behavioral Interventionist Services,” Lori Ross, a founder and CEO of FosterAdopt Connect, said in an email. “This will be devastating for their families and may cause them to seek treatment for their children’s severe emotional/behavioral issues outside of their homes, resulting in more dollars spent and more trauma for their kids.”
In addition to the total cuts to BI, which FosterAdopt Connect said totaled nearly $550,000, the nonprofit said its $500,000 Family Stabilization grant in Kansas wasn’t renewed. And when Missouri Gov. Mike Kehoe vetoed funding for Family Resource Centers, FAC lost another $250,000 in funding.
“It’s just a lot of small things,” Hollingsworth said. “They are smaller contracts that add up to big dollars. And as a non profit agency, we can only absorb so much of that before we have to reduce services.”
Ross said the nonprofit has suffered cuts in previous years, “but generally just smaller percentage reductions across the board.”
“Not cuts that directly affect programs and our ability to serve clients,” Ross said. “This is the most devastating year we’ve had in our entire 25-year history.”
Inside the cuts
Early last month, Kehoe, Missouri’s governor, signed the state’s $50.8 billion budget for the next fiscal year. But the Republican governor also slashed or restricted $511 million for projects approved by lawmakers, including $250,000 that would have gone to FosterAdopt Connect.
The staggering cuts affected a wide range of organizations across the Kansas City area that are now scrambling to make up lost funding. Kehoe, in defense of his decision last month, cited a need to curb spending ahead of a looming budget shortfall, a tax cut enacted by his own administration and an increase in public school funding.
The Republican governor’s cut to FosterAdopt Connect was part of a broader decision to axe $750,000 that would have gone to foster and adoptive care-based nonprofits called Family Resource Centers or FRC. Locations in Jefferson City and St. Louis County also lost funding.
“While this may be worthwhile project, due to the aforementioned reasons, we must control new spending and cannot prudently justify this expenditure at this time,” Kehoe wrote in a letter explaining the $750,000 cut to the resource centers, including FosterAdopt Connect.
A Kehoe spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment on this story.
The organization is headquartered in the district of Missouri state Rep. Aaron Crossley, an Independence Democrat. Crossley, a social worker by trade, also serves on the budget-writing committee in the Missouri House.
Crossley, who toured the organization’s headquarters last year, called the budget cuts “shameful.”
“A lot of folks in the legislature like to talk a big game about working for families and working for children, working to protect them,” he said. “But this is just another example of the people in charge in Jeff City not valuing children and families.”
Before serving in the state Capitol, Missouri state Rep. Keri Ingle worked in child welfare as the adoption specialist for the Jackson County Children’s Division. Ingle said she was furious about cuts to the organization.
“These are Missouri’s kids and they’re the most vulnerable, disenfranchised group of children in the state and it is our responsibility to make sure that they have everything they need to be successful, to have happy, healthy lives growing up,” said Ingle, a Lee’s Summit Democrat running for state Senate. “They are our responsibility and we are failing them.”
But at least one state lawmaker said she had questions about the organization’s argument that they had to cut services and employees due to budget cuts. She specifically pointed to Kehoe’s veto of funding for the Family Resource Centers.
“I’m shocked that they’re saying that the veto that was made in Missouri would result in termination of employees, because one-time funding is by definition not for full time employees or core services,” said Missouri state Sen. Mary Elizabeth Coleman, an Arnold Republican. “Those are for extraordinary expenses to build out new things.”
Coleman was speaking about Kehoe’s veto and said she didn’t have details about the decision to not renew FosterAdopt Connect’s funding for Behavioral Intervention expansion, saying that was likely an administrative decision.
The intention of the money for Family Resource Centers — which FAC was set to get $250,000 — was to be a permanent allocation, Ross said. So was the money for BI expansion. But that’s not how it ultimately was labeled in the budget, she said.
“It was in as one-time only funding,” Ross said. “But when we were working with the lobbyists to get the money put in, and the legislators that helped get the money put in, that was nobody’s intention for it to be one-time only funding.
“Whatever happened in the budget process, it came out with a label of one-time only funding. But none of us expected that to be the case. We expected it to be put in as ongoing funding as of this year. And instead, it all came out. “
‘Tilt point for us’
Leaders inside FosterAdopt Connect said they paid close attention to potential cuts at the federal level but didn’t anticipate seeing an impact until the next fiscal year.
Then, during the Missouri legislative session, they started to see that some funding could be at risk. But, Ross said, they didn’t “realize the extent until the budget bill was finalized.
“We had begun having strategy conversations around how to absorb the cuts with the least interruption in services for kids/families and the idea of reducing our staff through attrition,” she said. However, when Kehoe vetoed the $750,000 for Family Resource Centers, “it was a tilt point for us.”
“Having to lay off people who have done nothing wrong, because of senseless things that are beyond your control, is one of the worst experiences you can have as a leader,” Ross said. “We are worse off as an organization without their talents and energy.”
And it’s not just about job losses, Hollingsworth said in a news release about the cuts.
“It’s about the children, youth and families who will no longer have access to support systems that help them heal, grow, and stay safely with their families,” Hollingsworth said.
On the Kansas side, FosterAdopt Connect’s $500,000 grant for family stabilization was funded by the State General Fund (SGF).
“This grant expired in fiscal year 2025 as FosterAdopt Connect can now bill the Children’s Behavioral Interventionist service through Medicaid if the youth receives insurance through Medicaid,” said Erin LaRow, a spokesperson with the Department for Children and Families.
The nonprofit is “seeking to restore the $500,000 in SGF for children who are not Medicaid eligible to receive children behavioral interventionist services,” LaRow said. “DCF is receiving budget information and feedback on program budgets through stakeholder meetings.”
FosterAdopt Connect leaders now hope people contact state and federal legislators and push for the “restoration and protection” of funding for all family-centered services.
“Our hope is that by telling our story, we may also encourage people who care about the children we serve to reach out to those who are elected to represent us to ask them to work hard to preserve the funding that supports abused and neglected children,” Ross said, “and the services they and their families need.
“We’ll need every voice we can muster so that we can try to prevent further harm as a result of more cuts over the next year.”
This story was originally published August 6, 2025 at 6:00 AM.
