We created Fostering the Connection to help families, professionals, organizations, churches, and communities better understand foster care and trauma, strengthen the way they support others, and turn compassion into meaningful action.
Our friendship has taught us that connection is not built through one grand gesture. It is created through trust, consistency, honesty, and the willingness to stay present. Those same values guide everything we do.
Together, we bring complementary strengths, a shared commitment to serving others, and decades of combined experience in nonprofit leadership, foster care advocacy, program development, community engagement, education, events, communications, and relationship building.
For more than 26 years, we have walked through life side by side as best friends. Through changing seasons, growing families, personal challenges, and professional milestones, one thing has remained constant: our belief in the power of showing up for people.
Fostering the Connection grew from that shared belief.
After years of working together to support children, youth, caregivers, and families experiencing foster care, we saw the need for something broader: a place where lived experience, professional knowledge, honest conversation, and practical tools could come together.
Meet the Founders: Nicole Hanks &
Camille Maara
Experience That Is Personal, Practical, and Proven.
