Running Toward

South TX Alliance for Orphans
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Running Toward tells the stories of ordinary people who couldn’t look away once they saw the hidden crisis in foster care and family. Each episode features honest, unfiltered stories from ordinary people who couldn’t look away once they saw the hidden crisis impacting children and families in their own communities. People living normal lives who took imperfect, often reluctant steps toward brokenness — and were changed by it. This is not a podcast about quick fixes or heroic solutions. It’s about the long, costly, deeply human work of preventing family fracture and supporting families.

  1. 1 day ago

    I Just Wanted To Be A Grandma | Denise

    Denise became a relative caregiver the way most grandparents do — with a phone call she never expected. Over the years she took in four grandchildren born into crisis, including a grandson who weighed just 10 pounds at eight months old and was later found to have esophageal atresia — born without an esophagus. She navigated CPS "safety plans" that dragged on for years without legal custody, a case that was quietly closed without her knowledge, and the day she was denied entry to her own grandson's hospital surgery because she still had no legal rights. Now Denise works alongside Texas Grandparents Raising Grandchildren, helping other relative caregivers avoid the same painful gaps she fell through — because, as she puts it, the need doesn't change based on which door a child walks through. Thanks for watching! Follow South Texas Alliance for Orphans: 📲 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/southtxalliance4orphans/ 📘 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SouthTexasAllianceForOrphans 🎙️ Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5OW7JlcWOlbs9Ms4BQcdeI?si=0416b37dd53540c8 🌐 Learn more about fostering & adoption: https://www.southtxalliance4orphans.org If today's story moved you — share it with someone who needs to hear it. And if you've ever thought about fostering, even just once, let that thought be the start of something. 🤍 — Running Toward Podcast is brought to you by the South Texas Alliance for Orphans — real stories from real families walking the road ahead of you.

  2. 6 days ago

    Locked Door, On the Floor | Samantha

    Samantha never planned on foster care — it wasn't even on her radar until her husband Ryan stumbled across a website and discovered how badly foster families were needed. What started as a backup plan to grow their family turned into something far bigger: a six-week-old baby girl whose grandmother's love reshaped Samantha's assumptions, a birth mom who watched from a distance as Samantha carried her newborn out of the hospital, and a season so chaotic she locked herself and three kids in a nursery just to survive the day. Samantha opens up about the children who passed through her home before her family found its permanent shape, the fear and joy of an autism diagnosis, and the moment she stopped trying to control the outcome and started trusting God one day at a time. Thanks for watching!Follow South Texas Alliance for Orphans:📲 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/southtxalliance4orphans/📘 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SouthTexasAllianceForOrphans🎙️ Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5OW7JlcWOlbs9Ms4BQcdeI?si=0416b37dd53540c8🌐 Learn more about fostering & adoption: https://www.southtxalliance4orphans.orgIf today's story moved you — share it with someone who needs to hear it. And if you've ever thought about fostering, even just once, let that thought be the start of something. 🤍Running Toward Podcast is brought to you by the South Texas Alliance for Orphans — real stories from real families walking the road ahead of you.Be sure to like, subscribe, and share this episode. We'll see you next week. 🤍

  3. 26 Aug

    Spiritual Warfare in Foster Care | Mike Kraft

    Mike Kraft and his wife Ariel have been fostering and adopting for nine years — long enough to learn that when the gavel drops, the story doesn't end, it just gets harder to explain. Mike, a pastor and part of the South Texas Alliance for Orphans, opens up about the day one of his kids went into a full meltdown three hours before their scheduled baptism, hurling a metal truck at his head — and the gut-check that came with baptizing them anyway. He talks candidly about the CPS investigation triggered by an angry birth mom, the night his son coded twice in the hospital while reunification was still on the table, and a barbecue-table conversation where his young son asked point-blank whether his birth mom "made mistakes, or did it on purpose." It's an honest, unfiltered look at nature, nurture, trauma, and the spiritual battle Mike believes every foster and adoptive family is fighting — whether they realize it or not. Thanks for watching!Follow South Texas Alliance for Orphans:📲 Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/southtxalliance4orphans/ 📘 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SouthTexasAllianceForOrphans🎙️ Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5OW7JlcWOlbs9Ms4BQcdeI?si=0416b37dd53540c8 🌐 Learn more about fostering & adoption: https://www.southtxalliance4orphans.org If today's story moved you — share it with someone who needs to hear it. And if you've ever thought about fostering, even just once, let that thought be the start of something. Running Toward Podcast is brought to you by the South Texas Alliance for Orphans — real stories from real families walking the road ahead of you.

  4. 19 Aug

    Raising 5 Grandkids in Retirement | Mercedes

    Welcome to the Running Toward Podcast! Today we sit down with Mercedes Bristol — founder and Executive Director of Texas Grandparents Raising Grandchildren — a woman who went from planning a vacation to Alaska to raising five grandkids in under a year, with no beds, no benefits, and no roadmap. At 57, she got the first phone call. Three months later she had her grandson back from foster care. Six months after that, four more grandchildren arrived. CPS put them in her lap and left. No one told her about the McKinney-Vento Act, no one mentioned the resources that existed, and when she went to her church for help, they prayed for her — and nobody showed up. So she built something. She went to the Texas Legislature and helped change state law for kinship families. And she did all of it while raising kids who carried wounds she was still learning to name. This week, one of her grandsons held a dying kitten in his lap and said, "Everything I love leaves me." She's still walking through that one. Hope you enjoy. Thanks for watching! Follow South Texas Alliance for Orphans:📲 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/southtxalliance4orphans/ 📘 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SouthTexasAllianceForOrphans 🎙️ Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5OW7JlcWOlbs9Ms4BQcdeI?si=0416b37dd53540c8 🌐 Learn more about fostering & adoption: https://www.southtxalliance4orphans.org Find Texas Grandparents Raising Grandchildren: 🌐 www.texasgrg.com 📲 Facebook & Instagram: @TexasGRG If today's story moved you — share it with a grandparent who's doing this alone. And if you've ever thought about fostering or kinship, let that thought be the start of something. 🤍

  5. 12 Aug

    Came with 4, Left with 8. | Kizzie

    Welcome to the Running Toward Podcast! Today we sit down with Kizzie — a kinship caregiver who said yes before she even thought about the logistics. She'd spent time on the supervised visits side of foster care, sneaking snacks into a little bag because the rules said she couldn't help, and staying past the cutoff for parents who never showed. Then her pastor called all the women together after Sunday service and asked if anyone could take four kids from a family in their church. Kizzie talked to her husband. He said yeah. They drove home with four boys in a car that didn't fit all of them — no beds, no plan, no idea they'd just signed up for a six-month kinship placement that would include a "Truth Hour" family meeting, a neighborhood trash collection business, a secret adoption countdown, and a goodbye nobody was ready for. She still calls them her kids. Thanks for watching! Follow South Texas Alliance for Orphans: 📲 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/southtxalliance4orphans/ 📘 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SouthTexasAllianceForOrphans 🌐 Learn more about fostering & adoption: https://www.southtxalliance4orphans.org If today's story moved you — share it with someone who needs to hear it. And if you've ever thought about fostering, even just once, let that thought be the start of something.

  6. 5 Aug

    We Said Two Nights | Josh

    Welcome to the Running Toward Podcast! Today we sit down with Josh Arrington — nearly 30-year career pastor, STAO board member, and a man who got thrown into kinship care in the last way he ever expected. His oldest son — the prodigal — had been living in a storage shed on a girl's parents' property. Late on a Friday night, Josh gets the call: I've got nowhere to go, can I come? And then: she can't stay either. And then: oh by the way, Dad. She's pregnant. But we already have an abortion scheduled. Josh went upstairs and laid on the floor and wept. By Sunday morning, they were asking if they could keep the baby and stay. He said yes before he even talked to his wife. That "yes" set off a chain that included a girl who said no one had ever had a real conversation with her, a doctor's appointment where she "couldn't find her keys" (they were in her pocket the whole time), a wife's brain tumor surgery with a five-year recovery, COVID, a career shift out of vocational ministry, an accidentally planted church, and a five-year-old grandson named Dylan who calls him Papa. No regrets. But God.

  7. 29 Jul

    Three Car Seats and a Long Yes | Melody

    Welcome to the Running Toward Podcast! Today we sit down with Melody — a board member of the South Texas Alliance for Orphans who has been in the foster care world longer than most, and not by choice. When Melody was 14, her mom asked what she thought about bringing home a baby with serious medical needs — a little girl who had nowhere to go. When she was 21, her mom was killed in a car accident, and Melody moved back home and became mom to her seven-year-old sister. When her stepsister came back to San Antonio struggling, Melody took her and her two-year-old nephew in. Then she went on vacation, came back to an empty house, and found out her sister was in jail and her nephew was at the children's shelter. What followed was a year of kinship care, a safety plan, a farewell party, and a goodbye she didn't fully expect to feel as hard as it did. And after all of that — she still wasn't done. Thirty years of saying yes. Hope you enjoy. Thanks for watching!Follow South Texas Alliance for Orphans:📲 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/southtxalliance4orphans/📘 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SouthTexasAllianceForOrphans🎙️ Learn more about fostering & adoption: https://www.southtxalliance4orphans.org

  8. 22 Jul

    The Yes We Could Actually Carry | Lisette

    Welcome to the Running Toward Podcast! Today we sit down with Lisette — a NICU nurse, school employee, wife to Nino, and mom of three. Lisette's story didn't start with a calling to foster care. It started with postpartum depression, a chronic illness diagnosis, and a quiet grief over the big biological family she always imagined. But God kept planting seeds — through a coworker, a single woman fostering alone, a virtual adoption in a school conference room, and eventually a three-day-old baby who became forever theirs. She opens up about the fears she and her husband had going in, the moment she realized NICU trauma was real, why they switched churches before getting licensed, and what she sees now when she looks at a homeless person on a street corner. Hope you enjoy! Thanks for watching!Follow South Texas Alliance for Orphans:📲 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/southtxalliance4orphans/📘 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SouthTexasAllianceForOrphans🌐 Learn more about fostering & adoption: https://www.southtxalliance4orphans.orgIf today's story moved you — share it with someone who needs to hear it. And if you've ever thought about fostering, even just once, let that thought be the start of something. 🤍

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About

Running Toward tells the stories of ordinary people who couldn’t look away once they saw the hidden crisis in foster care and family. Each episode features honest, unfiltered stories from ordinary people who couldn’t look away once they saw the hidden crisis impacting children and families in their own communities. People living normal lives who took imperfect, often reluctant steps toward brokenness — and were changed by it. This is not a podcast about quick fixes or heroic solutions. It’s about the long, costly, deeply human work of preventing family fracture and supporting families.

Information

  • Creator
    South TX Alliance for Orphans
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    35
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © South TX Alliance for Orphans
  • Show Website
    Running Toward