About Be the Source
Our Mission
To promote healing for children and families impacted by foster and kinship care through meaningful, transformational resources, community and support.
Our Vision
Children and youth finding hope and healing through equipped, attuned caregivers.
Our Goals
- Allow children in out of home care to begin to heal by assuring that they receive the best possible therapeutic parenting.
- Stabilize out of home placements by investing in caregiver support, ensuring that children remain in the best placement whenever possible.
- Reduce caregiver turnover by addressing the root causes of burnout, including a lack of support, training, and resources.
- Enhance public understanding of the child welfare system and the challenges caregivers and children face.
Our Why
Children deserve to heal.
Child welfare is grossly misunderstood, under-resourced and devalued. Stereotypes of old school foster parents “doing it for the money” are harmful and wrong.
Families are struggling, and support services are lacking. Children are lingering in out of home care far too long. Child welfare is on the verge of doing more harm than good.
It’s time to support all families, reunify children when possible and support lasting and therapeutic permanency when reunification isn’t possible.
Our Story
Founded as a grassroots initiative in 2016 by former foster parents and current adoptive parents, Renee and Brian Bernhard, “Foster Source” was created to address critical gaps in support for both caregivers and the vulnerable children in their care. In response to the 2018 passage of the Family First Prevention Services Act, Foster Source expanded its programs to better support kinship caregivers in addition to foster parents. With the full implementation of the Act in 2022, the organization became one of the few agencies in the state of Colorado to offer dual support for both children and their caregivers in the child welfare system. In 2025, Foster Source began rebranding to “Be the Source” to reflect its expanded mission and the variety of families it now serves.
Today, Be the Source is committed to turning the focus back to the children, ensuring they receive the care and stability they deserve. The agency is focused on addressing needs including: under-resourced caregivers; lack of lived-experience voices in local, state and federal policy decisions; overall lack of understanding about the purpose of out-of-home care; mental health and wellbeing of caregivers and children; stability for children in care; and reducing or removing the barriers and lack of resources that child welfare families face.
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