Project 1.27 Recruits and Supports Foster Families Across Colorado

Project 1.27 is a Christian non-profit that started in 2004 to help connect kids in foster care with families through local churches. Over the last 20 years, it has grown into an organization that collaborates with churches across the state to recruit, train and retain foster families. Their mission is to help churches and families care for children through faith-based support, including family preservation, kinship care, foster care and adoption. Spanning the state, the organization is active in the Denver Metro area, the Western Slope and in Northern Colorado. 

“Our church engagement team reaches out to multiple churches within the community and makes connections with them. We’re not just asking people to show interest in foster care, or open up their home to kids in foster care. We’re asking: how  are you going to care for these kids who are coming from hard places? We let them decide by giving them the options of ways that they can step into serving not only the kids but the foster families as well,” said Marilyn Robinson, the Director of Family Connections at Project 1.27. Marilyn has been with the organization for the past eight years after spending 30 years working in child welfare.

Project 1.27 hosts three virtual information nights prior to the seven cohorts of training they host each year. They provide foster parent training over three weekends using the National Training and Development Curriculum (NTDC) and they welcome all families –  not just Christian families. Once certified,, Project 1.27 stays involved by offering support through case managers and family connection events.

“We say that once you’re a Project 1.27 family, you get to stay one. We reach out to our families once a month and provide support to them. That support can look like providing hard good items or connecting them with services or respite care. We also provide $50 new placement gift cards for all of our families who reach out to us and let us know they have a placement.  We also have two family events a year in two locations (Denver and Mesa County), one at Christmas, one in the summer,” said Marilyn.

In addition to the support they provide directly to families, Project 1.27 helps each family build a support team before training ends. They ask families to invite four people they trust to be part of their foster care journey. Then Project 1.27 trains their support team to help them be more trauma-informed when they are supporting the family. 

“During the training, they put them in breakout rooms and there’s a series of questions that they answer, focusing on being realistic and talking about some things that are going to change in their lives when these kids come to live with them. It’s really about preparing them and preparing the people in their lives on how they are going to bring this child in, how they’re going to love on this child, and how the team is going to help them to be successful as a foster parent,” said Marilyn. 

Project 1.27 collaborates with other faith-based bridge organizations across the country on a monthly basis to share ideas about how to best serve the foster care and adoption community. Through this information sharing, Project 1.27 decided to implement a program to provide support to social workers called the Socialite program in Mesa county. The program now serves 24 caseworkers in Mesa County.

“The goal is for this community person or this church person to reach out to the caseworker, to pray for them, to offer support for them. Letting them know that they weren’t alone out there because, having been in the field before, it’s a lonely job out there when you’re making those hard decisions. They can send notes of encouragement, phone calls, emails, texts, maybe even a little gift. It’s just a way of showing appreciation to the community,” said Marilyn. 

For the last three years Project 1.27 has hosted a Hope for the Journey conference in Northern Colorado and the Denver Metro area. The 2025 conference was just held in May and brought together families for a live streamed Trust-Based-Relational-Intervention Training with experts from Texas Christian University. The day-long training also includes opportunities for foster families to get to know each other as well as activities for children and youth. For example, there was a trauma-informed SuperHero Academy for kids aged 0-12 and an “Our Voices” teen meetup for 12-17 year olds.

“The Our Voice program was started for teens who have involvement in child welfare and is facilitated by Kia Gelinus. Kia is an adoptee herself and she was adopted by Pastor Robert Gelinas who started Project 127. Kia is now a teacher in a Denver public school and so she wants to give back. She spends a lot of time talking about how they’re adjusting and sharing about her own adoption. They spend a lot of time talking about belonging and they’re also learning to develop relationships,” said Marilyn.

Project 1.27 also oversees the Neighbor Program where volunteers provide monthly meals for kinship and foster families. In the future, Project 1.27 hopes to expand their services to support youth who are aging out of foster care,as well as uplevel assistance for kinship families.

“We talk a lot about serving foster and adoptive families, but there’s a lot of kinship families out there too that could use support. We want to be able to support them too because we all know that a well supported family, has well supported kids,” said Marilyn.