ABOUT US
Our Vision & Mission
Life Ranch exists to create communities through family structure and mentorship to effectively impact the least of these in our foster care system. We orchestrate a loving, safe, and holistic PLACE that shows foster kids the love of Christ through PLACEMENT with gospel-centered families and mentors.
Core Values: Anchored Environment, Stable Homes, and a Safe Place
Life Ranch is more than just a place; it's a community with an anchored environment, stable homes, and a safe place for children to thrive. We want Life Ranch to be a place for foster children to feel like they are home and where they belong.
Our Story
Life Ranch is deeply rooted in a history of foster care. Our founder, Jarod Jones, grew up with two sisters who were adopted out of the Colorado foster care system. To read the full story that inspired Life Ranch, click the "Our Family Story" button below.
Life Ranch's Greatest Need
Life Ranch is looking for a property with room to start and build to begin the trauma healing, to provide homes and to let the kids be kids and experience God’s creation. Life Ranch believes these kids need room and acreage to accomplish healing and a rural agricultural setting to gain ground in this mission. We want to steward our property and use what God has given to restore and give young men and women an anchor to be faithful, hard-working, grace-filled citizens of our great country. With society becoming busier and more contained, Life Ranch will use our property acres to build houses for the homeless parentless epidemic facing these foster kids. Life Ranch acres and infrastructure will create a space for healing to happen.
Foster Care's Greatest Need
When Life Ranch asked the question “What is the greatest need in Georgia’s foster care right now” of people and organizations who have been in the foster care space in this state for a long time, almost immediately and verbatim the answer was “sibling groups”. So that is where Life Ranch will start, we will start with the biggest need. Life Ranch wants to create a PLACE with five sibling group homes in 5 years. Once Life Ranch obtains the property God has in store for us we will begin a 5-year development plan for five homes to meet the greatest need of sibling group place. Life Ranch will no longer use the word placement but we have replaced it with Place because we are going to use a vocabulary with its roots in story not system.
Trauma Healing
Life Ranch sees trauma healing as one of the greatest needs in foster care. Trauma causes a myriad of mental health issues, citizenship issues, and in many situations, death (primarily by suicide), and comes from a number of sources. Predominantly abandonment, homelessness, and in the worst-case scenarios human trafficking. These sources of trauma can cost the state and the system upwards of $30,000 to $120,000 per kid per year. What if there was a PLACE that could circumvent the problem? What if there was a PLACE that could turn the tide and not add layers to the trauma? We believe in trauma healing at Life Ranch, a place of retreat, a place of relief, a place of reconciliation.
Creating a Community-Centric Approach
Imagine with me a community where everyone looks alike (which is rare for foster kids). And when I say looks alike that does not mean skin color, religious affiliation, or socioeconomic status. I mean a community where we look alike because of foster care, because of focused PURPOSE, because of common location, and a clear culture of providing a trauma-informed PLACE for marginalized kids. A PLACE that orchestrates loving, safe, and holistic living. Life Ranch seeks to be a place of connection, collaboration, and community. Imagine a community where success is measured in coming alongside families on the front line to serve them through community living to thrive not merely survive.
A Vision for Change
Imagine with me a church and a people with a focused purpose to support local foster families and foster kids. Families that do not need organizational wrap-around service because they live within an organism that provides all that they need. Imagine a place where each foster kid is covered in prayer, with quality clothes and nourishing food. Imagine a place where families feel connected and supported, spurred on to fulfill their God-given calling to foster kids. Imagine a property that is stewarded and managed not only by the families living there but also by their care communities that come through the local church.
The Future of Life Ranch
Life Ranch will be an aesthetically pleasing rural small farm community where foster kid siblings are at the top of the ladder. You will step into a world where foster kid sibling groups maintain and give purpose to everything done. It will be a place where the highest level of success is a foster kid growing up in a community with his/her siblings growing and being prepared and ready to re-enter home, context, and community as a contributing force to be reckoned with. Foster kids will be the reason Life Ranch exists, they will always be at the top and the “greatest of these” in our economy. We hope one day there will be no more foster kids but until that day we will be Life Ranch. These kids are not a statistic, they are not pieces of a system, they are stories, they are lives, they are God’s children and we have work to do.