Kinship Center offers resources — and hope.

When a nonprofit that provided key resources to homeless and abandoned children closed its doors in Monterey County, Carol Bishop stepped up and founded the Kinship Center to fill the void.

“We started primarily as an adoption center and grew based on community needs,” Bishop says. “We’ve grown as the community has allowed us to grow.”

It’s been 30 years now since the nonprofit started, with a plethora of resources offered to help newly formed families transition into their lives together. Whether furnishing mental health counseling for children or support groups for caregivers, the nonprofit takes families by the hand throughout the journey of adoption.

“Things don’t end when people go to court and finalize the adoption process,” Kinship Center’s Acting Executive Director Picha Watkins says.

For Lisa Morales, and her adoptive son, Mario, the Kinship Center was her family’s “very own miracle.”

Morales says her son had acted out since he was a toddler as a way expressing his troubled past. After numerous failed counseling sessions with different therapists, she went to the Kinship Center, where the focus was not just on Mario’s troubles, but on teaching each family member how to understand him and deal with him.

“The biggest thing they gave me was a feeling that I was not alone – you become isolated because you think people don’t understand,” Morales says. “[Kinship Center] was a healing force for our family.”

Just as the Morales family benefited from those services, Bishop estimates that every year about 1,500 Monterey County kids – most of them in foster care – do too.

“Once a family is connected to kinship Center we don’t lose that touch, we are here for the families forever,” Bishop says.

The strong support system Kinship offers is what gave Morales hope that Mario would thrive, despite people telling her he would never graduate high school and that she should give up on him.

Morales says that not only did Kinship help the family, but gave Mario hope.

“He in his own mind thought he was a hopeless case – they reinstated hope in himself,” she says.

Mario is now a high school graduate and working toward being a firefighter – just like his dad.

“If you think you can’t love that child, don’t give up because it’s possible for that child to change – but you can’t do it alone,” Morales says.