Our Mission:
Neighbors helping neighbors—ensuring children and families in the child welfare system are seen, supported, and not alone. We connect neighbors with one another in practical, compassionate ways so that families are strengthened, children are cared for, and communities flourish.
Our Story:
Plesion was born out of a simple but powerful question: “Who is my neighbor?” Our founder saw children and families in the child welfare system carrying heavy burdens without enough support. At the same time, countless neighbors wanted to help but didn’t know how. Plesion became the bridge—linking the two. What started as a handful of people meeting urgent needs has grown into a movement of neighbors walking alongside families with dignity and care.
Core Values:
- Neighboring Well – Choosing compassion and presence over distance and indifference.
- Dignity for All – Honoring the worth of every child and every parent.
- Shared Abundance – Believing that when we share what we have, there is more than enough.
- Community Over Isolation – No family should have to walk alone.
Our Vision:
We envision a community where children and families in crisis are met with immediate compassion and lasting support. A place where neighbors step toward one another, resources flow freely, and no child is ever unseen. Our future is one where the answer to “Who is my neighbor?” is lived out boldly—until every family has more than enough.
Kindness in Action
Turning care into tangible support.
Plesion exists to support children, teens, and families who are receiving services from the local child welfare system. In particular, we serve the following three groups:
- Youth and their biological parents who are receiving services from the local child welfare system due to factors related to poverty. The children are at risk of being placed into foster care if their parents are unable to meet their basic needs. Many of these families are dealing with issues such as generational poverty, housing insecurity, homelessness, a history of trauma in the parents’ own lives, lack of transportation, and lack of support from relatives and friends.
- Youth who are living with relatives or close friends because their parents have been unable to care for them. These families are known as kinship families. By taking on the responsibility of raising the children, the kinship parents are instrumental in keeping the children from having to placed with unfamiliar foster families; however, many of the kinship families find themselves struggling financially to cover the additional expenses that they are incurring—for food, clothing, hygiene products, and other basic necessities for the children.
- Teens and young adults who are in the foster care system but do not have the support of a birth family, a kinship family, or a foster family. There are many teens who are in shelters, group homes, or independent living programs. These teens are faced with having to take on adult responsibilities at a young age because they do not have parental figures in their lives to care for them in the ways that would be ideal.