Heart Gallery

The Heart Gallery is a community engagement initiative that uses professional portraits displayed at various locations in the community, such as local businesses and restaurants, libraries, or places of worship, combined with weekly local news segments to connect families interested in adoption with children in the care of Child Protective Services that seek relational permanency.  

Please click on the map below to find information on other Heart Galleries throughout Texas.

Improving Adoption Recruitment

The Texas Center for Child and Family Studies and Partnerships for Children worked together to create a comprehensive review of Texas’ adoption recruitment methods and to offer some interesting recommendations for improvement. Part of these recommendations include robust Heart Gallery programs, like the one that PFC leads in Central Texas, be duplicated throughout Texas.

Learn More

If you are not quite ready for adoption, there are multiple ways that you can help make a difference in the life of a child in the child welfare system.


A few ideas to get started are:

Become a Certified Babysitter

When you become a certified babysitter, you are able to provide child-care services for a brief specified time to families who have adopted (or foster) children. Fostering Hope and Foster Love are good places to start to learn about respite in Central Texas, as well as through CPS. 

Host a Filming or Heart Gallery Exhibit

The purpose of the Heart Gallery is to bring awareness to the community of children in care, and we are always open to new places to host our exhibits or locations to film our weekly Forever Families segments. In order to continue the success of the program, we rely on community partners to volunteer to host a mobile exhibit or provide a place to film.

Foster a Child

Fostering a child is a temporary solution that provides a child a safe place to stay until permanent arrangements are made for their care, ideally, if possible, returning to their family of origin. Learn more about the process to become a licensed foster family here.

Learn

  • Educate yourself about foster and adoption so you can support those you know who have undertake the journey and also debunk the myths that many have about the process. Some ideas can be found here:
  • Host an information session through Foster Community
  • Attend a Virtual Information Session to learn more about the foster/adoption process
  • Have a family movie night to learn about kids in care
  • Read books that talk about the journey of children in care
  • If you live outside of Central Texas and are interested in opportunities to volunteer, please visit the DFPS Volunteer Hub