A Home for Every Child: Sonia Veliz Brings the 4KIDS Mission to Miami’s Business Community
The faith-based nonprofit is calling on local companies, churches, foster families, and community leaders to help provide hope, homes, and healing to children in crisis.
For Sonia Veliz, joining 4KIDS Miami was more than a career change. It was an opportunity to turn decades of professional experience—and a deeply personal understanding of childhood loss—into meaningful service.
During a recent BNI presentation supporting a back-to-school donation drive, Veliz introduced local business leaders to the work of 4KIDS Miami. She spoke candidly about her journey from corporate marketing and business development into the nonprofit world.
After approximately 20 years in corporate America, Veliz began questioning what she wanted her work and life to represent. She left the corporate sector and eventually served organizations including St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and World Vision.
Having lost both parents at a young age, she understands how profoundly loss can affect a child.
“I wanted to be in a place where I made a difference,” Veliz told the group.
Today, her role at 4KIDS Miami is to invite businesses, churches, professionals, families, and individuals into a mission expressed through five simple words:
A Home for Every Child.
Hope, Homes, and Healing
4KIDS is a Christian, faith-based nonprofit serving children and families across Broward, Palm Beach, Miami-Dade, the Treasure Coast, and Southwest Florida. The organization began in 1997 through a church-led movement to recruit and support Christian foster parents. (4KIDS)
Its work is organized around three promises: Hope, Homes, and Healing.
Homes come through the recruitment, licensing, and support of foster families. Hope grows through family preservation, mentoring, practical assistance, and community partnerships. Healing is supported through trauma-informed therapy and caregiver education.
Veliz explained that children may remain in foster care for several days, several months, or several years. Regardless of how long the placement lasts, every child deserves to feel loved, protected, and cared for.
Stability matters because removing a child from home is already traumatic. Moving that child repeatedly between foster placements can deepen the fear, uncertainty, and loss.
4KIDS therefore works to support foster parents so children can remain in a stable home for as long as necessary.
Keeping Brothers and Sisters Together
Another priority is keeping siblings together.
Children entering foster care have already been separated from their parents, surroundings, schools, and familiar routines. Separating brothers and sisters can compound that loss.
4KIDS recruits families capable of welcoming sibling groups and has developed specialized homes to help brothers and sisters remain together.
Veliz described one of the most painful realities of foster care: some children leave their homes carrying their belongings in a plastic bag.
It is a simple image, but it reveals the scale of the disruption.
For a child, a foster home is not merely a place to sleep. It can become the first stable environment available during one of the most frightening moments of that child’s life.
Connection as a Path to Healing
4KIDS also uses trauma-informed approaches to help parents and caregivers understand the needs behind a child’s behavior.
Veliz discussed Trust-Based Relational Intervention, commonly called TBRI. Developed by the Karyn Purvis Institute of Child Development at Texas Christian University, TBRI is an attachment-based, trauma-informed model designed to support children who have experienced adversity. It emphasizes physical well-being, safe relationships, connection, and compassionate responses to fear-based behavior. (KPICD)
The goal is not simply to correct behavior. It is to understand what happened to the child and help rebuild trust.
That distinction can transform the way parents, teachers, counselors, caregivers, and other adults respond to children experiencing trauma.
Family Reunification Remains the Goal
Veliz also addressed a common misunderstanding.
4KIDS does not exist to break families apart.
Whenever it is safe and possible, the goal is family reunification. Parents may need time, treatment, guidance, housing stability, or other assistance before their children can return home.
Through CarePortal, 4KIDS connects churches, businesses, and individuals with urgent needs identified by child-welfare professionals. Items such as beds, cribs, dressers, car seats, and household necessities can sometimes help stabilize a family and prevent a child from entering foster care. (4KIDS)
Adoption may become the appropriate outcome in some cases. However, strengthening families and supporting safe reunification remain important parts of the mission.
An Invitation to Miami’s Business Community
Companies do not need to become foster-care experts to participate.
4KIDS Miami offers corporate partnerships through employee matching gifts, service projects, event sponsorships, workplace engagement, and customized initiatives. Veliz serves as a contact for companies interested in becoming 4KIDS business partners. (4KIDS)
Businesses can also support back-to-school collections, volunteer activities, fundraising events, Vision Tours, and monthly giving.
The opportunity extends beyond writing a check. Companies can introduce the mission to employees, clients, professional networks, and faith communities.
“Together, we can reverse this,” Veliz told the audience.
Her message was direct: Miami’s foster-care challenges cannot be solved by one organization alone. They require foster parents, churches, clinicians, businesses, donors, volunteers, and advocates willing to stand beside children and families.
For 4KIDS Miami, every donation, partnership, training session, and supported foster home advances the same bold vision:
Until every child has a home.
Learn How Your Business Can Support 4KIDS Miami
Sonia Veliz
Partner Engagement Officer
305-298-3088
SoniaV@4KIDS.us
4KIDS.us
