Children's Disaster Services ramps up response in flooded midwest.

Children’s Disaster Services is fielding teams of child care volunteers in Indiana and Iowa to support families affected by flooding. Children's Disaster Services is a ministry of the Church of the Brethren. Each child care team includes four or five trained and certified volunteers, and the response in each state is overseen by a trained project manager.

One Children’s Disaster Services team has been working in Martinsville, Ind., in a Red Cross Assistance Center that has seen 25-30 children each day. The Red Cross will no longer be working out of that center, which will now be carried on by FEMA and others, and the child care team will continue to provide services to children there. The team also will be expanded from four to five people. Ken Kline has been the project manager in Indiana, but has completed his two weeks commitment and Barbara Lungelow will be the new project manager.

Another Children's Disaster Services team relieved exhausted volunteers for CJ's Bus, which has stopped services in Indiana as of Wednesday, June 18. The team that had worked with CJ's Bus has moved to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and is now serving children and families there. In Cedar Rapids, Children's Disaster Services may soon also be providing training for other responders from the Iowa state response as well.

A child care team in Cedar Falls, Iowa, has been working to care for children at a Lutheran school while families cleaned up homes from mud that carried oil and fertilizer. That child care team has now moved location and currently is working at a Red Cross Service Center. A second team of child care givers will begin working in Cedar Falls starting Monday, June 23.

Another team will begin providing child care in Iowa City on Monday. Lorna Grow is the project manager for the teams working in Iowa.

Children's Disaster Services is putting two more teams of child care workers on alert, to go into additional areas affected by flooding on Sunday or Monday. By the end of next week, the program will be sending new teams of volunteers to replace those who by that time will have been working for two weeks.

Brethren Disaster Ministries is requesting a grant of $5,000 to support the work of Children's Disaster Services in Indiana and Iowa, from the Church of the Brethren's Emergency Disaster Fund.

Go to www.brethren.org/genbd/BDM/CDSindex.html for more information about Children's Disaster Services and for information about how to become a trained disaster child care volunteer.

Source: 6/20/2008 Newsline Extra