Colorado advocate supports birth parents during child protective services cases

Be the Source is a nonprofit organization founded in 2016 to bridge the gap in services for foster care families. The organization expanded its services to kinship care families in 2022. In 2025, it extended new services to birth families who've had their children removed from the home. Nikki Sanchez was hired as the organization's first Birth Family Advocate. 

"My main goal is that when they are reunited with their kids they have everything that they need in place," Sanchez told CBS News Colorado. 

Sanchez shows up for the parents on her case load. She goes to court with them. She works their treatment plan with them. She helps them access resources. 

"There's such a stigma with foster parents and birth parents, and I just feel we can break those barriers," Sanchez explained. "Foster parents are amazing, and we can use them as our village." 

Sanchez is deeply passionate about her new job. She's providing a service that she felt she didn't have when her children were removed from her care in 2022.

"I lost my kids because of domestic violence," she said.

Sanchez went to jail. When she got out, she had not home, no children, no family and a substance abuse problem. 

"It felt very hopeless. I had no motivation," she said.

She also explained that she didn't understand the treatment plan that would lead to her getting her children back. 

"I felt set up ... like, 'Okay, you guys are just trying to take my kids. You're not helping me. You're not here for me,'" Sanchez recalled.

She said she felt judged and dismissed by the caseworkers on her case. It was her kids' foster parents that really made a difference.

"They did things that they didn't have to for me, and little by little my trust started coming, and I just saw how much they loved my kids, too," Sanchez explained.

She said they did things like making sure she had proper clothes to go to court in and set up a dinner out with her children for her birthday.

"When I was reunified with my son, the way it was, it was so smooth. It was like a co-parenting thing. And then I got my daughters back, and I had lost all of these services that I was getting when I had CPS in my life. I lost it all. They were there to help me, and if not, I would have been alone," Sanchez said. 

It took Sanchez a while to rebuild her life with her children, but she persevered. Now she's married in a blended family of six children. She has her new job, and a mission to help other parents navigate the foster care system. She hopes to lessen the impact that foster care has not only on the birth parents but on the children, too. 

"I love my life," she said with a smile. 

Sanchez credits Raise the Future for some of the ongoing training that she's undergone, include Trust-Based Relational Intervention, also known as TBRI.

"When I was in that class I was like, 'I should have had this before I got my kids. This is soo, so useful,'" she said.

Sanchez not only shares TBRI practices with the clients she works with, she also uses the practice as she works to heal her own children from their time in foster care.

LINK: Wednesday's Child on CBS Colorado

You can find out more about TBRI training by calling Raise the Future at (303) 755-4756 or (800) 451-5246 or go to the Raise the Future website.