Mary Perdue’s Mission to Change Georgia’s Foster Care System

From the Governor’s Mansion to the Church Pews: Mary Perdue’s Mission to Change Georgia’s Foster Care System

Everyone can be a foster care advocate — including the former First Lady of Georgia!

In 2003, Georgia elected Sonny Perdue as its 81st governor. As the new First Lady of Georgia, Mary Perdue decided to use her platform to advance a cause that had become near and dear to her heart. 

“Personally, I knew nothing about foster care, had never known anyone who had fostered and had never known any foster children until the early 1990s,” Mary explained. “When I was teaching in the school system in Houston County, I became aware of an opportunity to foster newborns awaiting adoption through Covenant Care in Macon.”

Intrigued, Mary discussed the opportunity with her husband. With four biological children well past the newborn stage, Sonny was surprised his wife wanted to return to sleepless nights. But Mary was determined to meet this need. 

She recalls the first baby to enter their home, a two-day-old baby boy. 

“As our big six-foot-three, 200-pound son came home from school and walked up to the porch, I met him with the baby in my hands, and I said, ‘Dan, look what we got,’” Mary shared. “He dropped his book bag, picked up that little one and went into the house. He laid back in the recliner, and they both went to sleep.”

This immediate connection showed Mary that she had done the right thing, even though her foster care journey wasn’t always easy.

“That memory still moves me because I know that when you foster, you are blessed. Yes, you help the children. Yes, you do a lot for them. Yes, you take the place of a sound, healthy [biological] family in their lives for a short time. But you reap a reward and a blessing.”

Since welcoming the first baby boy, the Perdues fostered seven more newborns. When Sonny was elected governor, Mary knew she could make a difference in the foster care system across the state and for the 20,000 children in the state’s care.

“At the time when my husband was elected governor, I felt like the foster care issue across our state, and really across our nation, was almost like a black hole,” she explained.

“There was a lot of misinformation, a lot of skepticism and mistrust within the system. I felt like the ordinary citizens of Georgia only knew what they read in the newspaper about foster care, and let’s face it, that is almost always when we have a tragedy within the system.”

But Mary knew from her own foster care experience that welcoming children was also a gift. As First Lady, she felt an obligation to address this “black hole.”

“The fact that I had a megaphone, had a platform and had for the first time in my life the opportunity to shed light on something that was beyond me helped me to understand that this needed my attention and my work as much as anything else in the state,” she said.

“I wanted to see children quickly reunited with their parents if possible. I wanted to see the number of children in care go down. I wanted to make the greater public aware that there are foster kids in every single neighborhood, in every single county.”

With these goals in mind, Mary met with constituents across the state to raise awareness and find ways to meet the need.

“I spoke to anybody who would listen to me speak. I spoke to civic groups. I spoke at lunch-and-learns at businesses. I spoke at church groups,” she explained.

In addition to raising awareness, she helped to develop the Champions for Children program.

“We told people if they could provide some items on our list — like providing computer support, hosting a backpack drive or a winter coat drive, throwing birthday parties for foster kids, showing foster parents’ appreciation — they could get the First Lady of Georgia Seal as a champion for children,” Mary explained. “We would then have a reception at the governor’s mansion and invite all the champions from many different walks of life.”

Through her initiatives, Mary began to change the narrative surrounding foster care and spark real change across the state. 

“By the time we left office in 2011, we had seen the number of foster children in the state decline significantly to under 10,000 children in care,” she shared.

After Sonny’s two terms in office, Mary still felt she had something to contribute to foster care awareness in the state, especially through empowering local churches to meet this need. 

“This is what the body of Christ is called to do: to care for children and families in need,” she said. “Not everybody can be a foster parent, and frankly, we don’t want everybody to be a foster parent because everybody is not called to that.

“But many people are, and we need to support them when they are. We need to bring them meals, babysit for them, give them gift cards so that they can take the kids places, help them with transportation — all kinds of things.”

Mary believes many churches have, often unintentionally, relegated care for children in need to the state and federal government. 

She believes this aspect of foster care support needs to change. 

“We have a mandate to care for the widows and the fatherless, and that’s what these children are when they come into state care,” she said. “They are orphans for that brief period of time.

“This issue needs to be resolved through churches, through the hands and feet of Jesus, through everyday people who feel called to get involved and who feel that God can do anything in His power.”

While sitting in a service at her home church, she first connected with an organization sharing her vision for church-led advocacy: Families 4 Families.

“Wayne Naugle [Families 4 Families CEO] came and spoke at our church, and the things that he said to us that day at church were the very same things that I had said when I was working on this issue as First Lady,” Mary explained. “I thought to myself, ‘Someone has the same idea that I had: that our solution is to involve the body of Christ.’”

Once the service ended, Mary spoke to Wayne and shared her heart to continue advocating, even without her platform as the First Lady of Georgia.

“I don’t feel like the Lord has finished with me yet. Even at my age, I feel like there are still some things that I can do to contribute,” she said. “If there’s anything that I can do to encourage people to pay attention and to pray about involvement [in foster care], then I want to do that.”

Mary’s partnership with Families 4 Families is only a year old, but she’s been powerfully using her voice to call churches to action.

“For many of these children, being in that foster family may be their very first introduction to Jesus, not only at church and Sunday school but also seeing the love of Jesus through that family, seeing how they’re cared for and seeing how Christ loves them regardless of the issues and problems they have,” she shared.

“Let’s face it. We all have issues and problems. Some of ours are more evident than others, but He loves us anyway. He loves these children as well — every one of them.”