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Grandma’s Hands: An ASCI Treasure


Young people need something stable to hang on to — a culture connection, a sense of their own past, a hope for their own future. Most of all, they need what grandparents can give them.

Jay Kesler

A Second Chance, Inc. created Grandma’s Hands to allow grandparents to connect with children and families and assist in the kinship triad process. This program has allowed ASCI to increase our visitation capacity by ensuring that every child is able to visit with their birth parents, siblings and loved ones. Also, the grandmothers involved in Grandma’s Hands feel a sense of purpose by being a part of something amazing and seeing children’s smiles every day.

Grandma’s Hands helps foster relationships between generations by sparking healthy conversations between birth parents and children. They teach children respect for others and the importance of bringing families together by maintaining consistent week-to-week visitations. These consistent visitations create strong connections and are vital to a child’s daily structure. Further, visitations maintain a parent-child attachment by reducing the child’s sense of abandonment so they can have a sense of belonging.  

Members of Grandma’s Hands meeting to collect their donated goods for family Thanksgiving baskets

Grandma’s Hands also motivates birth parents to make positive changes in their lives while teaching them the importance of values and encouraging them to maintain and strengthen family relationships. Grandma’s Hands provides opportunities to show birth parents a different style of parenting due to the generational gap.  

Moreover, Grandma’s Hands helps ASCI with decision-making processes that help to promote timely reunification goals while supporting parent-child relationships.   

Thank you to all past and present Grandma’s Hands volunteers for being such a valuable asset to the organization and to the kinship triad!

This article originally appeared in our monthly newsletter, the National Kinship Review. Sign up today!

The opinions expressed are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of A Second Chance, Inc.

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