For churches & ministries
Run a foster-care ministry without a spreadsheet
Most churches that want to wrap around foster families are stuck on the coordination, not the willingness. aVillage is the coordination — the needs, the meals, the closet, the volunteers, and the proof it happened.
Care needs
The ask, and the person who answers it
A family — or a leader on their behalf — posts what would actually help. Volunteers see it, claim it, and get reminded before the day. Capacity is a real number, not a hope: the database refuses the sign-up that would overfill a need, so the count on the screen is the count that's true.
- Exact count, a range (“2 to 5 helpers”), or unlimited for a prayer or a drive
- One-time or recurring, with a first and last day
- Verification gates when a role needs a background check first
- Needs can belong to an event, so a back-to-school night gets sign-ups for free
Meal trains
Dinner, with the allergies attached
A placement arrives on a Tuesday and a church wants to feed them by Thursday. A meal train carries the allergies, the delivery window and the standing notes on every night, so the person signing up on their phone at a red light has everything they need.
- Claiming a night is race-safe — two taps at once never both win Thursday
- Reminders before the night someone claimed
- Lives inside the Care tab rather than as a separate app to remember
Care circles
Six people who know the family, not six hundred who don't
A care circle is a named team around one household. The family posts into their circle and the circle is notified — the congregation isn't. When something needs more hands, a leader opens it to the whole community with one tap.
- Standing notes so the fifth volunteer knows what the first one learned
- A private thread for the circle
- Circle content is invisible outside it, enforced by database policy
Foster closet network
One closet, several churches
The closet is its own entity, not a folder inside one church. A church creates it; others join with a 6-character code. The people who run it are coordinators — a group that doesn't have to match anyone's role in any church, because the person who actually runs the closet usually isn't on staff.
- Inventory, a public needs list, and family requests private to the requester
- Members suggest needs; coordinators accept them — requests are never republished with the notes attached
- Donors pledge to bring something by, or to buy it online and have it shipped
- Volunteer shifts, with the verification bar the coordinator sets (none, application, or background check)
The licensing journey
A family becoming licensed, without the guesswork
Every state's process is different, and most families meet it as a stack of PDFs. aVillage keeps the steps per state, records where each one came from and when it was last checked, and treats the process as what it is — a graph, where a few things genuinely wait on others and everything else can start today.
- “N steps you can start now”, and a plain “waiting on X” where something really does block
- Completing a step out of order is allowed after a confirm — people do things out of order, and a tracker has to record what happened
- When a state changes its process, journeys reconcile: progress and notes are kept, removed steps retire rather than vanish
- Leaders can see their members' journeys; a family who hasn't started one isn't nagged by the app
Impact reporting
The number your board asks for, honestly derived
Families supported, needs met, hours given, licensing milestones — by date range, by campus, exportable as CSV for a grant application. Every metric says how it was reached.
- Recorded means counted from real rows. Estimated means a multiplier or a proxy date, and it is labelled that way in the app and in the export.
- Manual corrections are their own layer — override, adjust, or verify a figure without rewriting history
- Only aggregates ever leave the database. No row about a family or a child is in any report.
And the rest of it
The parts nobody puts on a landing page
The unglamorous half of a ministry is where it usually breaks.
Multi-campus
Scope needs, meals, families and resources to a campus or share them church-wide. Campus leaders run their own care without becoming staff of the whole church, and a persisted campus switcher keeps everyone in their lane.
Notifications people don't turn off
In-app, push, and optional text. Members set categories and quiet hours; your church defines its own alert types (a prayer chain, an emergency placement) and the people who opted out are removed on the server, not in the app.
Joining takes ten seconds
A 6-character code or a QR on the screen at the front of the room. Codes rotate when you want them to.
Volunteers & members
Searchable, paginated lists; roles for admins, leaders and volunteers; commitments a person has made in one place, so nobody double-books themselves.
Events, drives & celebrations
An event's needs are ordinary care needs, so they get sign-ups and reminders for free — and an event can carry a whole Amazon wish list. Drives and celebrations can be switched off if they're not your thing.
Resources & a lending library
The training links, the local caseworker contacts, the pack-'n-play that moves between families — kept where the next person will look for it.
Messages & prayer
1:1 messages, group threads, and an optional prayer wall. Blocking someone is refused on the server, not just hidden in the app.
Drafting help, if you want it
An optional per-church assistant for drafting a need or an update. Off unless your admin turns it on, and the key never touches a member's device.
Giving to your church
Gifts to your church go to your church's own payment account, never through ours. Off by default until a leader connects it, and a member is never shown a broken checkout.
Getting started
What actually happens next
How long does setup take?
An afternoon. You tell us about your church, we open it up, and you invite your team with a code or a QR. There's no data migration — aVillage doesn't try to be your church database.
Can we try it before deciding?
Yes. We'll stand up a private sandbox in your church's name, seeded with realistic families, needs, a meal train mid-flight and a closet with things in it. Click anything. Invite your team.
A sandbox is permanently free, is never asked to contribute, and is torn down when you move to a real community.
What if we can't afford it?
Ask, and keep working while we look at it. Any church can request a reduced or sponsored account; asking buys 14 days of full access, the review window is the same length, and an undecided request approves itself on or before the day access would lapse.
aVillage is funded by the churches that use it. Your contribution is based on your size; small churches pay nothing, and any church can request a reduced or sponsored account — cost should never be the reason foster families go unserved.
What happens if we stop paying?
Nothing happens to your data. Ever. A pause moves in stages — a banner, then leaders' management screens, then the community — and even under a full hold, exporting your data and deleting your account stay reachable.
Who owns what we put in?
You do. Leaders can export the whole community as a document at any time, and members can export their own account. Neither export can reach the other's private fields — a member's export never contains a leader's private notes, and a community export never contains a family's household roster.
Bring it to your church
aVillage is opening up church by church. Tell us about yours.