From a Weekly Circle to a National Standard: The Story Behind KFT-Families Society

KFT-Families Society grew from a peer support circle for Indigenous parents navigating child welfare, started in 2019. Seven years of weekly meetings with families shaped every pillar of the IFISC standard. The organization was incorporated in British Columbia on March 10, 2026.

In 2019, Lori Damon helped start a weekly gathering.

It was not a program. There was no government funding, no outcome framework, no reporting structure. It was a circle of parents, many of them Indigenous, many of them in active conflict with the child welfare system, meeting to share what they knew and what they needed.

That circle became KFT, Keeping Families Together.

What the circle revealed

Over seven years, the same gaps surfaced in conversation after conversation.

Families did not know their rights before removal decisions were made. Providers had no requirement to understand the cultural needs of the children in their care. Reunification was treated as an administrative process rather than a relational one. Elders and traditional law had no formal standing in placement proceedings.

Lori Damon is a social services professional with nearly 40 years of experience. She holds a graduate degree in Clinical Psychology and is a certified drug and alcohol counsellor with active research in safe supply. She heard what families said and built an organizational response around it.

How IFISC emerged from those conversations

The seven pillars of IFISC are not abstract. They map directly to what families in those weekly circles described as missing.

Health and Wellness came from parents who described children losing access to ceremony and traditional healing in care. Rights and Legal Accountability came from families who had not known they could refuse entry to an investigator without legal counsel present. Indigenous Law and Tradition came from Elders who described being excluded from proceedings that governed their grandchildren’s lives.

Each pillar is the standard that the circle decided should exist.

KFT-Families Society today

KFT-Families Society was incorporated in British Columbia on March 10, 2026. The society number is S0084831. The CRA business number is 79757 3177 BC0001. Federal charitable registration is in progress.

Six directors govern the society, all serving voluntarily. Five are Indigenous. Stuart Cadwallader, Gladue writer, Tongas Tlingit member, and author of more than 3,400 Gladue reports, serves as an advisor. Three Elders, Lorelei Hawkins, Rusty Edmonds, and Tom Oleman, guide the organization’s work.

The weekly circle still meets.

The standard it produced is now the first Indigenous-led certification framework for child welfare providers in Canada. The two things are not separate. The standard is the circle, formalized.

If you are an Indigenous family navigating child welfare in BC and need peer support, contact KFT-Families Society at [email protected], call Lori at 604-512-3266, or visit keeping-families-together.com. IFISC operates weekly peer support circles, connects families with culturally grounded resources, and provides guidance to parents at every stage of the child welfare process — at no cost.