Roughly a year old, the Isaiah 117 House is on its way towards expanding from a local, Elizabethton/Carter County establishment to having a presence in every single county in the state of Tennessee. The recent ground-breaking in Greene County is merely one step in that process.

Executive Director Ronda Paulson said the experience was amazing.

“Governor Bill Lee called us and asked to be part of [the ceremony],” Paulson said. “He said this is the new standard.”

The Isaiah 117 House works alongside the state’s Department of Child Services, which helps hundreds of children displaced from their parents, no matter the reason, and helps them find foster parents.

With this organization, instead of living in conference rooms or other more official locations, the Isaiah 117 House provides a real house with furniture, toys and other regular life items.

“The project reminds me people are good, and they want good things,” she said.

With the organization branching off into other counties, Paulson said each location will have a board of directors that manages its local affairs, but she will serve as executive director over Isaiah 117 House as a whole.

She said Greene County’s board wants to open its doors by December of this year.

“They want to open in 2019,” Paulson said.

Greene is not the only county the organization wants to expand into within the next year.

Washington County’s location will have a ground-breaking on December 17, and Sullivan County wants to start in October, with the goal of opening in the spring of 2020.

Paulson said she is in talks with half a dozen others, including Rutherford, Knox, Davidson, Bradley and Hawkins counties, among several others.

“Most people understand there is a DCS, but they do not understand the numbers,” Paulson said.

She said the goals of the Isaiah 117 House are three-fold: getting the hundreds of children in the region into better homes, reducing the workload of over-worked and understaffed resource officers and helping the foster parents adapt to and nurture the children they adopt from these services.

“There is such a need,” she said. “This is a way to meet that need.”

She said they encourage potential foster parents, even if they are not sure, to register for training courses online at the DCS website.