Kelley McDougal is a young woman who lives in the North Country and has dedicated her life to emergency first response. It’s her mission to help others.

“I come from an EMS family. It was kind of in my blood, I guess,” McDougal said.

She sometimes spends seven days a week inside an ambulance squad station. Sometimes it is in Indian River, sometimes Carthage, even as far away as Utica.

It truly is a labor of love.

“I think it is really important to give back, especially in a community that has kind of taken us in and has done so much for us. I want to just give back, and it makes me feel good helping the community,” McDougal said.

She used the word "us" because she could not possibly do any of that without her family and their support.

“Yeah, we definitely could not have done it without banding together and helping me,” she said.

The story of McDougal's family coming together began three years ago. McDougal and her son, Elijah, made the decision to give back more — this time, their home, as a foster family.

“I did the foster program at the Children’s Home of Jefferson County. A couple months in, I got a phone call from a social worker that they were working for a pre-adoptive home for two girls. I went and met them, and we kind of fell in love with each other,” McDougal said.

What she did not know until a short time later was that the two sisters had a brother on the way, a boy who also needed a home.

“He kind of surprised us, and he came and lived with us after he was born,” she said.

The new family, which now includes McDougal's partner Sam, is now focused on the future as a close-knit family.

The day the adoption became official was a day three years in the making. McDougal’s larger family will allow her to continue to not only be a mother to four, but someone who watches out for the entire community.

“Some advice I got when I was in foster parent class from a foster family was not to worry about how you are going to make it work or what your plan is. You just need to ask and your community will come. Your village will come. You’ll be surprised at how big your village is. Everybody has really surprised me the last three years, and I know have this giant village that makes everything possible,” McDougal said after the adoption.

She said her story is an example of what someone can do, even as a single parent, and people can be much stronger than anyone realizes, especially when it comes to helping someone else.