VIDALIA — Carrie Vest has always been an adrenaline junkie, and that really paid off when she went over the top and down the side of the 24-floor One American Place building in Baton Rouge earlier this month.

Vest, along with fellow church member and Vidalia-area resident Dawn Moss, was a participant in the Louisiana Family Forum’s “Over the Edge for Adoption” awareness event. They are both foster mothers.

Participants in the event joined Louisiana First Lady Supriya Jindal and “Duck Dynasty” star Korie Robertson in rappelling down the face of the building in an effort to bring awareness to the need of 400 adoption-eligible children in the Louisiana foster care system.

There isn’t a single unified system between the private and public foster care and adoption agencies, Vest said, and some children may be overlooked because of that lack of coordinated effort.

“My biggest calling to do this was to bring all those organizations together, because all of them are trying to do what is best for the child, but there is no streamline for the process,” she said. “This event was about trying to find a streamlined process and bring all those organizations together to work for the common cause. Those children shouldn’t have to be sitting and waiting.”

With that mission in mind and only a short training session before the event, the moms hooked up their harnesses, grabbed a rappelling rope in each hand and went over the edge of the building, scaling 280 feet until they reached the ground.

“The only scary part of it is when your feet are half on the ledge and half off and you have to lean back and trust your harness,” Vest said.

“To try to put it into perspective, I say that with foster and adoptive parents, you don’t get a trial run, you just have to go with it.”

While Vest said she took full advantage of the opportunity to look around and see the people on the ground cheering them on, Moss said she couldn’t force herself to look down.

“The view of the river was amazing, but I didn’t look down,” she said. “It was fun, and I loved it, and we are planning to do it again.”

Vest said she signed up for the event after Moss told her she would be doing it.

“When I started dreading the event, I thought about the cause and the purpose of it, and it was for me one of those things you can’t not do even if you are scared,” Vest said.

Vest and her husband, Frank, hope to finalize the adoption of twins they’ve had in their home since July 2013 by the end of the summer.

The Vests weren’t looking to foster at first — they wanted to adopt outright — but Vest said the family learned of a twin set who would be split up in foster care if they couldn’t find a placement that would take both. A foster parent who was caring the twins for the weekend took them to church the Sunday before they were to be split.

That weekend, the Vests were keeping the church nursery. It turned out to be an opportunity to show the world what being a Christian is really about, Vest said.

“It was one of those God-ordained things where we were at the right place at the right time,” she said. “They were siblings and they deserved to be placed together.”

Vest and Moss said the event accomplished its goal of raising awareness, with a number of people asking them for more information about becoming foster parents.

“That’s exactly why we did this,” Vest said. “It opens the door for us to bring that awareness for the children who need it, to help those children in the foster system get placed and those who are eligible into a forever home.”