Finding the right agency

Hi - Well, we have not had a successful adoption, yet. But we started with LDS Family Services. We waited 2 years and are just switching to work with a county affiliated agency in California. LDSFS was great, except the average wait was real long. The people were wonderful and we loved our worker. But, at least here in CA there are so many adoptive families and not half as many birthmoms. Their average wait here is 2 - 3 years (when we were approved the average wait was 1 - 2 years) and placement is not guaranteed. We finally decided we needed to be with an agency where placement happens much more quickly (less than 6 months) and where an educated social worker is making those choices. But, there are definite pros and cons to both. Also our new agency does work with the county, but their main goal is adoption and only about 2 % of kids placed are reunified with birth families. In many other county agencies that percent is much higher. I would suggest going to different agency orientations in your area and see how you feel about each of them. And also take into consideration what age of child(ren) you are wanting to adopt. LDSFS pretty much only does infants. Good luck and keep us posted.

They do only USUALLY do infants, but we were open to any age, and while we were with them, we were shown 3-4 profiles of children in foster care/relative placement who were LDS, and knew they couldn't or didn't want to continue to raise the children...so they went to LDSFS to find an LDS family for these older kids in the foster care system.We recieved a match thru LDSFS, but our daughter was 3.5, not an infant...eventually due to her age, we went private using just an attorney, but the initial matching was done thru the agency.I have heard of other agencies that have faster avg wait times, but their basic fees are usually double.