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Hi All, We are an adoptive family who are foster/adopt approved and have a private home study as well. We are trying to reach out to families BEFORE CPS gets involved and the children enter the system but have no idea how to do so. Have any of you had any ever tried to reach out to families? We don't care about age or race and are open to special needs and sibling sets. I just don't know how to do this..... No luck yet with our foster/adopt home study. It's kind of discouraging. Thanks!
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The big problem is that the families whose kids end up in foster care don't think they are doing anything wrong. I have yet to find a bio family that admitted they couldn't care for their kids, abused them or neglected them. They do not want to give them up. Even when CPS does take their cildren, they will drag their feet for years all the way to court order TPR and not sign over before that. Some do, but most don't. I don't know what you ahve been doing in terms of looking for cildren before, but there are many avenues to finding older kids including working with the state or private agencies.
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We adopted 2 through foster care and although our bio mom had 4 prior removals/terminations she still fought it legally til the end, although she did not do her service plan and has since had another one who was born/removed that she did get back for now. They seem to wait too long to place w/family and it also seems that if they place with family they don't feel like they lost or gave kids up it's more like she's "staying" with my sister, but if they lose to foster care they feel like a failure.
A little confused. What do you mean by "reach out to"? You want families to place with you? Or you want to help families at risk for removal improve their situations? If the former, that doesn't seem either ethical or desirable. Generally speaking, many families do receive intervention services before removal and many of those are successful in turning things around. Even after removal, most families are reunited thanks to a case plan. In either instance, how would you create and implement a case plan? Or would you only take adoptive placement and skip the idea of reunification? IMO, it would be wrong for a third party to convince a family to place prematurely. If you mean the latter, I'd suggest contacting your state/local social services agency and family service charity orgs and seeing if any of them have a volunteer family aide or mentoring program in your area. I did that for a little more than 4 years, and it was very rewarding. Good luck, I hope you are able to help some families.
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Thanks for the replies! I have not been on this forum much since my original post. We wound up bringing home a beautiful newborn right here in our hometown after networking with a local adoption attorney. We never did get one single call from the state even though we have a state issued home study as well. We did wind up helping one local family whose child was nearly taken by social services but is now back with his birth mom. We keep tabs on him. His mom is now preggo again, too. Take Care, Julie:rockband: