Compendium Adoption Opportunities

Adoption Opportunities

The major efforts mandated by the authorizing Adoption Opportunities program legislation, section 205 of the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment and Adoption Reform Act of 1978, as amended (P.L. 95-266) are developing and implementing a national adoption and foster care data gathering and analysis system; developing and implementing a national adoption information exchange system; developing and implementing an adoption training and technical assistance program; increasing services in support of the placement in adoptive families of minority children who are in foster care and have the goal of adoption with a special emphasis on the recruitment of minority families; increasing post-legal adoption services for families who have adopted children with special needs; studying the nature, scope, and effects of the placement of children in kinship care arrangements and pre-adoptive or adoptive homes; and studying the efficacy of States' contracting with public and private non-profit agencies (including community-based and other organizations).

In these areas, research and demonstration grants are awarded through a competitive process to States, local government entities, Federally recognized Indian tribes and tribal organizations, colleges and universities, public or private non-profit licensed child welfare agencies, adoption exchanges and community-based organizations with experience working with minority populations. This section of the Compendium describes the 16 Adoption Opportunities projects funded in FY 2001 under the following priority areas:

2001A.1: Achieving Increased Adoptive Placements for Children in Foster Care
2001A.2: Field Initiated Demonstration Projects Advancing the Sate of the Art in the Adoption Field
2001A.3: Quality Improvement Centers on Adoption
2001A.4: Evaluations of Existing Adoption Programs

Priority Area 2001A.1
Achieving Increased Adoptive Placements
for Children in Foster Care

Through this grant, the New York State Office of Children and Family Services/New York State Adoption Service (OCFS/NYSAS), in collaboration with New York City Administration for Children's Services (ACS), intends to address the hardest of New York State's adoption cases by finding permanent adoptive homes for 65 of New York State's "Longest Waiting Children." Many of these children are in therapeutic foster boarding homes, group homes, and residential treatment centers and are seen as having multiple barriers to finalization. In addition to finding homes for these children, OCFS/NYSAS will identify, analyze, and develop strategies to address the barriers that have kept these children without adoptive homes for an average of 8.6 years after freeing. These strategies will be incorporated into training for caseworkers.

The Missouri Department of Social Services' Division of Family Services endeavors to increase the number of children adopted from foster care through the Missouri Adoption Continuum project. This project provides unique pre-placement and post-adoption support services that complement existing programs and that are designed to strengthen the adoption process. In doing so, it endeavors to work collaboratively with public and private agencies to expedite permanency for 500 children from foster care. Specifically, the Missouri Adoption Continuum, through innovative recruitment and marketing services, plans to collaborate with public and private agencies and foster/adoptive parent associations to forge a 20% increase in the number of adoptive families for children embodied in foster care. In addition, the program will develop and implement a statewide training program for 40 adoptive parents to mentor prospective adoptive parents from initial inquiry through placement of a special needs child. The Missouri Adoption Continuum will also initiate a respite network by recruiting and training 70 respite providers who will serve adoptive families throughout the state. The project will conduct a comprehensive, outcome-based evaluation of its program and will disseminate the results.

The grantee will establish an Indian Adoptive Agency that will be licensed to provide comprehensive adoption services to tribal children and their families. The agency will work toward permanency as part of concurrent planning when a child is removed from his/her home. The agency's efforts will focus on permanently situating displaced children with members of their extended families or other Indian families in order to promote children's well being and to maintain their ties to extended family, community, and tribe. The Indian Adoptive Agency will provide a full array of adoption services, including adoption home studies, placement of children, pre-adoption and post-adoption services, adoption subsidy assistance, and information and referral. The agency will also conduct thorough kinship/relative searches by Indian staff and will use resources from local government, tribal records, clients, and available relatives to locate family members for consideration as safe and appropriate permanent placements for children. Such searches have not been conducted in the service area since 1999. The agency's offerings will chiefly benefit the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, which encompasses some 40,000 persons.

The Cherokee Nation plans to implement an innovative approach to removing barriers and expediting legal permanency for children. The project places special emphasis on the safety, permanency, and well being of Cherokee children across the United States. The Cherokee Nation will endeavor to create and identify practices that meet timelines imposed by federal adoption regulations, while providing a pathway to achieve cultural sensitivity in placing Cherokee children. Specifically, the program will provide accurate information concerning federal guidelines for placement of Indian children and actively employ the large pool of Cherokee families willing to fulfill legal permanency. Through activities funded through this grant, Cherokee adoptive families will become more accessible to state agencies nationwide to fulfill the mandate of the Federal Indian Child Welfare Act and meet the placement needs of Cherokee children needing adoptive families. The number of Cherokee children being placed in appropriate tribal adoptive homes is expected to increase and adoptions will become timelier as inter-jurisdictional resources will be greatly increased.

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Priority Area 2001A.2
Field Initiated Demonstration Projects Advancing the Sate of the Art in the Adoption Field

La Familia, Inc. will develop, implement, and evaluate an interactive multimedia training and support package for parents who are adopting transracially. Secondarily, La Familia will provide continuing education and support for these parents and their children and hopes to impact transracial adoptions within the child welfare system. This endeavor will provide comprehensive support and training and will produce resource lists, papers, and articles as well as a CD and website, which will facilitate the training's accessibility to people in remote locations. Post-placement services for adoptive parents and their children will be designed to help parents with challenges and to enhance transracially adopted children's ability to experience normal family life. Evaluation of the project will compare families who have been exposed to traditional in-person training and support services to families who use the CD and website. La Familia also plans to disseminate its full range of products.

Adoptive Families Together (AFT) and the Center For Family Connections have partnered to form the Siblings Connections Program. This collaborative endeavor serves to strengthen relationships for siblings separated by adoption and to reinforce supportive relationships for their birth, adoptive, foster, or kinship families. Through a clinically supervised process, the project will develop opportunities for siblings and kinship, foster, and adoptive parents to come together to create and cultivate family connections in the best interest of all children involved. This project will create a model for enabling children to build on their daily life's experience in their adoptive/foster families without the additional loss of sibling connection. It will help public and private adoption agencies expand their commitment and expertise in maintaining these connections. The project will include extensive evaluation by professors at Boston College School of Social Work. As the program develops and evaluates varied models for building sibling connections in different settings, it will disseminate its findings, data, curricula, and manuals through a variety of channels and will replicate the project to two other agencies.

The purpose of this project is to address the intergenerational needs of guardianship/ adoptive families, particularly those who have become guardians for foster children, and to promote child safety and permanency as well as child and family well being for intergenerational adoptive families. The project seeks to accomplish this through the mental health component of a family support program that incorporates state and local delivery systems for children and adults. Specifically, the project will provide therapeutic supports and interventions for children and their intergenerational family systems that include, education and consultation in substance abuse, domestic violence, general health, mental health, and intergenerational issues; community workers for case management; therapeutic activities for caregivers and children; respite and recreational services for caregivers and children; and emergency assistance. The project expects to produce several outcomes, such as a reduction in substantiated cases of abuse or neglect, elimination of recidivism in adopted children, improved well being of caregivers, enhanced community capacity to meet kinship families' needs, and long-term support and intervention services.

The chief objective of Project GRASP (Generating Race Related Adoption Specific Protocol) is to provide information that will improve the child welfare system's knowledge of and ability to provide services and supports that enhance positive psychosocial development and permanency in transracial adoptive families. Secondarily, Project GRASP will offer an opportunity to gather information about adoptive families of color, especially African Americans, as well as utilize transracially adopted adults to participate in formulating the questions and guidelines for research and intervention to address their issues and challenges. Project GRASP will build on Project Understanding, an exploratory and hypothesis generating study which employs a research design to assess core constructs of transracial adoption as reported by adoptive parents, children, and youth at different stages of their family's life cycle. Project GRASP will develop data from in-racial adoptive families and transracially adopted adults, which will elucidate what happens within these families over time and will create service models to support successful outcomes for adopted children of color placed in transracial families. These models will facilitate the development of a curriculum for social workers under the auspices of the California Social Work Education Center and a training program for mental health providers including targeted recruitment of therapists of color.

Institute for Black Parenting (IBP) will recruit adoptive homes for African American special needs children who reside in Louisiana and have a case plan for adoption. IBP's primary goals are to recruit adoptive homes for special needs children; place African American special needs children with African American families; and increase child welfare professionals' knowledge of strategies for recruiting and retaining African American adoptive homes. IBP will realize these goals through a variety of approaches, such as targeted outreach, Rapid Response Workers to provide in-home orientation, culturally sensitive strategies, public service announcements and paid advertising, newspaper articles, collaboration with ethnic organizations, and workshops for child welfare professionals. As a result of its work, IBP expects 100 African American children to be placed in adoptive homes. Other anticipated results include an expanded pool of applicants, increased knowledge among African Americans about the need for adoptive parents and the adoption process, heightened knowledge among child welfare professionals concerning community-based recruitment, and a handbook.

Northeast Ohio Adoption Services (NOAS) will use this grant to implement an innovative targeted community outreach program. NOAS will apply social marketing and community organizing practices and will build community capacity to conduct targeted outreach efforts in order to recruit new adoptive families. Long-term outcomes include a strengthened sense of community support for waiting children and adoptive families, an increase in the number of adoptive parents, an increase in the number of adoptions, and a decrease in the time children wait for adoption. NOAS will produce detailed reports of project activities and a comprehensive evaluation of the program that other local, state, and national public or private agencies may replicate in their efforts to build capacity to place children in permanent families more quickly. NOAS will disseminate its evidence-based findings, results, and products via a website, presentations, articles, publications, and a "toolbox" of materials.

The Adoption Mediation Project will address the protracted Court process during cooperative adoptions. This project will offer a forum to discuss cooperative adoption planning issues with a professional mediator. The mediator has been specifically trained in issues related to mediating consensual termination of parent rights and post adoption agreements. The major goals and objectives of this project are to promote a cooperative, non-adversarial alternative to litigated Termination of Parental Rights Trials and to expedite permanency. The project expects several benefits for situations in which cooperative agreements can be effectuated. The likelihood of positive sustained contact between adopted children and their birth families should increase. Likewise, relationships between the birth parents and the adoptive families would be less conflicted. Some financial benefits include a decrease in court costs and a reduction in administrative costs to the applicable jurisdiction's social service agency. A distinctive feature of the project is that all cases (within its jurisdiction) in which the permanency plan changes to adoption will be considered for referral to this program. Additionally, there will be an analysis of cost savings to both the Court and the Department of Social Services.

As a result of this grant, the Teenage Homelessness Prevention Project will place 68 teenagers, during a 4-year period, into permanent families before their discharge from foster care. Half of these teenagers will be placed directly from the congregate care facilities in which they now reside. The project will accept teens age 12 and over who are awaiting adoption for several reasons. Project benefactors include teens who had been adopted at a younger age and were subsequently abandoned by their adoptive parents; teens who previously were not freed for adoption because of emotional status or age, or because they previously refused adoption; and teens whose goals changed to an independent living status. The project also will accept 135 teenagers to conduct an innovative recruitment approach and will subsequently conduct several parent preparation classes for 100 families identified through the recruitment program. Sixty-eight of those families will be certified to accept participating teenagers into their homes permanently.

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Priority Area 2001A.3
Quality Improvement Centers on Adoption

The Quality Improvement Center on Adoption will provide the State of Virginia with the opportunity to strengthen the quality of services to those children awaiting adoption and those who have been previously adopted. Staff and a regional advisory group will lead and monitor the project's activities, which will include a comprehensive statewide needs assessment.

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Priority Area 2001A.4
Evaluations of Existing Adoption Programs

Michigan's Adoption Division and Michigan State University School of Social Work will collaborate to conduct an evaluation of Michigan's Medical Subsidy for Adopted Special Needs Children. The purpose of the study is to enhance the state's understanding of prospective adoptive children with special needs; address questions such as length, type, and effectiveness of mental health treatment; and refine the Adoption Division's knowledge about expenditures. The study will describe a random sample (N=1,000) of medical (emotional-behavioral) subsidy cases and will create a profile of those cases, delineate the types of services provided, and evaluate the safety, permanency, and well being of children served by this program. The study will also identify, describe, and evaluate medical subsidies for the full population of adopted children who receive residential treatment services. Finally, the study will examine subsets of children, focusing on specific diagnoses such as attachment disorder and cases in which the adoption has dissolved or disrupted. The evaluation will rely upon data routinely collected on all subsidy cases as well as surveys of parents, providers, and stakeholders; inform Michigan policy and practice; and have implications for other states considering medical subsidies to support special needs adoptions.

The proposed research project will evaluate post-adoption services as they are implemented during the next 3 years. The objectives of the project are to provide direction for evidence-based practice development in an effort to improve post-adoption services for all adoptive families and to advocate for adoptive parents, adoption workers, and collaborating professionals by continually seeking their input into the post-adoption services system. Utah's Division of Child and Family Services and the University of Utah's Social Research Institute will implement evaluation of the three-year post-adoption plan by collaborating to collect and analyze data using mailed surveys, focus groups, and in-depth interviews of the key stakeholders in adoption. The evaluators will provide to policy and program developers the results from the quantitative and qualitative analyses. The project expects an immediate benefit to be a more efficient process of improving post-adoption services. Long-term, the project is expected to contribute to the child welfare knowledge base, increase adoptive placement stability, and improve the well being and quality of life for adopted children.

Beech Brook will examine the complex issues related to child, caregiver, and system factors that have an impact on adoption outcomes. The research sample will consist of placements arranged by Beech Brook's Spaulding Adoption Program. Approximately 562 special needs adoption cases will be studied. Case studies will span a 28-year time period (1976-2004), which represents the beginning of the special needs adoption movement through current adoption reforms. A mixed retrospective/prospective design will examine three cohorts of special needs adoption children and include a common core of predictor and outcome variables. Subjects will range in age from infants to teens, and include foster parent adoptions as well as the hardest-to-place children residing in intensive treatment environments. Central to the prospective study design is the ability to accurately measure child, caregiver, and system factors in an attempt to understand the complex interplay between these three related domains and adoption outcomes.

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