What does your job title consist of?
"I’m the matching assistance director, and we help families find children to submit their home steady on and we help by supporting them through the adoption process. There’s a long waiting phase that they have to go through so there’s a lot of silence and not a lot of contact with case workers or recruiters, even their adoption workers, so we step in and kind of take the place of that persons so we can fill in holes or get updates in kids that they’re looking for or help them submit their home study and get their home study and their family out there on the desks of caseworkers and recruiters that are looking for families for their children."
How long have you been doing this?
"Almost two years. I’ve been with A Family For Every Child for about four years."
How do you match children with their new parents?
"We have families assigned into our program and they look for certain things and are approved for certain things in their home steady. We have a whole volunteer staff of family adoption specialists that will be assigned to a family. One will get assigned to each family and they help the family by helping them to submit their home study, calling caseworkers, getting updates for them, talking about how great their families are, what their families are looking for. That kind of turns into additional contact from other caseworkers, because word gets out that there’s a family looking for kids and maybe that caseworker doesn’t have kids in their case load that can match with a family but they might have another caseworker that might have one. So it gets passed along that way. Everybody is talking and communicating."
How is this agency different from others?
"We’re persistent. We stay in contact with our families and we do a lot of communicating. We always try to keep families informed and if a family needs something then all of us try to help in whatever way we can."
What types of children do you handle in your line of work?
"We have children from infancy all the way up to twenty-one years old, so there’s a big range of age groups. Most of the kids we work with are about six years old and above, and generally have some sort of disability. Some of them don’t, but a majority do because they’ve had a rough start in life which really has an impact on how they develop. Their past really is a good indication of what their future is going to be like. If it’s going to be tough to get through, or how much they need to go to therapy, surgeries, medical, educational, whatever it is."
Do you have any adopted children?
"I do. I have one adopted child, but we have five children all together. Michael is our youngest and he has been in our family for about three years."
If you could change something about the system what would it be?
"Um, this is a tough one. I think that the thing I would want to change is communication. Keeping that communication, there are a lot of families out there that are looking for kids and they’d be great matches for these kids, but for whatever reason, that communication stops."
Why should people consider adopting a child?
"Everyone deserves a loving home and a family to call their own. I don’t know any one out there that doesn’t deserve to have a family to call their own."
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