Belief in A Family for Every Child

By Bob Welch

Register-Guard columnist

Published: October 25, 2012 12:00AM, Midnight, Oct. 25

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When growing up, Chase noticed that his life was different from the lives of his friends.

“They got to have all these good relationships with their parents,” he told me last week. “I never had that with my ‘bios.’ I had a mom who couldn’t take care of me and I never had a dad. I never had a grandmother who liked me.”

So, why, in our phone interview, is the 15-year-old Federal Way, Wash., boy going on about astrophysics and anti-matter and why I’d be a fool to read only the first book in the “Hunger Game” series?

“The second is better and the third even better,” he says. “And all the books are better than the movie.”

Why? Because Chase is no longer a “throwaway kid,” the kid with Asperger who nobody wanted.

He’s an upbeat, knowledge-­thirsty kid with hope.

Thanks, largely, to the Eugene-based A Family for Every Child adoption agency, he not only has found a foster home that’s working for him but is scheduled for permanent adoption by a Maryland couple before year’s end.

“They already love me,” he says. “That’s the great part. They’re willing to tackle my problems with me.”

A Family for Every Child concentrates on finding permanent homes for the most difficult-to-place children — those with special needs, those who are part of an ethnic minority or those at risk of “aging out” — the middle-teen kids who, if they don’t wind up finding permanent homes, will most likely wind up on the streets at 18.

“Chase is one of those kids,” says Linzy Munger, the associate director of the six-year-old organization. “He’d have three years before he’d probably become one of those statistics.”

But the matchmaking agency found him the foster home while they worked on shifting him to a permanent solution back East.

Such success stories will be celebrated Nov. 1 when the Eugene nonprofit group puts on its third annual “Home for the Holidays Gala: A Winter Wonderland Evening” at Valley River Inn. The silent and oral auctions begin at 5:30 p.m. with dinner and wine to follow.

Though the organization began by serving only Lane County children, it soon saw the need to expand across the Northwest and now matches kids to families nationwide: 700 adoptions and counting.

“We began to build contacts with waiting families nationwide and saw the barriers they faced in trying to adopt from foster care,” Munger says. “It’s our belief that there are more than enough families for every child waiting in foster care, but there is simply too much red tape, bureaucracy and resistance to collaboration between states working together to make this happen. So we recognized and built a system that helped families and children nationwide to be matched.”

Conventional thinking suggests that uprooting a child from one state to another would be disruptive.

“The reality is that it is far more important for children to have the right match in a family than to remain in the same state,” Munger says. “A child who lives in foster care moves an average of three times a year and they lose everything. It doesn’t matter where they move from Eugene to Cottage Grove or whether they move from Eugene to New York. The important thing is they find the right family.”

Which looks like may be the case for Chase. (The agency doesn’t allow use of last names.)

“These kids all need a chance,” says Kathy Bigelow, 55, who is Chase’s foster mother in Federal Way. “Most are coming out of group homes or hospital situations. We want them to feel like they can be part of a family that doesn’t beat them or abuse them.”

She admits that she’ll miss Chase when he’s permanently placed.

“He has the most awesome sense of humor,” she says. “You can be down in the dumps and he’ll come up with that big old smile and his braces and you’re all better. He reminds me of that kid in TV’s ‘The Big Bang Theory.’ Sheldon. Smart. Quirky. Funny.”

Twenty years ago, options for children such as Chase were limited. Not now.

“We live in a world where the Internet makes everyone (be) in your backyard,” Munger says.

The organization still believes children without permanent homes are part of a social epidemic.

“We believe foster care is a community crisis and needs to be a community solution,” Munger says. “However, the community is not just in our own backyard anymore.”

And so it is that children like Chase may find their permanent families 2,000 miles away.

“You feel like there’s been something missing in your life,” Chase says about life without a permanent family. “But what I want is people who share my interests. People there for me. A shoulder to cry on.”

A Family for Every Child understands. But it’s come to realize that the important thing isn’t where that shoulder is.

Only that, for kids with no shortage of heartbreak, that shoulder is available.