Watch THIS Before You Adopt a Child Through an Adoption Agency

Lucrece Bundy 0:00 

If you’re trying to decide what adoption agency to choose, it is really hard to make a decision, right? Because there are so many different adoption agencies out there that mean, if you just Google adoption agencies in Colorado, you’ll be hit with like at least 20 to look at. So how do you choose? Well, that’s what I’m going to talk about in this video.

FUNCTIONS OF DIFFERENT AGENCIES

So let’s dive right in understanding the functions of different agencies, not all agencies are created equal. A lot of people just kind of say I want to adopt, they Google the agencies in their state to adopt and find one, call them give them their money. And there you go. And then a few years later, they’re having issues that they want to move to another agency, or nursing and the functions of different adoption agencies will really be helpful to you, because you’ll know which ones you should not be working with, and which ones you actually need to be looking into for your specific family.

3 CATEGORIES OF AGENCIES

So for an example, agencies are really divided into three different categories. We have public agencies, we have private agencies, and also international agencies. So the private agencies are the ones that are most popular when people are trying to adapt newborns and your public agencies are the ones that are most popular when you’re trying to adapt from foster care. And then your international adoption agencies are also private, but they’re international. They’re the ones that you want to use when you want to do an international adoption.

The first step you need to do when you start your adoption process is to understand the type of adoption you want to do. Are you wanting to adopt internationally? Are you wanting to adopt a newborn? Are you wanting to adopt an older child? The answer to that question is going to help you decide what agency you actually need to work with? If you can’t answer that first question, you will be lost when you’re looking at all these agencies on the internet.

The private agencies are just that they’re privately owned, meaning that they have to be licensed just like any other agency, but they set up their own rules. So for example, if you work with agency, a private agency a and three months later you decide you know, we don’t really like them, we want to move over to agency B, we want to take our home study with us. We want to use the home study at agency B agency B can say sorry, we can’t take your home study, you have to do your brand new home study through us. Why can they do that, because they’re private agencies, they’re privately owned. And they can do that if they want. That’s why you’ll find that a lot of private agencies don’t play really well together a lot of times, and there’s nothing you can do to make them change that understanding that will help you so much in the long run. Because if you do choose to work with a private agency, you’ll be able to ask those questions firsthand and say, hey, if we decide to move to another one, will you be okay with that? Will you be will it be a smooth process? Are you going to give us a headache.

Public agencies are the ones that you want to use when you’re adopting from foster care. So we’re talking about DHHS, basically, okay, the agency in your state, those agencies are there to help you adapt children in foster care, your international adoption agencies are the ones that you use to adopt internationally. These are three categories of different agencies that are just mentioned, right, some agencies actually do a mix of a couple of different things. That’s why it makes it confusing for people.

Sometimes you’ll also find agencies who only do home studies, they’ll only do home studies, they don’t do anything else. confusion comes from times when you find agencies who do a little bit of each of those things. Once in a while you’ll find an agency that will not only do your home study, they will also they can also help you adopt a newborn, but they can also help you adopt from foster care, those agencies are gold, because that means that if you’re one of those people who really want to adopt an age range, and you find that agency, I mean, that’s just the best ever. But those are really, they’re very rare. You’ll have to do a lot of research and really dig and ask the right questions to find out what they actually do.

Number one, the best thing that you can do for yourself is understand the different functions of different agencies so that when you are researching, it just makes more sense to you as you’re looking at agencies, and you’re looking at their functions and what they do, you’ll be able to know right away, okay, that agency is not for us because we’re looking to adopt foster care kid, not a newborn.

So a second way to choose the agency that you want to work with is by choosing it based on a state that gives you a lot of opportunity to adopt. So what do I mean by that? Not all states are adoption friendly. For example, if you adopt out of Nebraska, which is where I am, you are guaranteed to wait at least three to four years to even hope to be matched with a birth mom. Why? Because Nebraska isn’t an adoption friendly state. What do I mean by that? It means that more birth moms here choose to abort their babies versus actually placed in for adoption. And it’s really sad. But that’s just the reality of Nebraska. So that means that you have hundreds of hopeful adoptive parents here competing for maybe two babies that are available every year. So as you can see, Nebraska is probably not the state that you want to focus on, because you don’t have a lot of opportunity here. But you look at states like Texas or Florida or California, there’s so many other states that are just more adoption friendly, meaning that more moms who are pregnant are choosing to place those babies for adoption versus abort them. So if you are wanting to find the fastest way to adopt, you probably want to spend your money in a state or states where you just have more opportunity to be matched by versus waiting for years just to even be matched, hopefully with one or two pregnant moms.

So a lot of times what I find is that when people call agencies they’ll ask “how many birth moms do you have on the waitlist? How many hopeful adoptive parents do you have on the waitlist.” And the thing is that every agency decides how successful they are, they have their own metrics on how the decide that maybe that agency is really looking at how many matches they’ve had that year, or they’re looking at how many adaptive throws had been able to help they have a different measure of success. So when you call in your thinking successes, how many babies have been placed for adoption that year, that may not be the same with agencies looking at success.

And so there are questions that you want to ask to really help you be confident that whatever agency you choose will actually help you adopt a child, they can guarantee you that obviously, right because you have moms who are coming in who are looking at profiles and for making decisions, there is no agency, there’s no humans, I can guarantee you that a program is going to choose your family, but you can vet those agencies and asking them really interviewing them to find out if you’re comfortable working with them, and knowing that they’ve got your back, that they’ll do everything they can to help you right that they’re actually showing your profile to pregnant moms. There have been a lot of agencies in the past few years that I’ve really gotten a lot of heat, because instead of actually showing the profile of the hopeful adoptive parents and birth moms, what they’re doing instead was they were pocketing the money for themselves. And they were letting people’s profiles just sit on the website and actually not really advertising like they said they would the way to really combat that to make sure that you’re not going to work with an agency that’s just going to take your money and run is interviewing them.