My Adoption Advisor

Affording adoption is a huge challenge for many hopeful families. Many families need at least some help to afford the $15,000 to $50,000 agency fees, attorney fees, birth mother expenses, travel expenses, and other related costs.

We recently researched ways to afford adoption and collected information from many others who had previously done a tremendous amount of the legwork. Below is the result and I hope you find it useful.

This list of resources can never be long enough.
If you know of other resources please add a comment to this post
or contact us and we will add your ideas to the list.

Adoption-Friendly Workplaces

If you already work at a company that offers adoption benefits then requesting these benefits is probably the easiest way to decrease your out-of-pocket expenses. Review the top 100 adoption-friendly workplaces from The Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption to see if your company is on it.

If you do not see your company listed, ask your human resources or benefits department whether they offer adoption benefits. Just because your company is not on the Dave Thomas list does not mean they do not offer anything.

If they do not provide adoption benefits consider using the free toolkit provided by The Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption to propose to your employer the idea of adding adoption benefits. Your efforts may not help you today, but they may benefit others in the future (and you if you adopt again). Adoption benefits are inexpensive for companies because few employees will use them, but they go a long way in communicating that the company is family-friendly. Your prodding could make the difference.

Fundraisers

Families have come up with some incredibly creative fundraiser ideas to help them afford the high cost of adoption. In a previous post about how to afford infertility (and adoption) we wrote about a family who collected donations through a personal adoption blog and another who held a wine tasting fundraiser. Other families hold garage sales to make extra money.

One Hundred Good Wishes is an organization that helps you collect donations from friends and family. If you have an approved home study you can set up a free One Hundred Good Wishes page to raise financial support for your adoption. Those who visit your page can leave a good wish message and make a donation directly to your PayPal account.

Other fundraiser ideas include:

• Bake sales
• Bingo and raffles
• Family bike-a-thons
• Pamper day (ask a stylist, masseuse, manicurist, etc. to donate services for a day and you charge a modest amount to go toward adoption expenses)

Want more ideas? Use your favorite search engine to search on “fundraiser ideas.” There are plenty of resources out there with great ideas and help with implementation.

Grants

A Child Waits Foundation’s Grant Program is specifically designed to help older children and children with special needs who are still living in international orphanages to become part of a family.

The Gift of Adoption Fund provides grants to those with an approved and current home study from a licensed and accredited adoption agency. The number of biological children or adopted children in the home does not impact eligibility. Grants are awarded regardless of religion, race, age, marital status, or sexual orientation.

God’s Grace Adoption is a non-profit organization dedicated to helping place orphaned children of the world into Christian families. God’s Grace Adoption Ministry works in cooperation with an adoption agency to assist with the family’s financial needs.

HelpUsAdopt.org is a national non-profit financial assistance grant program providing qualified couples and individuals (regardless of race, ethnicity, marital status, gender, religion, sexual orientation, or disability) with grants toward their domestic, international, foster, or special needs adoption expenses. Grants are awarded twice a year in June and December and families must be able to demonstrate financial need.

His Kids Too! has an interesting fundraiser/grant program for families adopting internationally so the families’ personal network can assist them financially with adoption costs. This grant program is set up so donors make tax-deductible donations to His Kids Too! and then families may apply for a grant for the funds generated by donors. It is important to note that all funds generated become the property of His Kids Too! and the organization does not guarantee that all funds received will benefit any particular family’s personal adoption expenses.

The National Adoption Foundation offers grants that are open to all legal adoptions including public or private agency adoptions, international, special needs or adoptions facilitated by an attorney. There is no income requirement.

Parenthood for Me is a wonderful non-profit organization that offers grants for both adoption and medical intervention. Their first grants totaling $12,000 went to 4 families in July 2010. This is a new organization, but their early success will hopefully only result in even more money becoming available for hopeful families.

Resources4Adoption is run by an adoptive parent who did tons of research on grants and loans while she was going through the adoption process. She was frustrated by the lack of up-to-date and consolidated information so she has taken it upon herself to help you make sense of your options.

Shaohannah’s Hope provides grants to families adopting orphans. Funding priority is based on need.

Loans

ABBA Fund provides interest-free loans for Christian couples who are adopting.

A Child Waits Foundation provides low interest adoption loans for families who have exhausted other financial options and cannot proceed with their adoption without their help. This is for families adopting internationally only.

International Association of Hebrew Free Loans offers interest-free loans to people of any religious background. You can contact a local office for details about adoption-related loans.

Oxford Adoption Foundation was formed to help families adopt internationally by providing low interest loans to assist with the expenses associated with the international adoption process.

Military Adoption Benefits

Military adoption benefits are available for service members who adopt a child under 18 years of age. Service members may be reimbursed for qualified adoption expenses up to $2,000 per adoptive child (up to a total of $5,000 if more than one child is adopted) per calendar year.

Tax Credits

Section 23 of the United States Internal Revenue code offers a credit for “qualified adoption expenses” paid or incurred by individual taxpayers. Qualified expenses include: adoption fees, court costs, attorney fees, traveling expenses (including amounts spent for meals and lodging while away from home), and other expenses directly related to and for which the principal purpose is the legal adoption of an eligible child. Talk to a tax professional to learn more.

“Just Ask” Ideas

Airlines: Whether you are adopting domestically or internationally, you may have to make one or more trips that require airfare. Some airlines offer adoption rates for travel related to adoption.

Banks: Local, hometown banks may work hard to help families in the community. Tell them what you are doing and see what happens.

Religious Organizations: Some religious organizations have the ability to help defray some adoption costs.

Too many prospective adoptive families unintentionally sabotage their efforts to match with a prospective birth family because they fail to understand the birth family’s perspective. They come to the adoption process with a huge focus on “ME” or “WE” and although it is completely understandable, the actions that result from such a mindset do not typically help their cause.

“We have suffered enough.”
“We have waited long enough.”
“We have worked hard enough.”
“We have spent enough.”

“WE WANT TO FIND A CHILD!”

The purpose of this article is to help you, a hopeful adoptive parent, understand and then focus on the other perspective – the expectant parent’s perspective. Where are they coming from? This is an important question to answer because if you cannot see and try to understand their perspective, then:

• How can you create an effective adoption profile that “speaks” to them?
• How can you develop a respectful, long-term relationship with them (however open your relationship may be)?
• How can you raise a child who will love both of his or her families?

Consider for a moment what the expectant parents have recently experienced or are currently experiencing:

• They were not planning to get pregnant, but nonetheless, that’s the situation they are in.
• They may have considered having an abortion, but ultimately decided to continue the pregnancy.
• They may have considered parenting their child themselves. They may still be considering this.
  • Can I afford it?
  • What support do I need?
  • How does this affect my goals, my plans, and my future?
  • Can I figure out a way to give my child everything that he or she needs?
• Clearly they are also considering making an adoption plan.
  • How am I supposed to pick parents for my child?
  • How “open” do I want the relationship to be?
  • Will my child hate me?
  • Will I ever get over the pain and loss?
  • Can I trust people I really don’t know that well to love my child as much as I do?

Read these four main bullet points again and pause for just a few seconds after each one to let them sink in.

Having not experienced an unplanned pregnancy myself I am sure that this just scratches the surface in terms of their feelings and struggles. Nonetheless, this is likely some of what is going through their minds when they read your adoption profile and begin their relationship with you.

You can understand now how you and they come together with such divergent perspectives. At its core for you, adoption is all about finding a child. For them, however, adoption is all about finding a family for their child. Read that again; it is incredibly important.

So the key for prospective adoptive families then is to understand and appreciate BOTH perspectives. “Separate Your History From Their Present” means continuing to find meaning and purpose in the experiences that led you to adoption. It also means being careful not to let that past prevent you from focusing fully on the expectant parents and their situation when writing your adoption profile, responding to their emails and phone calls, and meeting with them to explore the possibilities.

There are a lot of reasons why families adopt, but what many families fail to appreciate is that for the most part, those reasons are not particularly important to the expectant parents. Quite simply, expectant parents are consumed with their own situation when they meet you and are rightly focused on figuring out what is best for them and their child, not what you might need.

Given the divergent perspectives described above, failing to separate your history from their present creates opportunities for verbal and non-verbal miscommunication. You will probably never know that it even occurred. You just won’t have a match. The families who deep down in their gut understand this will likely communicate more effectively, match more quickly, and develop a stronger long-term relationship based on true compassion, patience, and love.

Last month, Brian (not his real name) started an email exchange with me after he and his wife attended one of our adoption networking & advertising workshops. Brian and his wife started to set up a Facebook account so they could more easily advertise their desire to adopt, but they were worried about losing their anonymity with prospective birth families. They wanted to be sure that they shared confidential information thoughtfully and on their terms.

Brian decided to email his sister-in-law, a Facebook user, to get her opinion about creating an adoption Facebook page. His sister-in-law replied that she had actually recently seen something similar. “One of my friends,” she said, “must have become a fan of some couple’s page or something because it popped up on my home page.” She sent Brian the link. After Brian and his wife clicked the link they immediately recognized the couple. This couple, who just happened to “pop up” on Brian’s sister-in-law’s page, actually sat right next to Brian and his wife during the workshop. Small world? Yep, and that’s why adoption networking and advertising are so powerful.

Brian and his wife are still considering their options, but the power of Facebook was certainly eye-opening to them. Brian’s sister-in-law did not even know this couple, but the information about them was “pushed” to her because a friend of hers “liked” the couple’s adoption page.

The question that families typically struggle answering when considering how to leverage Facebook is exactly what Brian and his wife are struggling to answer:

How do you spread the word using Facebook while
simultaneously maintaining control of confidential information?

Let’s start with the Facebook facts.

Facebook’s reputation on privacy is not great. In December 2009, Facebook revamped its privacy settings. Not long afterward, 10 privacy and consumer groups filed a complaint with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. Almost every day another article comes out deriding Facebook and its privacy approach and just yesterday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled his company’s revamped privacy tools to address the criticism.

Facebook has two privacy-related challenges:

1. They need to keep some level of information public because the core of its business model rests on the need to enable friends to find each other. That’s what social networking is. If users hide all of their identifying information, no one can find their friends.
2. Facebook also wants users to share information because the more they share, the easier it is for marketers to advertise to their target markets and the more money Facebook can make as a result.

Facebook continues to search for the right balance and the right way to give users control. That being said, Facebook’s privacy settings are not even an issue when it comes to creating a Facebook page similar to what the family from Brian’s workshop created. The reason, ironically, is that you don’t want to limit who can see your information. To understand this statement you need to know that Facebook offers two types of accounts: personal “Profile” accounts and more business-oriented “Page” accounts.

Profile Accounts

Profile accounts are for individuals only and per Facebook’s policy, must contain the person’s real first and last name. Most Facebook users create a profile account. A profile account allows friends to find you and you to find them. For adoption outreach purposes, these personal profile accounts are a great tool to use to expand your network and ask your friends to help you spread the word about your adoption plans.

Page Accounts

Page accounts represent a business; a brand, product, or organization; or an artist, band, or public figure. A page account is visible to anyone on the Internet (unlike a profile account where you would likely want to greatly limit what everyone, especially “non-friends,” can see). During our training we suggest that families create an adoption page just like what the family who sat next to Brian did.

If a Facebook user wants to follow a business or artist they can “Like” the page (this was previously called “Become a Fan”). Liking a business page means they automatically see the business’s posts, links, and other information on their personal profile page. The link that Brian’s sister-in-law sent him was to a “business” page because it showed up on her profile when a friend of hers “liked” it.

Pages are a great advertising vehicle because as we learned from Brian, word spreads quickly outside of your direct network. One person “likes” your page and their friends see it. Some of them will check it out and hopefully some of those people will “like” it, too. An example of a Facebook “page” is the My Adoption Advisor page (Have you “Liked” us yet by the way?).

The Bottom Line

So now that you know the difference between a profile account (e.g. Tom Smith) and a page account (e.g. Tom & Sue are Hoping to Adopt) and that you want everyone on the Internet to be able to see your adoption page information, how on earth do you protect your privacy when creating a Facebook adoption page? It’s simple. Do not put confidential information on your page! It actually has nothing to do with Facebook’s privacy settings.

• Don’t share your last name.
• Don’t “Like” your page from your personal profile account (that contains your last name) or someone can match pictures and identify your last name from your profile account.
• Don’t share your home phone number on your page. Anyone can do a reverse lookup on your phone number to find your last name, current address, previous cities that you have lived in, and relatives. And that’s only the information that is available for free!
• Don’t share your work email address since you do not want anyone to know where you work.
• Don’t create an email address with your last name.
• Don’t put confidential information in your posts.
• Don’t forget to analyze closely any pictures that you post to your page. Do they communicate something you don’t want to communicate?
• Don’t forget to monitor what others post on your page. You want friends and others to post supporting information so expectant parents can learn a little more about you, but those who post do not think about what they are saying from a privacy or adoption perspective. It is your job to delete inappropriate posts on your page (which you have access to do).

A Facebook page is a free and powerful tool
that is great for adoption networking and advertising purposes.

You control the content and what others can learn about you.

Don’t let concerns about Facebook privacy settings
prevent you from leveraging Facebook business/adoption pages.

Open adoption has brought many gifts to my life, not the least of which are my two wonderful children, but it is the gift of inspiration that led me to start My Adoption Advisor.

I remember first considering adoption and deciding that international adoption was the way to go. I was scared, frankly, of birth families and of the risks associated with domestic infant adoption. There are risks for all members of the triad, but my fear is what forced me to hold domestic adoption at arms length. At least that was the case until I heard for the first time some birth mothers speak on a panel at an adoption information series.

Awe. Respect. Love. I remember the moment like it was yesterday. These three words are the ones that came to my mind after listening to women speak about their unplanned pregnancies, the options they were considering, and the choices they finally made.

Now I am not so naïve as to think that all birth families – mothers, fathers, grandparents, and others – have experiences that are similar to the ones shared on that panel or even the ones shared by my children’s birth families. There are many stories out there, both more positive and certainly more negative. Nonetheless, it is incredibly inspirational to me when birth families freely make an informed choice to permanently place in someone else’s care the child they love most in this world.

My children’s birth families have inspired me in many ways – to be a better parent, less selfish, more sensitive to others, and to even change careers. In fact, the creation of my company, My Adoption Advisor, is the direct result of not only my experience with adoption in general, but also quite specifically my relationship with my oldest child’s birth father.

I had spent five years in the consulting industry before accepting multiple roles in information technology and product development in a large medical technology company over the course of more than a decade. I was a big company guy leading performance improvement initiatives throughout a multi-billion dollar division. I had a comfortable, stable job that provided a nice salary. Things were good, but something was missing.

What I saw in the career choices made by my son’s birth father seemed like the opposite of my own choices. He lacked some of the job security and income that I enjoyed, but he had what I did not – a passion for his work. His eyes would light up whenever he talked about his work. It was as if “work” was not even the right word to use. His hobby and his career interests were one in the same. This harmony seemed to create for him feelings of happiness and satisfaction that I lacked.

So off I went – ok, it was a few years later – to search for a stronger harmony between my passion and my work. Eventually, I connected the right dots and developed the business plan for My Adoption Advisor.

I built my family through adoption, but I also developed new relationships with people who would not have otherwise been in my life. They taught me how to let my passion, instead of my resume, steer my career choices and I have never loved my “work” more. Through my work at My Adoption Advisor I hope to follow my son’s birth father’s lead and inspire others to do what might sound foreign or scary (or both!) to them.

I came across a great article today titled Baby or Bust: Infertile Couples Turn to the Web to Raise Funds for IVF. The article shares stories about some families who experienced infertility and struggled to afford treatments. Unfortunately, the challenges with affording adoption are just as common. Both infertility treatments and adoption can cost tens of thousands of dollars and the high cost is a real barrier for many families.

What I loved about the article were the creative ways that families came up with to afford their treatments. One family created a blog to share their struggle with infertility. They also asked for – and received – donations. Nearly $6,500 in donations! Another couple held a photo contest and charged entrants $10 apiece. A third family used social networking sites Facebook and Twitter to invite their family and friends to a special wine-tasting fundraiser. Nearly 150 people paid $35 each to attend the event and in combination with a silent auction of items donated by friends, the couple raised more than $8,000.

The article closes with some comments about the ethics of raising money for IVF. To be honest, I did not quite connect with the ideas presented by Hank Greely, a biomedical ethicist at Stanford University. Mr. Greely cautioned that people who donate might have a heightened interest in the pregnancy and child, somehow feeling entitled to a special relationship or more information than what families would like to share. I supposed some might feel that way, but the idea seemed like a stretch to me and easily managed by the parents.

Anyway, I like to share creative idea that families have to afford adoption and infertility. If you want another idea, read about the family that held a successful garage sale.

Adoption Connection, an Ohio non-profit adoption agency, had a wonderful article in their Family Ties newsletter (see page 3) about their revamped adoption program. “Instead of asking you to WAIT with us we are inviting you to WORK with us,” says Samantha Tebelman, Director of the Jewish Family Service adoption program. As you will learn from the article, their new approach is about empowering pre-adoptive families to find their future child’s birth family and adopt more quickly at lower expense.

My Adoption Advisor is proud to be working with Adoption Connection and influencing the way prospective adoptive families and adoption professionals work together.