Adoption Opportunities

Program Description

The program provides discretionary funds for projects designed to eliminate barriers to adoption and help find permanent families for children who would benefit from adoption, particularly children with special needs.

The major programs areas, as mandated by the legislation, are:

1. The development and implementation of a national adoption and foster care data gathering and analysis system
2. The development and implementation of a national adoption information exchange system
3. The development and implementation of an adoption training and technical assistance program
4. Increasing the placements in adoptive families of minority children who are in the foster care and have the goal of adoption with a specials emphasis on recruitment of minority families
5. Post-legal adoption services for families who have adopted children with special needs including day treatment and respite care
6. Support the placement of children in kinship care arrangements, pre-adoptive, or adoptive homes
7. Study the efficacy of state contracting with public and private agencies (including community-based and other organizations)
8. Increase the number of older children adopted from foster care, emphasizing several child specific recruitment strategies (media campaigns to inform the public of the needs of older children available for adoption; training personnel in older children’s needs and recruiting families to adopt older children)
9. To improve efforts to eliminate interjurisdictional adoption barriers
10. Study manner in which interstate placements are financed; best practice recommendations for inter and intra state adoptions and how State definitions of special needs differentiate and/or group similar categories of children
11. Research adoption outcomes and factors that affect these outcomes