Finding vs. Waiting

I remember when my husband and I were new and just beginning the adoption process. We verbally told friends and family, usually in person, that we were adopting. One friend told me that she just received an email from another friend that was adopting. She said the email had a link to their profile and they encouraged her to send the email on to more people.

My internal first response was "Weird." Being rather new still to the adoption world, I hadn't heard about "finding" techniques that help adoptive couples connect with potential birth parents. When Jared and I discussed doing something similar we felt uncomfortable with the idea of advertising ourselves in this way. We were still situating ourselves to the fact that we, for all appearances, were "applying" to be parents like you would a job. I think planning an advertisement campaign was beyond our emotional capacity at the time.

Since then, I have heard and seen more and more successful adoptions that have taken place because the couple was actively searching and finding their child. We have changed our opinion from "weird & uncomfortable" to "good idea & helpful." So I encourage you to prayerfully consider different ideas and options on getting the word out that your family is hoping to adopt.

Here are just a few ideas:

Facebook
Here is an article about how one couple connected with their birth parents by posting their adoption flyer on Facebook.

Jeff & Anna members of our Indiana/Kentucky FSA have an adoption page on Facebook. If anyone else in our chapter has a Facebook adoption page, we would like to hear about it!

IN/KY FSA is now a group on Facebook. Make a request to join our group!

Adoption Pass Along Cards

Here is a link to a company where you can see examples and order adoption pass along cards.

Check out this post from another FSA blog about different ideas on how to pass out your adoption pass along cards.

Read this post about an LDS couple who connected with their birth mother because she received their pass along card.

You could potentially make your own professional looking pass along cards using Photoshop. Would anyone be interested in attending a workshop at our next FSA conference on making your own adoption pass along cards?

We will post more ideas on how to find and connect with birth parents in future posts. If you have ideas and/or success stories on "finding" techniques please email them to us at indianafsa@gmail.com or leave a comment!
-EE