Grantee Projects You Gotta Believe!
The Older Child Adoption & Permanency Movement, Inc.
Long Island Opening Adoption’s Door to Teens (May 2008)
Major Activities and Accomplishments to Date
The Long Island Opening Adoption’s Door To Teens Project is a unique and innovative partnership with the two suburban counties right outside of New York City known as Long Island, Nassau County and Suffolk County, and a number of supportive organizations within those counties including residential treatment centers and advocates who work in the Family Court systems of both counties. You Gotta Believe’s sole mission as an organization is to develop innovative ways to find adoptive and other permanent parents for teens and pre-teens in the New York State foster care system before they leave foster care.
The Long Island Opening Adoption’s Door to Teens Project is a project that was designed to reach even the most resistant of teenagers: teens that are so loyal to their own birth families that they actually believe that being adopted is a violation of their bond to their birth families.
The project works to tackle the issue of resistant-to-permanency teens on five fronts:
- Working therapeutically with teens on their own personal issues.
- Training the traditionally prepared foster parents who have teens residing with them, who have not made a commitment to the teen, about the urgency of permanency so that they either may adopt themselves or lead us to someone who will.
- Training the staff that work with the teens directly from all over the spectrum of foster care, up to and including cooks and maintenance staff at group care facilities, as well as social workers, therapists, child care staff, court personnel and anyone else who has day-to-day contact with the teen.
- To prepare prospective adoptive and permanent parents who come forward to permanently parent the teens in foster care of the great need these teens have to continue their ties and connections to their birth families, siblings, and fictive kin such as former foster parents and life friends.
- The project also offers a variety of opportunities for teens to share the same space with prospective families including:
- Hiring the Teen as our Training Consultant
- Hiring a Teen to Work around the Office
- Inviting Waiting Teens to all Agency Events
- Setting Up Individualized Special Events
| To date, the project has achieved the following permanency outcomes: | |
| 73 | Referrals |
| 7 | Adoption Finalizations |
| 11 | Permanent Placements |
| 2 | Bio-parent Placements |
| 5 | Permanently Placed with Original Foster Family |
| 7 | Pending Placements who are already matched and visiting |
| 1 | Pending Adoption Finalization |
For more information, please contact:
Patrick O’Brien
You Gotta Believe!
The Older Child Adoption & Permanency Movement, Inc.
1728 Mermaid Avenue
Brooklyn, NY 11224
Phone: 718.372.3003
www.yougottabelieve.org/us.htm