Celebrating National Adoption Month: Let It Be Us Believes Every Child Awaiting Adoption Deserves a Loving Home

November is a special month on the calendar for many reasons, and one of them is National Adoption Month. This annual observance is a time to celebrate the countless stories of love, hope, and family that have been created through adoption. It’s also an opportunity to review solutions to the fact that many children in Illinois, and throughout the country, are waiting longer than needed for their forever homes. 

At Let It Be Us our Placement Support Program has been innovatively designed and implemented to help child welfare professionals place children and teens in foster care in the right homes the first time, recognizing each child’s goal to return home or adoption. This Program improves permanency outcomes, a real-life situation in which Illinois ranks extremely low. 

Illinois, like many other states, faces challenges in achieving optimal permanency outcomes for children in foster care who do not have the opportunities to return to their families of origin.  These challenges can include lengthy stays in the foster care system and difficulties in finding suitable adoptive or guardianship placements. 

The success of programs focused on improving permanency and adoption outcomes often depends on several key factors:

• Collaboration: Effective collaboration between child welfare agencies is essential to streamline processes and remove barriers to permanency. In Illinois our system is siloed and at Let It Be Us we have developed an innovative workaround in our Placement Support Program. The Program encourages agencies to work together and provides them with an opportunity to share licensed and open homes.
  
• Timely Decision-Making: Quick and informed decision-making regarding the permanency opportunities for each child is crucial to minimize unnecessary delays. At Let It Be Us our foster home referrals are sent directly to Child Welfare Personnel. 
• Recruitment and Support: Programs that recruit and support foster and adoptive families play a pivotal role in finding loving and stable homes for children. This issue brings diligent recruitment to the forefront, which means we need to recruit families with demographics that match the youth in foster care whom we serve. Diligent recruitment improves permanency. 
• Child-Centered Approach: Placing the best interests of the child at the forefront of decision-making is paramount.
  
• Advocacy and Policy Change: Advocacy efforts can help drive policy changes that prioritize permanency and address systemic change in the child welfare system. The Let It Be Us Placement Support Program provides an opportunity for the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services to grow their efforts toward securing adoptive resources for waiting children. 

By addressing these factors and implementing evidence-based practices, such as the Let It Be Us Placement Support Program, we can help improve permanency outcomes for children in foster care in Illinois. As we enter the month of November, which is National Adoption Month, we look forward to focusing on recruitment, matching and placement for our waiting children through our innovative programming. 

Child Welfare Professionals interested in learning more about the Let It Be Us Placement Support Program should contact:
Susan McConnell
Executive Director
Let It Be Us
susanmcconnell@letitbeus.org
847-528-2044