Adoptions Together, Inc.

Adoptions Together was established in 1990 in direct response to a community need to serve families in need. We are a child and family health and welfare agency that provides therapeutic support and education for children and their families, works to build healthy, lifelong connections between children and families, and provides advocacy for best practices in child welfare systems. For over 30 years, Adoptions Together's work has touched the lives of more than 8,500 children and thousands of families.

Our programs strive to ensure that children of all ages will have the opportunity to grow up in healthy, supportive and permanent families by addressing the issues of abuse, neglect and family stability at four critical points of impact:
(1) Reducing the number of children in foster care through prevention focused on stabilization of first families who are struggling, reunification efforts and permanency through adoption/kinship/guardianship;
(2) Recruiting, training, evaluating and supporting families who wish to adopt or provide guardianship for children unable to be raised in their birth family and may currently be residing in the public foster care system;
(3) Providing specialized counseling, education, and support services necessary to help children heal from past trauma and keep adoptive, foster, kinship, guardianship and birth families strong; and
(4) Serving as a regional expert on child welfare issues including the impact of trauma for a broad spectrum of educational, mental health, and other child serving professionals and community stakeholders.

More specifically, we impact systems on the micro and macro levels by providing the following services:

1. All options counseling and education to expectant parents facing an unintended pregnancy.
2. Counseling and support to children and families before, during, and after their adoption or reunification journey.
3. Permanency placement for children of all ages- from birth to older youth in foster care.
4. Recruiting, screening, educating, and preparing families to adopt children recently born and those currently in state foster care.
5. Offering counseling, education and support services to keep families strong and ensure successful placements.
6. Offering permanency-competent clinical training and education to professionals in mental health, health care, and education with cutting-edge treatment skills and best practices in treating issues specific to families with children who have been adopted.
7. Providing specialized training and organizational transformation to understand and create trauma responsive environments.
8. Advocating for continued improvements in child welfare systems to ensure that children do not end up in foster care due to systemic problems within our governmental systems.

Adoptions Together focuses heavily on efforts that:
1) Strategically direct the agency to broaden it's footprint of services to ensure families and children in our community are stable, sustained and thriving.
2) Increase the accessibility of the placement and therapeutic support services to ensure we are reaching those who need us.
4) Increase the scope, breadth and depth of our professional training regarding trauma, attachment, principles of neuroscience and issues specific to the child welfare population on both an individual and institutional level.
5) Continue to build a foundation of financial support through a robust and effective donor engagement strategy which includes establishing an endowment for long term sustainability.

We will continue on our strategic directory to increase our footprint of services that are trauma-responsive, attachment focused, and based on promising and best practices in our field. Additionally, we will continue on our path to maximize our technology for marketing and program services/security. Some of the key strategies we have for achieving our 2017 goals are as follows:

1. Reorganizing our agency under the following broad pillars: AdoptionsTogether (child placement and related services), FamilyWorks Together (education, training and special projects), and our general and administrative (finance, HR, technology). This reorganization will better use our internal resources, increase our access to projects and funders that are not solely based on child placement services, and reduce duplication across projects.

2. Maximizing our technology approach: this year we will be moving all of our storage and servers into secure cloud access through a grant funded project that will increase our security on client data and heavily reduce lag times, thus increasing productivity across the agency.

3. We have organized a special board/staff committee to design a robust and comprehensive outcomes measurement strategy

4. We have a new committee focused on ensuring the mission and the funding are in strategic alliance to best serve the future of the agency

Over our 29 year history, Adoptions Together has developed numerous resources that allow us to achieve our mission of ensuring permanency for children. We have a dedicated and knowledgeable staff, as well as an experienced and committed board that establishes goals and evaluates progress. Strong relationships with local governments allow us to create exciting and innovative new programs that fill the gaps in the public child welfare system. Our programming is funded by a healthy mix of revenue streams, including fee-for-service, private foundations, public grants and contracts, and individual/corporate donations. This diversity of funding has sustained Adoptions Together's work in the community. Internally, our strong information technology resources enable the agency to communicate and manage client and funding information in an efficient and effective manner. The agency takes pride in the adoption of evidence based practices in its clinical work and continually strives to achieve best practices in non-profit management.

In terms of our 2017 areas of growth, to date we have achieved the following:

Goal 1. Reorganizing our agency under the following broad pillars: AdoptionsTogether (child placement and related services), FamilyWorks Together (education, training and special projects), and our general and administrative (finance, HR, technology). This reorganization will better use our internal resources, increase our access to projects and funders that are not solely based on child placement services, and reduce duplication across projects.

Progress: we have just completed this re-organization and rolled out the new name of FamilyWorks Together. We are following a dedicated social media and integrated marketing approach to building this brand in order to grow those services and our corresponding footprint.

Goal 2. Maximizing our technology approach: this year we will be moving all of our storage and servers into secure cloud access through a grant funded project that will increase our security on client data and heavily reduce lag times, thus increasing productivity across the agency.

Progress: we just received approval on the associated funding in February and have chosen our technology partner for this project. Our next steps are to finalize the overall plan and then actualize it.

Goal 3: We have organized a special board/staff committee to design a robust and comprehensive outcomes measurement strategy

Progress: the committee has been formed and the plan is in development

Goal 4: We have a new committee focused on ensuring the mission and the funding are in strategic alliance to best serve the future of the agency

Progress: the committee has been formed. The first project underway in the committee is to examine our fee for service levels and complete a market analysis of our area competitors. Additionally, we are beginning to look at one specific, contractual program that has changed it's payment approach and discussing ways to mitigate this change financially.