Andrew Stone

The biennial meeting of all Commonwealth Heads of Government (CHOGM) is scheduled to take place in June in Kigali, Rwanda and Hopeland has been working with a group of like-minded organizations to ensure that care reform for children without parental care is on the agenda.

Rwanda has made great progress and has been a global leader in curtailing the use of orphanages, and instituting alternative positive interventions to allow every child to grow up in a safe family environment. Since 2012, the country has closed 25 of 39 orphanages. This means that the next CHOGM meeting will be a great opportunity to highlight this issue and see the governments of one-third of the world’s population take action to support the most vulnerable children.

CHOGM is an important meeting where key decisions impacting the 2.4 billion people who live in the Commonwealth are made. It is also an important opportunity for development focused non-profit organizations (such as Hopeland) to make progress on vital goals.

For example at the last CHOGM in London in 2018 Hopeland’s CEO had important meetings with various officials that allowed us to develop our international work.

However, as with all other gatherings large and small – the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic is threatening the event and may mean there is a need to postpone until 2021. Africa is beginning to confirm more cases of the COVID-19 disease and Rwanda has just this week ordered a shutdown of the type we have seen in Europe and North America.

In any case, Hopeland is part of the Civil Society Working Group for Care Reform in the Commonwealth which has been working together to ensure that children without a safe, loving family are supported and in the hope that a policy agreement can be made on the importance of ending orphanage care and ensuring family care is valued across all 54 commonwealth countries.

This work has included Hopeland’s Campaign Director taking part in monthly video calls with colleagues in the U.S., Europe, Africa, and Australia to ensure we do all that we can to get this issue high up the CHOGM agenda. The group is drafting text that highlights the importance of taking action in this area, outreach to various organizations and officials involved in planning the event, and working together on the possibility of a side event at CHOGM to highlight this vital issue.

Of course the safety and well-being of the people of Rwanda and all those who would attend the event is the most important thing – but when the event is able to go ahead we hope to be able to advocate for this vital issue on the global stage. 

Thea Ramirez has never been one to take the easy route. She is an incredibly dedicated CEO, wife and mom of three kids who balances the hundreds of daily tasks involved with running her successful non profit organization. After talking to me today, she had to prepare a dish for a potluck event at her kids’ school that afternoon, get on a weekly stand-up call with her tech development team and then meet with donors, to give you just a snapshot of a normal afternoon for her.

“I am a clinical social worker by training and originally had my sights on becoming  a counselor” Thea tells me, but quickly realized this wasn’t her calling, finding a job as a director of a private licensed infant adoption agency. This would set her on a path to founding Adoption-Share, the non profit organization that created the Family-Match program.

It was the Family-Match program that connected Ramirez with Hopeland when we worked together on a screening of Instant Family in New York. Ensuring every child has a safe, loving family is a cornerstone of both organizations.

Adoption-Share

Thea’s early experiences in adoption fueled a passion to create an organization that is really upsetting the apple cart, first in private infant adoption and now in foster care.

“I had gone into private infant adoption thinking this was going to be amazing, it’s going to be helping families and kids but actually found it to be an industry with a lot of money changing hands, a lot of attorneys coming to hospital rooms and giving out checks”. “It just felt wrong”, said Ramirez, explaining that she felt called to action by a feeling that it wasn’t enough to just leave that job behind but that she had to do something to truly help – “that something became Adoption-Share.”

“I launched the organization right after having my second child,” Thea remarked, “there’s no better time when you’re not sleeping anyways, so I maximized the hours between 1am and 6am for the first six months and did everything to get it off the ground.”

What needed to change?

I asked Thea to paint us a picture of what needed to change.  “In the early days, when I was just starting out, I knew I needed a way to cut around the industry-like arm of the private infant adoption agency that really demanded families go to a brick and mortar organization; pay thousands of dollars; and then get a number and wait in line.”

“What made it worse is that these families would think they were in a line, but you’re not in a line, you’re in a pool and that pool is not objective, it’s very subjective. In some cases you’re chosen not necessarily even by an expectant parent you’re chosen by what is in the best interest of the agency and how they can best optimize their pool of financial dollars.”

On the other hand, Adoption-Share says as long as you have a home study and you’ve been licensed by a child placement agency that’s licensed in your state you should be able to work with any licensed agency in the country. It was this realization that led to the creation of an online network to provide a way to allow home study approved families to work directly with licensed child placement agencies.

Was there a special moment that told you it could work, I asked Thea? “I think that the kicker for us was when we had two active duty parents in the Air Force who had just completed their home study and were both deployed, get matched on our network while serving overseas. 42 days after coming home stateside from their deployment they were holding their son for the first time in a hospital room!”

Great moments like these generated a lot of publicity for the organization, they were featured on CNN and invited to ring the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange. “What we were doing was unheard of, people were finalizing an adoption through our online network within eight months of starting their home study process.”

Creation of Family-Match

“The publicity that grew with the success of our online network for private infant adoption resulted in child welfare leaders approaching our team. They wanted to find out if they could leverage our solution for private infant adoption to help children in foster care with a goal of adoption get matched with a permanent, loving family through adoption.

We quickly realized that though a completely different process, the barriers keeping children from achieving permanency through adoption in the foster care system mimicked what we had seen in the private infant adoption community.  Families are being corralled into pools whereby they are visible only to the placement workers from their own agencies. This fragmentation of an entire population of waiting resource families is where we saw an opportunity for the biggest improvement. You literally have families in every state across this country waiting longer to adopt kids from foster care than the kids are waiting to be adopted. For decades we have misdiagnosed the issue as having a lack of demand when truthfully what we have, and what we are helping correct through our Family-Match Program, is solving what is fundamentally a connection problem.”

Family-Match is solving the connection problem by helping workers more efficiently and appropriately connect waiting children with waiting families. Designed as a centralized repository or common platform for an entire state, Family-Match leverages its proprietary compatibility assessments authored by former senior researchers from eHarmony to help ensure that to the extent possible matches made on Family-Match are matches that can last a lifetime. By using algorithms and digital technology to place children with the best families who are going to provide the stable, loving home a child needs Adoption-Share has really changed the way we leverage data for child welfare.

“Family-Match is operating currently in the Commonwealth of Virginia and in the State of Florida with plans to hopefully roll out in Tennessee as well. About eight other states have reached out to find out how to start the process.”

Adoption Awareness Month

This interview was timed to coincide with Adoption Awareness Month and Ramirez told me that Adoption-Share wants to use November to highlight the waiting families, families that are approved and licensed, families who have gone through the arduous process of becoming home study approved and yet their homes are sitting empty.  “We should be putting those people up on billboards and interviewing them on the news.”

If you’re inspired by Adoption Awareness Month then “there are ways that people can step up and help. It could mean becoming a respite family, someone who can give another foster parentor adoptive parent a date night or a weekend off from fostering”.

“There needs to be an army of people that are just willing and licensed and safe to take in kids to give people the respite that they need. And then there’s other ways: offering to transport kids, mentoring, you know, there’s so many ways that people can help”. You can find out more about the need to mobilize American families to support vulnerable children here.

A Reason to be hopeful?

Is there a reason to be hopeful I asked at the end of our interview. “Absolutely! I would not be doing this without that as the very  beacon we are all running towards. There has not been a more solvable problem that can be achieved in our lifetime. We know mathematically that the numbers are there.  There are over 120,000 kids in this country that have a goal of adoption and we know that the number of willing and interested families is over 200,000.

“Ensuring every child with a goal of adoption knows the warm embrace of a forever family is something that can be achieved.”  Indeed, for those reading with a desire to learn more- Thea is eager to tell you how. For more information go to adoption-share.com

 

May is Foster Care Awareness Month and it could not come at a more important time. Foster families across the country are stepping up for some of the most vulnerable children in our society. Nonetheless, the foster care system is in crisis as the number of children in need of care is rising year after year. We need better solutions to give these young people the future they deserve.

Foster care is a temporary living arrangement for youth whose parents are unable, unwilling, or unfit to care for their children. This situation can be caused by a wide variety of factors but the annual U.S. Government AFCARS report tells us the major reasons for foster care are neglect, parental drug abuse, and physical abuse – amongst others such as housing scarcity, parental incarceration, and alcohol and sexual abuse.

In the U.S. we have rightly moved on from orphanages. The question remains however, how much better for youth is foster care if many of those placed in care bounce from home to home and many are never reunited with their family or placed into an adoptive family that can give them the love, and the stability, that they need.

This lack of stability only worsens as the number of children entering foster care continues to increase. At the end of 2017 there were 442,995 children in foster care – a number that has increased every year since 2010. If we are to achieve a world in which every child has the safe, loving family they deserve then this number needs to reduce, not increase.

The most significant factor in this increase is the number of children entering the foster care system due to the opioid crisis. Every year since 2015 (when this was first measured) the number of children needing foster care because of parental drug abuse has increased. The latest figures show 36% of children entering foster care in 2017 came from a situation with parental drug abuse. With no clear solutions from government this number will likely only continue to increase.

Of course this factor only adds to the instability of foster care and a lack of permanence for our most vulnerable youth – something they need more than anything. This instability also means too often governments struggle to retain enough foster parents to give the youth in their system the care they need.

By reducing the number of children entering foster care, particularly by tackling the impacts of the opioid crisis, and increasing the number of foster families available to provide support we can improve the lot for these children who need our help the most. That is what Hopeland is working to achieve.

There is a reason to be hopeful, however. In NYC, where Hopeland is based, the Administration for Children’s Services has overseen a dramatic decline in the number of children in foster care from 16,854 in 2007 to 8,732 now. That means thousands of NYC children now have a permanent home to call their own that will allow them to be their best and thrive.

Hopeland will continue to advocate for policies that will achieve this success nationwide. We believe working towards systemic change is the only viable solution – simply stepping in when the problem is at its worst is neither sufficient, nor sustainable. Together we need to tackle these issues at root to ensure a better future for every vulnerable child. Follow us on social media throughout May to learn more about this important issue and what we can do.

Hopeland’s Campaign Director interviews Peter Kamau in the first of our Better Ways Champions series

Peter Kamau jumps out from the crowd in most rooms he stands in with his infectious personality and ear-to-ear smile. When you meet him you might not expect to find out that from the age of three to 18 he lived with his five siblings in an orphanage in Kenya.

“I may come across as well established with a success in the advocacy work that I am doing,” Peter tells me, “but the reality is that I’m an exception and not the norm, the norm is that hundreds and thousands of children in orphanages and those that aged out of the system are struggling or have lost hope for life out there.”

Kamau founded the organization Child in Family Focus and is part of the advisory team at the  Kenya Society of Care Leavers – pushed by his desire to help those who found themselves in the same difficult place that he and his siblings were.

A Childhood Spent in an Orphanage: A Dream Which Never Came True

“The loss of my mother when I was six weeks old and my daddy a year later left me together with my five elder siblings in need of care and protection.” Tragically losing his mother in a building collapse and then his father soon after left Peter and his five elder siblings in need of care and support. It wasn’t immediately forthcoming, however.

The Children’s Court ordered that his two eldest brothers be placed in a reformatory for boys in conflict with the law and his two eldest sisters in a similar institution for girls, even though none had any behavioral problems or action against them. Meanwhile Peter and his youngest sister were placed in a home for children with disabilities. “After losing our parents we were separated from each other for two years in very inappropriate facilities,” Kamau recalled, “contact with our siblings during these years was a dream which never came true.”

It would take a further two years for the six siblings to be reunited in one orphanage and even then the housing of children according to their ages meant that “interactions with my brothers and sisters was limited to weekends and field visits and on occasions during mealtimes.”

Sadly Peter says that this “separation and limited interaction with my elder siblings is still felt today – there is no tight bond with my siblings and it can take over six months before we check on each other. Our eldest brother’s suicide in the year 2007 was a wakeup call for me and my remaining siblings to look out for each other often.”

Aside from this Peter feels his years in the orphanage were a “bittersweet experience with a share of highs and lows,” yes he had peers to play with and engage in mischief but he tells me “a lot of this mischief was so that we could get attention, as any attention was better than none.” Being one of thirty children cared for by two house mothers who worked in shifts meant it was very hard to get the attention, love, and care as well as guidance that is needed for a happy and healthy childhood.

“We never lacked material things, the biggest lack was love and attachment from consistent caring adults.”

The Inspiration to Work for Change: Family is the Most Important Source of Love

Knowing what children growing up in orphanages really need is the love and care of a family inspired Peter to turn down a career in communications and instead return to work for nine years in the orphanage that he had lived in.

Peter remembered being a child in the orphanage and the impact that seeing his friends being introduced to foster and adoptive families had on him, “I kept hoping that I would be next, every time visitors came to the orphanage to visit or bring donations was an opportunity to be at my best behavior so that I could increase my chances of being loved and taken into a family.”

In spite of what he knew about the needs of the children separated from their families he says that “a lot of the referrals that we got were from the chiefs and leaders in the communities for children who had one or both parents still alive.” Poverty, not the loss of their parents was the primary cause for them to be in an orphanage.

“Family is the most important source of love, it is the most important source of attention” knowing that these children had families who could be caring for them compels Kamau to continue his work.

Peter’s Connection to Hopeland

Hopeland is a proud member of ReThink Orphanages, a global coalition aiming to change the way we care and bring awareness to the damaging reality of orphanages. This is how we came into contact with Peter who plays a starring role in the documentary film ‘The Love You Give’. You can watch and share the film here.

I asked Peter whether being involved in this project inspired him? “Definitely” he beamed back. “Because I got a platform where I could get the message to a bigger audience in the interest of vulnerable children.’’ What do you hope people watching the film will gain? “I believe that it will bring forth mindset changes that will give them a better understanding of the issue of orphanages and voluntourism.”

By having the chance to work with Kamau it became clear that his work and Hopeland’s has a lot in common. While Hopeland is a global non-profit finding better ways to keep children in families, Kamau tells me that Child in Family Focus has a similar mission “to uphold every child’s right to family based care and see a Kenya where Family Based Care for Orphaned and Vulnerable Children is the norm rather than a privilege.”

“What Hopeland and Child in Family Focus is doing as well as other organizations is a much needed job that is aimed at making a world of difference to children, it continues to be an inspiration for me.”

What Needs to Change: Would I Want this for my Child?

“We have the wrong perception,” Kamau preaches towards the end of our interview: “that orphanages have more to offer than children’s families.”

How can this be the case, I asked him? As he says in ‘The Love You Give’, poverty is an incredible push factor for separating children from families in Kenya and around the world. “It is not only material poverty,” he says, “sometimes it is a poverty of the mind of thinking this is the right thing to do.” It is Kamau’s mission, which he shares with Hopeland and the whole ReThink Orphanages coalition, to change this thinking.

Kamau is aware that the problem is especially pervasive however, “Kenya has laws that allow children to benefit from alternative family care such as foster care, guardianship, and adoptions. However, many unscrupulous orphanage managers and directors retain children in their facilities to attract donations and volunteers, in effect perpetuating harm on the children, perpetuating more separation of children from their families, and also perpetuating the mushrooming of these facilities.”

I had to ask him: what would he say to those still donating to orphanages? “I commend the donors for their generosity and commitment to care for vulnerable children”, Kamau begins. However, “I respectfully ask them to pause for a moment and take a retrospective look at individual children that have gone through the orphanages that they fund: can these children be accounted for as leading successful lives? The benchmark should be – would I want this for my child?”

A Reason to be Hopeful?

“A reason to be hopeful,” Kamau says, “is first and foremost there is momentum, there is a shift in the way people care for children. Many different countries are engaging in care reform efforts.”

Peter is a man of faith, in fact as soon as our interview ended he was hosting a fellowship group at his house, and he tells me that he takes hope from scripture, specifically Proverb 23:18 which says There is surely a future hope for you, and your hope will not be cut off.

“Even for the children growing up in the system today there is hope and it will not be cut off and thanks to organizations like Child in Family Focus, Hopeland, and Better Care Network, amongst others there is surely light at the end of the tunnel for these children, and not an oncoming train.”

Hopeland is proud to announce that in partnership with Thankful we will be a leading organization in the #Thankful4Women campaign.

The spirit behind the campaign is that the mere act of being thankful has the power to increase attention, mood, energy, and many other important aspects of our lives. If we stopped more often to be thankful for what we have our world would be a happier, more peaceful place.

We all have a lot to be thankful for and we at Hopeland are especially thankful for the many inspirational and impactful women in our lives – that’s why we’re part of this campaign! We believe that by empowering women and girls they will strengthen their families and allow them to grow.

Check out some of the beautiful posts people from all corners of the globe have already posted here!

Take a moment to be #Thankful4 an amazing woman or girl by:

1. Letting us know about them on social media by posting on Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook
2. Tag the person you’re thankful for as well as @OurHopeland and @Thankfulorg
3. Don’t forget to use the hashtag #Thankful4Women so we can celebrate them together!
4. Encourage your friends to share and post their own messages!

Check out our pinned Instagram story for a template that you can use!

We’re thankful for our amazing Co-Founder Deborra-lee Furness and the many other women who are fighting for justice. Thankfulness is a virtue we can all appreciate the strength of; it encourages us to practice gratefulness and truly value the sweet and tender things in life – like a safe, loving, family.

We hope you will join this incredible campaign!

All children count but not all children are counted. In 2016, Hopeland rallied a campaign with these words and, in partnership with over 160 different organizations, pleaded that the United Nations reconsider its approach to counting the numbers of vulnerable children in the world. You can read more about the campaign and why it is important here.

By putting pressure on the UN, Hopeland and its partner organizations successfully prompted new methods of collecting data that ensured that vulnerable children, no matter their circumstances, were accounted for. This meant street children, children in unregistered orphanages, refugee children and any child that would otherwise remain invisible should now be considered when monitoring the SDGs.

But now we need to keep applying that same pressure.

Just last year the UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, called for a huge increase in funding so that all countries can meet the targets and provide adequate data to show that they are doing this for every person in their countries. His 2018 report, just released, however shows that there is much more work to do. We need to raise our voices for all the children, even those the global community isn’t listening too, so we can hold global leaders accountable and ensure they follow through on their commitments.

Mr. Guterres says in the foreword of the annual report “in some areas, progress is insufficient to meet the Agenda’s goals and targets by 2030.” Sadly, he adds that “this is especially true for the most disadvantaged and marginalized groups.”

Specifically regarding the results of the ‘All Children Count’ campaign the Secretary General says that “Today’s technology makes it possible to collate the data we need to keep the promise to leave no one behind” but yet we have not seen enough progress to be confident that all children will be counted by 2030.

Guterres says we need to “inject a sense of urgency”, Hopeland couldn’t agree more and supports his call for more “political leadership, resources, and commitment to use the tools now available.”

You can be sure that we will keep the pressure on – because nothing can be more important than making sure that all children are counted, not just those who are easiest to find.  

– Andrew Stone

On March 8th, the world collectively recognized women who empower and strengthen one another by celebrating their social, economic, cultural, and political achievements.

For Hopeland, this recognition lasts year-round and is an integral part of our identity; which is why we’ve developed the FAMILY Campaign. As part of FAMILY, Hopeland will provide financial support to some of the most impoverished women in the world, truly empowering them to make decisions that are best for their families.

But why is such a campaign needed?

Often the poorest women in the world face difficult choices about whether they can keep their children with them at home. Sadly many women face such hardship that they are forced into an incredible bind where they truly believe their children are better off in an orphanage than at home.

Unfortunately, the fact that more than 80% of children in orphanages have at least one living parent is testimony to the fact that this is happening every day.

This means children in orphanages quite often aren’t “orphans” at all – and it absolutely stings to think about how detrimental institutionalized care is for the growth of the child:

• For every three months spent in an orphanage a child loses one month of brain development.
• Children in orphanages are often exploited for tourist dollars. This is disgusting, especially when you consider that orphanage tourism can lead to children developing attachments to strangers they’ll never see again – perpetuating feelings of abandonment
• In many cases, children living in orphanages are being denied basic supplies of food, education, and safety

If poverty is causing family separation and putting children at risk of abuse, trafficking, and violence then we can all agree that something must be done.

There is not enough awareness of the reality of orphanages and that solutions do exist.

Hopeland is working to prevent children from being placed in orphanages in the first place, to reunite the 80% of children in orphanages who have living parents, and to mobilize families around the world to care for those who truly have no one.

Together we can follow through on the commitments made on International Women’s Day and ensure that even the poorest children in the world have a safe, loving family, not a life of despair and abuse in an orphanage – all thanks to the fierce and powerful mothers that we – and you – have supported.

There are an estimated 25 million children growing up without their families around the world, including 8 million in institutions, 12 million on the streets, and 5 million trafficked or unaccompanied minor refugees. The reality is that most of these children, even those in orphanages have living parents.

Imagine the hardship you would have to go through before you felt that it was better for your child to be separated from you than living in your loving care and you will know the importance of helping the poorest mothers in the world.

Sadly there are many reasons why this heart-wrenching separation happens but some of the major factors are poverty, forced displacement, and lack of education. This month Hopeland is bringing specific attention to these issues because we are committed to working with others to advocate for children suffering without the loving care of their family.

We know from research by UNICEF that children make up nearly half of the 900 million people worldwide living in extreme poverty. Even those children who are not yet separated from their families are at daily risk of becoming the next child who will grow up alone. We at Hopeland can’t accept even one more child facing that situation.

There are many ways that vulnerable children around the world can be helped – for example a child born to a mother who can read is 50% more likely to survive past the age of 5. By tackling the causes of poverty, not just the symptoms, we can make it easier for families to stay together, making lives for children around the world safer.

The All Children Count campaign shows how Hopeland can partner with other organizations to change thinking. Our campaigns help children and families across the world and here in the US – you can read more about our FAMILY campaign and how together we can find better ways to keep children in families. This month, if you can imagine how painful it would be for your child to grow up without your love and support, please take time to support Hopeland by sharing our story.