by Denise Goodman, Ph.D.
Reprinted from a publication of NACAC - the North American Council on Adoptable Children, St. Paul, MN.

Denise Goodman is an independent consultant and trainer who focuses on foster care and adoption issues. For more information contact Denise at 1824 Snouffer Rd., Worthington, OH 43085; 614-436-6838; fax: 614-436-2580; email: dagphd@aol.com. This article is adapted from Recruitment, Training and Support: The Essential Tools of Foster Care, published by Family to Family: A project of the Annie E. Casey Foundation, March 1998.

Over the last several years, there has been a growing need for foster and adoptive families. More and more children are entering foster care, and many of them will never return to their birth families. As a result, agencies across North America face the challenge of finding both temporary and permanent homes for children. To meet this challenge, agencies must develop an innovative recruitment system that integrates three types of recruitment activities: general, child-specific, and targeted. Each approach has a valuable place in a well-rounded recruitment program, but Family to Family has found that targeted recruitment is the most effective in placing children.

General recruitment involves reaching mass audiences through media and public service announcements on television and radio stations, billboards, foster care and adoption fairs, and booths at county fairs and sporting events. This is the most common recruitment method, but is the least focused, commonly urging your audience to "open your heart to a child" or "save a young life." Family to Family experience indicates that unsuitable applicants often respond to these methods, using limited staff time. Or, respondents may not be willing to take the particular kinds of children who need families.

General outreach is best used to increase an agency's public profile and raise community awareness of the continuing need for foster and adoptive families. Perhaps 15 percent of an agency's recruitment budget can usefully be spent on general recruitment.

Child-specific recruitment means developing an individualized plan for a particular child based on the child's background. It may include finding relatives or close friends who will provide a home for the child or teen they already care about. It is often used to find a family for a child with a disability or condition that requires special care. Cooperation from neighborhood service agencies can help recruiters locate an appropriate family. For medically needy children, support groups and associations related to the condition or disease can be an excellent resource.

Each child-specific recruiting case requires individualized planning, which is expensive. But special children deserve special treatment. Recruitment budgets may allocate 25 percent of available funds for this function.

Targeted recruitment focuses on the specific kinds of children and teens in the community who need temporary or permanent homes, as well as the pool of available families.

First, agencies must consider the age, gender, sibling status, and race or ethnic background of the children who need foster or adoptive families. Next, they must think about the children's physical, social, emotional, and cognitive needs. What do the youngsters have in common? Can they be considered in groupings of needs? Are these groupings consistent over time? Are there trends or patterns of change? What will be required for foster or adoptive parents of each kind of child? Where is the need the most urgent? Can the population from each source be generalized in any way?

• If a majority of children coming into foster care are adolescents, for example, recruitment efforts can target families willing to foster several older children, perhaps through local schools, churches, gyms, or community centers.
• If certain neighborhoods have a high proportion of children in foster care, the agency can develop an outreach effort in those areas. Staff might send speakers to neighborhood centers, churches, public housing units, or PTA meetings asking for help from families who can best care for the children.
• If medically fragile children are common in the community, agencies can send a speaker to a brown-bag lunch at a local university hospital, clinic, or medical school cafeteria, where prospective foster or adoptive parents already have experience with such children.

Next, agencies must assess the community. With a little research, workers can form a fairly complete picture of the community's potential to provide foster and adoptive families. Then they can tailor outreach and recruitment efforts to particular groups and areas.

Families have different financial means, religious and cultural identities, and educational backgrounds, as well as lifestyles, ages, values, housing circumstances (renters and owners), and organizational memberships. All of these can be factors in their suitability as foster and adoptive parents.

• Demographic and census information about the community can tell a great deal about the people who live in the area and where each kind of family lives. This data is available from the local library , planning department, or state census data center, and people in each place can help workers use and interpret the data. Or, the information is available online from the Census Bureau at www.census.gov.
• Does the data suggest the presence of families the agency may have previously overlooked as recruitment possibilities? These could include single-parent families, those with lower incomes or smaller homes, families with older adults, extended families, or households of unrelated people.
• What kind of families have worked successfully with the agency in the past? Are there common neighborhoods, professions, activities, organizational memberships, media choices, backgrounds? Can they be divided into "types"? Did they cite similar motivations in deciding to become a foster or adoptive family? For example, if the African American families the agency has already recruited include many two-parent military couples in their 30's, who have young children and are active in their local churches, recruiters can logically target speakers for church socials, posters for military base bulletin boards, and notices for church and base newsletters.
• Recruiters can match groups with locations in the community, and then look for places with a potential for transmitting information - supermarket bulletin boards, workplace newsletters, child care centers, or churches. Who hangs out with teenagers - coaches, musicians, pizza-parlor owners? Tailored messages can reach them at the gym or radio station.
• Agency staff should also talk to teenagers in their system about recruiting. Teens who have been placed successfully are likely to be vocal about who makes a good foster parent and will often recommend people they know.
• Recruiters should not wait for foster parents to volunteer again - they must ask them to do it, and to consider adopting. These parents can host "foster-ware parties" for their friends and neighbors where they and agency staff members can speak persuasively about the need for foster parents and the joys and problems involved.
• Agencies must be culturally sensitive. Is the service area's demographic diversity reflected in the staff and the board? Has the agency enlisted community leaders, gatekeepers, publications, places of worship, and other institutions to receive educational materials and become helpers? Are recruiting activities using appropriate messages? Are multi-lingual ads accurately and appropriately translated?

Targeted recruitment has proven to be the most effective in attracting the right kinds of families for the particular kinds of children and teens an agency has in its care. It merits perhaps 60 percent of the agency's recruitment budget.

Recruitment is full-time work that cannot be done as a sideline. It requires concentrated planning, action, and follow-up, and it requires pro-active effort on the agency's part. Agencies large and small must use all three kinds of recruitment techniques, but they should stress and invest in the targeted approach.

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MARE Videotaping Service: A Recruitment Tool for Workers

by Steve York

Editor's note: Portions of this article first appeared in the September/October 1997 edition of Recruitment News. With the natural turnover of adoption workers, and because of our belief in the value of using child recruitment videos, the article is being reprinted, with some additional information.

Of all the things I do here at MARE, the one thing I enjoy most is helping adoption workers make recruitment videos of waiting children. The reason is simple: it makes the waiting children "real" to me.

As editor of the MARE photolisting book, I see photographs and write short descriptions of anywhere between 25 - 50 children per month. As a case manager, I continually review tracking lists filled with names of hundreds of waiting children. All of these children are very real indeed, but there is nothing quite like meeting a child in person and hearing that child talk about his or her life, interests, and hopes for the future. It keeps me focused on the fact that the waiting children for whom we work are real, every-day children who simply need a loving, permanent family in which to grow.

Earl and Sandra were looking through the MARE book and were drawn to 10 year old Freddy. His likes and interests were similar to theirs, and he had a playful smile. Earl and Sandra were naturally concerned about some of the difficulties listed in Freddy's description. They felt like they might want to meet Freddy, but were afraid of hurting him if it didn't work out.

When a potential adoptive family "meets" a child through a recruitment video, the impact can be much more profound and immediate than if that family has only read a MARE book description or child evaluation packet. While these written descriptions are necessary and helpful, a video can often capture a child's personality and spirit in ways that written words simply can not. Instead of reading lists of impairments and imagining the worst, prospective families and see and hear the child and get a realistic idea of how those impairments or behaviors affect a the child's functioning. Instead of someone else describing the child, that child becomes his or her own advocate in the adoption process. This is the beauty and the power of a recruitment video.

Another important benefit of the recruitment video is that it allows the prospective parents and child to "meet" in a non-threatening manner without unnecessary pressure for anyone to be "perfect." If after viewing a video tape the prospective parents decide not to pursue an initial visit, the child is spared the heartache of what could be felt as another rejection. Using recruitment videos also allows the child to "travel" all around the state to meet prospective families without the agency or parents making special travel arrangements.

The benefits of using recruitment videos are many; however, many workers appear to be reluctant to take advantage of this service offered by MARE. It is my belief (and experience) that many workers are intimidated by the idea of appearing on videotape. While I understand how this could be a worker's initial response, I must emphatically state that it is the child (and not the worker) who is the focus of the videotape. When prospective families view these tapes, they are not evaluating the worker's "performance," their attention is focused on the child. It is the worker's job to facilitate the videotaping process by talking to the child on tape, making the child comfortable, and drawing out the child's personality and interests. The amount of time the worker appears on the screen is minimal at best. I have participated in taping sessions where the worker is clearly uncomfortable - and the child can definitely pick up on that. I think that it's also worth noting that these videotapes are not full-scale broadcast productions that are going to be viewed by millions of people on all the major networks. The videotapes are simply additional recruitment tools for workers and agencies to use at their discretion.

I think another reason many workers haven't used the MARE videotaping service is the mistaken impression that it will take too much time and/or effort. In reality, a typical taping session lasts anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour. Good casework will involve some preparation of the child and worker before the day of the taping; however, this need not be a daunting process for everyone involved. MARE has produced an excellent (and brief) videotaping manual to help the worker, child, and foster family prepare for the taping session.
I recently participated in an excellent taping session of a child with workers from Lutheran Adoption Service. The adoption worker and foster care worker did a wonderful job of working together to talk naturally and comfortably with the child. The foster parents were also involved in the taping and discussed their experience of living with the child. The result is a videotape where the child is comfortable and anyone who views the tape will get a good and realistic introduction to this particular child.

Like anything else, improvement comes with practice. I applaud those workers who have taken the initiative to try the video service and guarantee that your comfort level will increase with each video. For those workers who have not yet tried this service, I sincerely hope that you will make an effort to do so in the future. For a small investment of time, workers can have a valuable addition to their efforts to serve children and families.

For more information or to schedule a taping session, phone Steve York of MARE at (517) 783-6273, ext. 236.