Appendix II: How Some Agencies Answered an Enquiry from a Black Couple, Page 2

Five agencies showed a genuine interest in following up our enquiry. One is the Catholic diocese serving our area, two are well-established secular voluntary agencies, one is a London borough, and one is a condominium service, serving both rural and urban areas. Some responded with personal letters, some with form letters (including one form letter written for unmarried applicants).

The five “interested” replies are detailed below:

Agency A (local Catholic diocese): sent a preliminary application form. They mentioned that they did not have any Black social workers, but offered a preliminary home visit to discuss our application. (Several months later they followed up with another offer of a preliminary interview).
Agency B (local branch of a national voluntary agency): sent a letter including the name of their Black social worker. They also included a pack of information about children currently on their books, a statement of the types of children they place and the kinds of families they are looking for, giving details of their application procedure and assessment process, and a “statement of intent”. The information was very helpful although some of it was not well produced.
Agency C (member of a joint agency): sent a letter writing that they were forwarding our letter to the condominium. A week later I received a letter from the condominium stating that they urgently wanted to discuss placing a pre-school sibling group with us, and to reply by return mail. The temptation was almost too much!
Agency D (a specialist voluntary agency for very hard-to-place children): sent a letter giving the date of their next open information meeting and confirming that they have Black social workers. It detailed their application procedure, included an application form, general (non-agency) information about what kinds of people are needed to adopt, a form to fill in to get on their mailing list for new children, high-quality photos and profiles of children on their books (strangely, all of them white, although the agency places many Black children), other leaflets and press clippings, location map, information on fostering for them, and a case study of a dysfunctional family. Some of the information was poorly produced.
Agency E (London borough): sent a letter in very general terms, with an initial application form. They also referred us to Adoption UK (giving the out of date former name) and the British Association for Adoption and Fostering for more information, and stated that we must give up any fertility treatment (although I had stated that we already had done so).

What do I make of this? The only two really satisfactory replies, in terms of both the information sent and “Black-friendliness”, were from secular voluntary agencies. The three local authorities nearest to us showed no real interest in us, and the least interested was the only one of the three with a significant Black population.

The most unsatisfactory aspect of all was the response from the local authorities I most expected to be enthusiastic: serving economically deprived urban areas with large Black populations. Of the four agencies in this category two did not reply at all, one said we were too far away for them to assess, and the fourth, while interested, merely sent a form letter reply, addressed to my wife (although I had written our letter), misspelling our surname, with minimal and outdated information, and a preliminary application form which was badly written and contained several obvious spelling errors.

The full report on this small study appeared in Adoption & Fostering, volume 25, no. 1 (Spring 2001), pp. 13-23.

Next: More Reading & Resources

back to Table of Contents