X. The Application Process, Page 3

Meeting Experienced Adopters

In addition to meeting and talking to experienced adopters in your preparation classes, you can and should make an effort to get to know some outside the settings created by social workers. This is where Adoption UK and other groups come in.

Adoption UK (known until a couple of years ago as Parent to Parent Information on Adoption Services) is the country’s largest and oldest organisation of ordinary people interested in adopting. Join it. They have a special interest in the adoption of children with special needs, but everyone is welcome. They have local groups, run by co-ordinators who are all experienced adopters, and many of them hold meetings where prospective adopters can meet other prospective and experienced adopters and talk about the joys and trials of the process and the reality of raising adopted children. They run short courses on various topics to do with special needs adoption. They publish the magazine Adoption Today, with articles on all aspects of adoption and adopting, book reviews, news notes, etc. There is also a supplement to the magazine which carries advertisements or profiles of children waiting for permanent adoptive or foster families. They operate a service (PAL) where people who have encountered particular problems in adopting or have adopted children with unusual needs can be put in touch with others for mutual help. PPIAS (as it was then) was one of the forces behind the change in British adoption practice to considering every child as potentially an adoptable child, instead of just warehousing special needs children in institutions, and PPIAS members were instrumental in founding one of Britain’s first specialist voluntary adoption agencies for special needs children. But Adoption UK is not itself an adoption agency.

There are other adoption-related organisations which you might consider joining, such as the Fostering Network, ISSUE, NORCAP, OASIS, etc., all listed in the Advice, Help Lines, and Self-Help Groups section at the end of this book, but Adoption UK is the most important one, especially at this stage.

If you are open about adoption in your local community you will probably be surprised at the number of people you know with adoption connections, and you may meet interesting and valuable friends that way.

On another front, if you have a special interest in a particular type of special needs child, you might want to join the relevant organisation dedicated to their interests: people with Down Syndrome, multiple birth families, sexually abused people, ADHD/ADD families, people with cerebral palsy, people with a mental handicap, etc. — there are organisations dedicated to them all — literally hundreds of such organisations, which can be located in directories in your local library, on the Internet, through your family doctor, etc. Unlike adoption, where joining a foreign organisation is less likely to be of benefit (because so much of adoption is tied in with national and local laws and with national culture), you could get quite a lot from joining a foreign special interest group if there isn’t one in Britain.

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