IX. Applying to an Agency, Page 2

Where to Find an Agency

Your next step is to find an adoption agency. There are lots to choose from. What kind of agency is right for you? You need now to think about the kind of child you want to adopt and about yourselves. And you need to buy Adopting a Child, published by the British Association for Adoption and Fostering. This book gives the names, addresses and phone numbers of every registered agency in the UK, local authority and voluntary, and it is essential if you plan to approach any agency other than your local authority or agencies you know about by word of mouth. It also covers a lot of the same ground about why and how to adopt as does this book, but in less detail and from the “orthodox” or official point of view. It doesn’t give any information about what kinds of children individual agencies place or what their basic requirements are for prospective adopters (like age, religion, what geographical area they cover, etc.).

BAAF also has an online database of agencies that you can access yourself. This consists of a map that allows you to choose a major postcode area and get a list of agencies that have offices there. But be careful using it, because an agency is not always listed under all the areas where it operates. Check under surrounding areas as well. There is also a subject search facility for the database, but when I tried it out in October 2002 it was useless. A similar online database is operated by the Adoption & Fostering Information Line (under “Organisations”). The Department of Health also has a list; two lists in fact. One is of local authority agencies, and one is of voluntary agencies. The DoH lists only include agencies in England, but they can be useful for applicants in other parts of the UK as well, since you can apply to an agency anywhere, not just in your own region.

Choosing Some Agencies to Approach

How to choose an agency? If you are only interested in adopting one healthy, white baby or toddler, you are more or less limited to your own local authority or a neighbouring borough. There is such a surplus of couples wanting these children over the very few who are available for adoption that you will be lucky to find anyone outside your local authority to even answer your initial letter, much less assess you. Even your own local authority may simply tell you to forget it, that their lists are closed, at least for now.

If you are a non-white or mixed-race family living outside a city, you should definitely consider applying to one or more agencies (local authority or voluntary) in the nearest city or even further afield. Your own local authority may not have any Black children available for adoption, and there are plenty of agencies who will be very glad to hear from you indeed. But I have to say that when I wrote to a selection of 19 agencies posing as a rural, Black potential adoptive married couple, I was very disappointed in the results, even from urban local authorities. See Appendix II for the details.

Types of Adoption Agency

There are basically three kinds of adoption agencies:

Local authority social services departments

These must by law must provide an adoption service. This can be done either by running their own, by running a joint service with one or more adjoining local authorities, or by contracting out the service to a voluntary adoption society.

Voluntary adoption societies

These can be divided into the secular and the religious. Voluntary adoption societies can handle all adoption and fostering for a local authority by running a contracted-out service, or they can run a service for children referred to them by other agencies, or they can be approached directly by women or parents who need to have a child adopted.

Secular societies
These will have all kinds of children, in religious and ethnic terms, and in terms of other special needs, and will consider your religion as either irrelevant or simply as a matching feature for children they place with you.
Religious societies
These are more or less strict about the families they accept as adopters. Some, who handle placements of children from all denominations or faiths, will be interested in placing children in religiously matching families where possible, but are able to place across religious lines. Other societies (and here, in present-day Britain, I mean primarily some of those run by the Roman Catholic Church, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and Norwood, the Jewish agency) will be much more strict about accepting applicants only from within their own religious traditions, because birth mothers come to them with the specific expectation that their children will be placed with families of the same faith.

If you are practising Christians, you should consider one of the many Christian voluntary agencies as well as your own local authority. Adopting a Child lists agencies run by the Catholic, Anglican and LDS churches. If you are Jewish there is also the Norwood agency, in London. Adopting a Child (1998 edition) does not list any agencies specifically serving other religious communities, but if you belong to another faith then you will be very welcome to an urban local authority agency, and many voluntary agencies (secular and Christian) also have babies from other faiths. Even if you are not a practising member of any religion you should consider the Christian and secular voluntary agencies as well as the local authorities, if you are interested in a child with special needs. Almost all agencies are looking for special adopters for special children.

The more serious you are about considering a child with special needs, the wider you can cast your net. But your own local authority is a first port of call, no matter what your condition or what type of child interests you. Unless you have special reasons otherwise, for local authority agencies I would start with agencies nearest to where you live. Many local authorities and voluntary agencies only work within specified geographical areas, usually because of time and cost factors when assessing potential adopters and supervising placements.

I am tempted to say as an exception, that if I were a Black family living in a rural area where there were few other Black families, I might not bother to apply to my local authority. They are unlikely to have any Black or mixed-race children available, and the social workers are not likely to be able to assess Black potential adopters with any great competence. What stops me is that I have known lightning to strike exactly in this way, with a mixed-race couple being offered a similarly mixed-race child from their own county adoption service, serving one of the most rural areas in the UK.

Conversely, if I were a single man or a homosexual couple I can think of some provincial local authorities and religious agencies which it would be a waste of time to approach, although the story is different for most urban local authority adoption services. The Lesbian & Gay Foster & Adoptive Parents Network can advise you.

This raises the question, how do I know if an agency is going to be right for me; why doesn’t Adopting a Child give any details? Good question. The reason they don’t give details is because they can change. Agency A may not be considering people over 40 for baby adoptions this year; but next year that might go up to 42 or down to 35, depending on how many babies they have. They may change their focus, and in two years be handling a lot more children with severe multiple handicaps than they do now. The BAAF and Adoption & Fostering Information Line databases mentioned above do in fact now include that kind of information about the agencies listed, although its accuracy and up-to-dateness depend on the agencies supplying them with the data.

There are other ways of finding out whether you and an agency might be right for each other.

One is to ask someone who has dealt with them in the recent past; the other is to contact them yourself. I say recent past, because agencies change in their structure, organisation, methods and staff. Your friends may condemn Agency B as totally incompetent when they were being assessed five years ago, but the agency head may have left, and the new one has transformed it, or the membership of their adoption panel may have changed significantly. Conversely, Agency C, which your other friends thought was so marvellous, may have gone the other direction and now be totally disorganised, unable to keep track of clients’ files, and reassigning clients to new social workers every month because all the good social workers are leaving as fast as they can find new jobs. And the agency which might have been good/bad for your friends may be different for you, simply because you are different from your friends or you have different social workers.

The other way is to approach them yourself. You could phone the agency, asking whether they have any particular age bars or the like, and what kind of children they currently have. You are not very likely to get a definite response, not because the receptionist or social worker you speak to is being cagey, but because it is often not possible to point to anything definite, or at least anything that one could state in a minute on the phone. You will get a better response from an initial letter of inquiry.

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