COMMENTARY: Finding permanent homes for Nevada’s foster-care children

Nevada can and should transform its foster care system and promote services to find forever homes for our neediest children.

It is unfortunate, but true, that there are significantly more children in foster care than the Clark County system can manage. Many of these children need a new, permanent home — forever. Unfortunately, we are not finding them homes fast enough.

Across the country, more than 20,000 children each year “age-out” of the foster care system without a family to support them and launch them into adulthood. Children who age-out of the foster care system without that adoption are, unfortunately, much more likely to become incarcerated, suffer homelessness, and abuse substances when they become adults. That imposes a societal cost on us all.

This is something we should all care about. These children do not choose to be on their own. They do not choose to be in foster care. From a moral perspective, it is simply the right thing to do to try to find them loving, caring homes. It is also in our community’s financial interest — every child who “ages out” of foster care without a family is expected to cost society approximately $300,000 in adult services (incarceration, drug treatment, homelessness supports, etc.)

Children end up in the system for the most tragic of reasons — when the courts have permanently separated them from their parents due to abuse or neglect, often resulting from underlying addiction-related causes. We are woefully unprepared to manage the number of children living in the foster care system; and woefully unprepared to focus directly on finding new, permanent homes. This problem is especially acute for children who are considered to be “harder to place” — often teenagers, sibling groups and medically fragile children who, for a variety of reasons, tend to be overlooked.

Nevada alone has more than 2,000 children in foster care waiting for adoption.

To stop this tragic chain of events and give children the loving home they deserve, we should step up our efforts to increase adoptions of children from foster care in Nevada.

An innovative recruitment and adoption model can best serve these children. The Adoption Exchange, a nonprofit that operates in Utah, Colorado and Nevada, provides a child focused, proven and evidence-based model that serves these, our neediest, children.

It works like this: The Adoption Exchange starts with the child. Members of the organization spend time with the child, get to know the child and start looking around that child’s environment for good people who might be able to change that child from a statistic into a success story. They use proven methodologies to search the child’s existing network for that one caring adult who will make all the difference in the world.

Whether a nurse, a teacher, or a mentor, this is a person who is already an important adult figure in the child’s life. If there is no one in that child’s network who can step up, the Adoption Exchange gradually builds a network for the child — one step at a time. This model creates long-lasting, successful family environments in which children tend to thrive.

Children served by this methodology are up to three times more likely to be adopted.

It serves the whole community to be in the business of creating strong families, especially for children who face so many disadvantages in life. It is a great gift we can give to children in Nevada. We owe it to the children and to deliver on the promise of a better future for the next generation.

Brian Knudsen and Cara Goodman serve on the advisory board for the Adoption Exchange (www.adoptex.org). Lauren Arnold is the organization’s chief executive officer.