[bc-adopt]

My wife and I want to adopt an older child (10-13yr) from domestic foster care. We do the legwork to find the children & their case worker contact information. However, we cannot find an agency/ social worker to help us by making contact with the childrens' case workers, which many case workers require due to the privacy of the children. Everyone we talk to only deals with infant adoptions. We cannot find anyone to assist us with adopting children from foster care. Local Social Services will only help if we are interested in fostering children in their case load. We have a home study completed by an agency that focuses on/is extremely busy with infant placements, with no time to assist us.
Does anyone have any suggestions who may be able to assist us? We live in Virginia, but are willing to work with someone from another state. Again, we have a completed home study.
Please message us, etc, if necessary.

[Just Julie]

Do you have an attorney who can assist you? Maybe that is another route you can follow. I would think potential parents of youth would be a premium since most folks want infants. God bless you in your quest for a family.

[ericsmom98]

If you explain to the child's caseworker that you have a homestudy completed but that your local social services will not work with you since you are not adopting from that county.....I think they would work directly with you. You'll of course have to tell them what agency did your homestudy and give a contact name so they can verify it. BTW, are you looking to adopt out of state?

I'm in the process of the same thing, except our local social services IS going to help us even though we are looking at other counties/states. We want to adopt a boy 5-10 and a girl 10-14.

[bc-adopt]

"I would think potential parents of youth would be a premium since most folks want infants."
Yes, we keep hearing from social workers how "wonderful" we are for wanting to adopt an older child from foster care, since so few want to. However, we can't find a social worker/agency to speak for us, especially for out of state kids in the foster system.
We actually did tell a case worker today that we had the home study completed, and why local social services will not help & our adoption agency is too busy to help. She finally agreed to allow us to send our homestudy, but said any further contact would have to be thru our agency worker only, & would not tell us anything.
We are wishing to adopt a child from any of the domestic foster care systems.