Our Adoption Process - The Adoption Agency

Over the past few years we researched adoption agencies and talked to a lot of people that had adopted to get their view on things. Throughout 2004 we looked into several different agencies. We chose Lifelink International Adoption Agency (www.lifelink.org) for several reasons. First, they have been around for many years. Second, they were very prompt and courteous when we requested information from them. (Believe it or not, one of the agencies we looked into was quite rude to us!) Also, Lifelink has a LOT of resources for their families to use: they have free informational seminars, networking support groups, and cultural fairs and camps. They strongly emphasize how important it is for parents to understand the cultural and social difficulties that they and their children will encounter, and do a lot to prepare and support the families. Another thing that we like about Lifelink is that they are close to our house: our time is limited due to Jim's daily therapy sessions. We did not want to travel to have our homestudy visits. (We have heard of people travelling great distances for their adoption agencies.) Lastly, Lifelink is an "all-in-one" agency: they do the homestudy, match you with the child, arrange for your travel while you're overseas, and do follow up visits for one year. (The alternative to this is using one agency for the country you wish to adopt from, such as CCAI in Colorado, and having a local agency or state DCFS office near you do the homestudy.) Since we want our process to be as hassle-free as possible, we thought it best to use one comprehensive agency.

While I'm writing this I realize that this is one of the areas that the process differs from family to family: some people know already that they want to adopt from X country, and so find an agency that does adoptions for that. Other people find a profile of an orphan on the internet and find the agency that has that child and work with that agency to adopt her.