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Adoption Services
Programs that participate in arranging permanent homes under new legal parentage for individuals whose birth parents are unable or unwilling to provide for their care. Included are programs that provide counselling and assistance for people who decide to relinquish their children for adoption or arrange for an independent adoption; which recruit, select, counsel and match suitable adoptive parents with children who have been relinquished; which assist in the adoption of foreign-born children, stepchildren or adults; which provide foster care for children who have been relinquished for adoption but not yet placed; and/or which assist people who are adopted to locate their birth parents and birth parents to locate the children they relinquished.
Adoption and Foster/Kinship Care Support Groups
Mutual support groups whose members are individuals who have adopted a child or are considering or in the process of adoption, birth parents who relinquished a child for adoption, people who were, themselves adopted, foster care providers, children in foster care, kinship caregivers (paternal or maternal grandparents, aunts, uncles and other family members, members of a child's tribe or clan, godparents, stepparents, neighbours, friends of the family or other adults who can serve as "family"), children cared for by relatives under a formal or informal kinship care arrangement and/or adults who, as children, were raised in foster or kinship care. Groups may also be structured for adoptees, siblings and/or birth parents who have been reunited; older kinship caregivers who have taken on an unexpected parenting role later in life; and people who have other kinship issues, e.g., grandparents and other relatives who have been denied access to a grandchild or other youngster due to a death or divorce in the child's family. Meeting formats may include in-person, telephone or Internet options.
The above terms and definitions are part of the Taxonomy of Human Services, used here by permission of INFO LINE of Los Angeles.