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Home > Post-Legal Adoption Services for Children with Special Needs and Their Families: Challenges and Lessons Learned > Lessons Learned
Post-Legal Adoption Services For Children with Special Needs and Their Families : Challenges and Lessons Learned
Grantee Lessons Learned
3. Lessons Learned In addition to strategies that address the specific challenges described above, some strategies were seen by many of the programs to be crucial to their overall success. Their recommendations are summarized below. 3.1 Adoptive families need knowledge about service availability. Grantees noted adoptive families of children with special needs had an easier time dealing with challenges when pre- and post-adoption training had alerted them to the likelihood of difficulties and when they had an existing relationship with a provider of post-adoption support and treatment services. From the first contact with a family, providers should work with parents to help them recognize an impending crisis, understand the importance of seeking help as soon as possible, identify resources, and develop the skills to utilize those resources. 3.2 Take time to plan. Before launching a post-adoption services program, it is important to dedicate staff, resources, and time to community needs assessment, systems planning, and program development. Identifying what families need, what services are available, and whether sufficient numbers of adoption-competent providers exist within the community will help programs identify gaps and create a seamless continuum of appropriate services for adoptive families. 3.3 Flexibility is critical. The service delivery system proposed in grant applications may not address the needs and interests identified by adoptive families and professionals once the project is underway. Projects sometimes need to adjust their methods to meet the needs of the target population. For example, parents served by these projects made it clear that they wanted to be able to select the services most useful to them, rather than receiving a set "menu" of services determined by the grantees. Having choices helped parents feel empowered. Similarly, support groups that were allowed to develop their own unique tone and structure were more successful in retaining participants. 3.4 Collaboration is essential. Often the supports and services that adoptive families of children with special needs are likely to need are already available in their communities. The issue is simply their lack of visibility or accessibility. Collaboration among the public and private service delivery systems that touch the lives of adoptive families—by sharing knowledge, referrals, and resources as necessary to "wrap" appropriate services around individual families—is essential in order to build a solid network of supports and referrals. Collaboration, however, is not without its challenges. One grantee approached this issue by having each participating agency determine its own programmatic involvement and make its own decisions within its area of expertise and interest, in consultation with the other collaborating agencies when needed. This approach worked effectively when all parties were clear on the goals and objectives of the collaboration and on their respective roles and responsibilities in achieving those goals and objectives. It is important that these be developed, discussed, written down, and signed by all prior to implementation of the project.
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