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Recruiting Foster and Adoptive Families
In 2007 TPI assisted a donor who wanted to make a difference in the lives of foster children in New Jersey. We worked with Children's Aid and Family Services to develop a proposal for a large scale public relations and outreach campaign to recruit more foster and adoptive parents. The donor provided a three-year anonymous gift to Children's Aid and they used it to engage a marketing firm to create designs and messages and to place them on billboards in buses, train stations, and malls throughout northern New Jersey.
Two years after the grant’s inception, thanks to its heightened visibility, calls and applications to Children’s Aid by prospective foster and adoptive parents are up significantly, as are the numbers of people volunteering at the agency. And Children’s Aid now has a celebrity spokesperson – Darryl McDaniels (DMC of the pioneering hip-hop group, RUN-DMC), himself an adoptee, has partnered with the agency to support their community engagement campaign, resulting in an overwhelming increase in inquires and web hits. The campaign has also attracted significant new contributions to Children’s Aid from family and corporate funders, including both cash and in-kind donations.
In the words of Robert Jones, Executive Director of Children’s Aid, the gift has dramatically changed the agency’s ability to effectively carry out its mission.
“Although we have been helping vulnerable children and families in the community since 1899, many people were not familiar with our work prior to the commencement of this campaign. This grant has enabled us to engage the public at a far greater level than previously attained, and bring more people into the agency to fill vitally important needs, such as fostering, adopting, volunteering and donating. Most important, the children and families we serve have enjoyed the benefits – through more of the community getting involved, either through fostering a child in need of a loving family, hosting a holiday party for children in our therapeutic foster care residences or mentoring a child who desperately needs an adult to trust. These are but a few of the myriad of ways this gift has made a real and lasting difference.”
Catch a glimpse of some of the billboards on pages 4 and 5 of "Turning Points," Children's Aid and Family Services newsletter.
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