Carry on Family Finding... With a view to Camping!

So the child profile I mentioned in my last post didn't progress any further for us. We registered our interest but unfortunately the child’s Social Worker had other potential patents short-listed ahead of us. One reason cited for us not making the short list was that they thought my partner having appeared in a reality TV series several years ago may make us easy to trace given the child in questions birth parent spends much of her time online?! Bizarre. Anyway...

In the last week our SW has drawn up a 'Family Finding' table which I have turned into an all singing all dancing spreadsheet to manage the progress of all of our child enquiries so far. It's amazing that in such a short time since approval in June we have already enquired about 20 children. It's useful to be able to see them all in one place now and see the progress of each enquiry and colour code those red that we are no longer pursuing, amber for information pending and green for those we are hopeful about. Sounds a little clinical but it helps to keep things organised when you have a lot going on.

One of the children on the list (now coloured red) is an Asian baby girl. She was within our preferred age range and we were looking forward to reading her profile, however it turned out that her birth family has stated a preference for her to be raised within an Indian/Sikh family. As I am white British and my partner is Indian/Hindu we were ruled out. I still find it funny that the birth family's wishes are given such thought when they are unable to care for the child themselves. My partner has a good understanding of the Sikh faith and it's something that we could have raised the child to appreciate but alas it wasn't to be.

Through New Family Social I was actually contacted a month ago by a journalist from BBC Asian Network to speak about this as contribution towards a wider article on adoption within Asian gay communities. In the end we didn't end up speaking for various reasons (we have said we are happy to help with anything else in the future) but this story was referenced in the published article. See the article here.

One other thing to mention in terms of our family finding search, over the last month we have also tracked down email addresses for local authority adoption services across the country and personally emailed out single page profile out to around 30 of them... with mixed results. Some LA's have been welcoming and agreed to circulate our profile within their team, whilst others have missed the point completely and replied with generic 'Thinking of Adopting?' packs, and 'Come along to our opening evening next week'  letters. 

Each year New Family Social organise a camping trip for members and their children to get together - we know a few people who have been away on the camp this month and it sounds like so much fun. Such a great opportunity for lots of LGBT families to come to together and for our children to meet other children with families just like theirs. It's a great feeling and really inspiring to think that maybe next year we might be their with our new family.