Have You Heard? Some NC Counties Offer Free Post Adoption Services!

Today we had the great pleasure of meeting the Child Wellbeing and Success Coach Team.  If you live in Ashe, Alleghany, Alexander, Burke, Caldwell, Catawba, Watauga or Wilkes county, you can access their services for FREE!  They are funded with a grant from the state of North Carolina and are one of only five agencies in the Quality Improvement Center for Adoption and Guardianship Support and Preservation (QIC-AG).  Be sure to visit and like their Facebook page regardless if you reside in any of these counties or our state.  The agency posts great resources and videos for all families to utilize for free!  

Sharing Stories, Symptoms...Persons with Developmental Disabilities - Register now!

NC families can share this with their professional medical and clinical supports to be sure they are aware of this great opportunity.  The more they know, the more they can support your child and family’s needs.

Register early and save $20!
Click here to register.



For more information and to register for other Mental Health continuing education, click here.

NC Statewide Adoption Conference & Youth Conference 2015. Don't Miss It!

Dear Prospective Conference Attendee: 

Registration is now open for the 3^rd Annual Statewide Adoption Conference sponsored by Mecklenburg County/Youth and Family Services Division and is waiting for you.  The conference will be held on Friday, April 24, 2015.  Sign up today because slots are limited.

We are also having our 1^st Annual Statewide Youth Conference on Saturday, April 25^th for youth ages 12 through 18  in foster care or youth between the aforementioned ages who were adopted.  It will be a fun filled and exciting opportunity for those who attend.

Interested parties for both can register here.

Download Youth Adoption Conference Brochure (PDF)

If you have any questions, contact 704-336-5437.  We are looking forward to seeing you there.

Kind Regards,
The Adoption Conference Committee

Bow Ties and BBQ: Only 5 DAYS Left to Register!

DID YOU KNOW....

• Kybele has recruited more than 220 volunteers to participate in medical training programs in 11 countries.  These professionals have come from over 70 different institutions worldwide with the vast majority traveling multiple times to volunteer their time and medical expertise.

• Nearly 50% of these volunteers have come from North Carolina hospitals.

• The work Kybele has done for the past 5 years in Accra, Ghana has significantly reduced both infant and maternal mortality in a leading regional hospital.

• Kybele's work has been published dozens of times in national/international medical journals, books, and publications.

• Our programs are making a TRUE DIFFERENCE in the lives of women and children in our program countries.  National medical protocols are being changed.  Lives are being saved.  Women are experiencing a more compassionate, safe, and successful childbirth experience.

Here is what you can do to support this effort....

If you are in the Winston-Salem/Greensboro/Raleigh/Durham area: 

Register for this event by August 10th.  We guarantee a great time. 

$60 for Adults  |  $35 for Medical Residents/Students  |  $20 for Children 12 & under

Click to learn more or to register.

If you are not in the local area - PLEASE consider making a donation on behalf of this event or become a member or monthly donor. 

NC State Access to Birth Records Status and Directory

NORTH CAROLINA
HB1463, signed into law by Governor Beverly Perdue on July 21, 2010, expands the Confidential intermediary program.

HB1463 will allow adoptees age 18 (instead of 21) and older to be able to use the CI program. It will also allow:

• Adult biological siblings of adult adoptees
• Adult biological half siblings of adult adoptees
• Adult family members of deceased adoptees
• Adult family members of a deceased biological parent to use the Confidential Intermediary program.

This bill also allows an agency acting as a Confidential Intermediary to obtain a certified copy of a death certificate of the person who is the subject of the search and deliver it to the person who is searching.

For more information please contact Roberta MacDonald  or go to  http://adoptionreform-nc.org

NC Home Study Service

NC Home Study, Post Placement & Adoption Reports, Family Assessments for Hosting, ICPC Supervision & Reports for all NC and NY residents. Contact us at: info@hopscotchadoptions.org or 336-899-0068

NC COLPPA Membership Drive 2014

North Carolina families can find the highest standards of service to adoptive families by working with any member agency of these NC Coalition of Licensed and Private Adoption Agencies. 

Attention North Carolina and New York Host Families!

If you are thinking about hosting a child this summer, you'll need a host family assessment.  Click here to get your assessment started today!

Host Programs: What are they all about?

Worthy and Reposted from: Rainbow Kids/Martha Osborne

Host programs allow specific children to travel during holidays to the USA and stay with families for a summer or winter 'fun experience'. The hosting families are screened carefully, and many of them are hosting a child with the hope that they will eventually adopt that child. 
Families are asked not to talk about adoption in front of the child, and let the experience be a positive, holiday time for the hosted child. Hosted children MUST return to their original countries after the holiday period.  Some children stay with 'host only' families, who do not intend to eventually adopt.  Quietly, the host family and group leaders reach out to other screened-families who are interested in adopting an older child.  Over the years, I have seen hundreds of older children, once thought to be 'unadoptable' due to their age, enter into loving families."Curtis", pictured above, is a 'host only' child who is in Virginia until August 6th. He and 2 other young boys need families. If you are considering the adoption of an older child, and are willing to travel to meet Curtis and the other hosted boys, please contact  pgancie@cradlehope.org to learn more.  This will still be an international adoption, and the children will return to their orphanages after August 6th. Hopefully families will be found before they leave!

--Martha Osborne of Rainbow Kids

Attention North Carolina and New York Host Families!

If you are thinking about hosting a child this summer, you'll need a host family assessment.  Click here to get your assessment started today!

Host Programs: What are they all about?

Worthy and Reposted from: Rainbow Kids/Martha Osborne

Host programs allow specific children to travel during holidays to the USA and stay with families for a summer or winter 'fun experience'. The hosting families are screened carefully, and many of them are hosting a child with the hope that they will eventually adopt that child. 
Families are asked not to talk about adoption in front of the child, and let the experience be a positive, holiday time for the hosted child. Hosted children MUST return to their original countries after the holiday period.  Some children stay with 'host only' families, who do not intend to eventually adopt.  Quietly, the host family and group leaders reach out to other screened-families who are interested in adopting an older child.  Over the years, I have seen hundreds of older children, once thought to be 'unadoptable' due to their age, enter into loving families."Curtis", pictured above, is a 'host only' child who is in Virginia until August 6th. He and 2 other young boys need families. If you are considering the adoption of an older child, and are willing to travel to meet Curtis and the other hosted boys, please contact  pgancie@cradlehope.org to learn more.  This will still be an international adoption, and the children will return to their orphanages after August 6th. Hopefully families will be found before they leave!

--Martha Osborne of Rainbow Kids

Attention North Carolina and New York Host Families!

If you are thinking about hosting a child this summer, you'll need a host family assessment.  Click here to get your assessment started today!

Host Programs: What are they all about?

Worthy and Reposted from: Rainbow Kids/Martha Osborne

Host programs allow specific children to travel during holidays to the USA and stay with families for a summer or winter 'fun experience'. The hosting families are screened carefully, and many of them are hosting a child with the hope that they will eventually adopt that child. 
Families are asked not to talk about adoption in front of the child, and let the experience be a positive, holiday time for the hosted child. Hosted children MUST return to their original countries after the holiday period.  Some children stay with 'host only' families, who do not intend to eventually adopt.  Quietly, the host family and group leaders reach out to other screened-families who are interested in adopting an older child.  Over the years, I have seen hundreds of older children, once thought to be 'unadoptable' due to their age, enter into loving families."Curtis", pictured above, is a 'host only' child who is in Virginia until August 6th. He and 2 other young boys need families. If you are considering the adoption of an older child, and are willing to travel to meet Curtis and the other hosted boys, please contact  pgancie@cradlehope.org to learn more.  This will still be an international adoption, and the children will return to their orphanages after August 6th. Hopefully families will be found before they leave!

--Martha Osborne of Rainbow Kids

Hopscotch Adoptions, Inc Announces Successful North Carolina Re-licensing

Hopscotch Adoptions, Inc announces our successful North Carolina re-licensing!  If you are a North Carolina or New York family in need of home study, post adoption or post placement services, we are here to help.  Thinking of building your family through adoption?  We would love to help you explore your many options.  Contact info@hopscotchadoptions.org.

Birth Country Travel: A Journey Back And A Journey Forward

A heritage journey is one of the most significant factors in the identity building process of internationally adoptive children. 

So, what's the journey all about? 

• What age is the best age? 
• How can families prepare? 
• How can you integrate service work if you'd like?
• What role does "adoptee loyalty" play in the journey? 
• What are the pros and cons of group vs individual travel? 
• What adoption exploration is possible in country? 
• How do the kids react before, during and after the trip? 
• What role does FACEBOOK play in homeland journeys?

Questions welcome!

North Carolina Area Workshop 

Where: Lake Lynn Community Center, 7921 Ray Road, Raleigh, NC 27613

When: Wednesday, July 18, 2012

Time: 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm

Presented by: The Ties Program

Prioritize it ....plan to come! 

Please RSVP by emailing your... 

Name:

Date you will be attending:

Country(ies) of Interest:

Number of Attendees:

Info@AdoptiveFamilyTravel.com

SPAFA's Adoption Expo 2012

SPAFA's Adoption Expo 2012

SPAFA's Adoption Expo 2012

SPAFA's Adoption Expo 2012

The Tbilisi Chalice Goes Home

Archbishop Songulashvili (L)
and Rev. George Reed

The church of which I’m a member, Pullen Memorial Baptist in Raleigh, has had a partnership for many years with First Baptist Church in Tbilisi, the capital of the Republic of Georgia (formerly part of the Soviet Union). The pastor with whom we’ve had the closest contact, Malkhaz Songulashvili, has now become the Archbishop for Baptists in Georgia. (You did not read that wrong. Baptists in the Republic of Georgia have bishops and an archbishop!) Malkhaz was at Pullen on November 13 to preach and lead in the celebration of Eucharist.

Malkhaz has been courageous in his advocacy and practice of nonviolent action as Georgia has gone through its “Rose Revolution,” which moved Georgia away from authoritarian government and toward democratic reform. The Church of England honored his leadership in September 2005 when he was awarded the Lambeth Cross by the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Sunday’s service was a deeply moving one, which he and Pullen pastor Nancy Petty had crafted to focus on the liturgy of the church in Georgia, but also in ways accessible to Baptists in North Carolina. So, we had incense, but no wine!

What caught me off-guard and deeply affected me was Malkhaz’ telling of the purpose of his trip to the United States. It seems that the Baptist church inTbilisi, the capital of Georgia, had had a communion chalice dating back to the time of the church’s founding in 1868. (It was the first Baptist church in all of what would be the USSR.) In 1928, the church inTbilisi gave the chalice to a Baptist congregation in Moscow as an expression of their oneness in the faith, even in the face of differences between Russians and Georgians. Shortly after the end of World War II, a delegation from the United States visited the Soviet Union at the invitation of Soviet leader Josef Stalin. The delegation was invited to visit the Baptist church in Moscow, and the church gave the Americans a treasured possession, the chalice from Tbilisi, again as a symbol of the power of faith to overcome differences. So it ended up in the United States, was labeled the “Chalice of Peace” in some circles, but then pretty much disappeared.

Archbishop Songulashvili is completing his doctoral dissertation at Oxford. In doing research on the history of Baptists in Georgia, he came across information about the 1946 American visit. Further research found a reference to the chalice, and he was able to trace it to Mercer University in “our” Georgia, the US state. Someone there in the Mercer library had a vision of a chalice in a little-used room in the library (Malkhaz noted that she was not a woman given to visions!). When she went to the room she had visioned, there was a chalice, but it was labeled as Russian, not Georgian. It turned out to be the missing Tbilisi chalice, mislabeled because the Americans had gotten it in Moscow. Mercer has given it back to the Baptist church in Tbilisi, and Malkhaz is in the States to receive it. He came to Raleigh to celebrate communion, using the chalice, with his brothers and sisters at Pullen.

Are you still with me? Why was this particularly moving to me? Malkhaz mentioned in telling this story that a letter which led him to the chalice was from a “Dr. Newton.” My mind went spinning.

One of my grandfathers was a Baptist preacher in Georgia. He died at a relatively young age, almost twenty years before I was born, from an infection that antibiotics would cure today. I don’t know much about him, though I was given the name “Joseph” – the “J.” in “J. George” – as a tribute to him. One of the few pieces of his history that I have is an obituary noting that my grandfather’s funeral was preached by his close friend from seminary, Dr. Louie Newton. Louie Newton went on to be president of the Georgia Baptist Convention (the one in the US), president of the Southern Baptist Convention, and vice president of the Baptist World Alliance.

Could it be?

You know I wouldn’t be going through this story in order to tell you that the “Dr. Newton” was somebody else! I can’t tell you the emotions I sensed as I put my hand on the chalice to receive communion. The tangible, physical tie to someone who was a close friend of the grandfather I never knew . . . Well, it was a moment I’ll never forget.

But, wait, there’s a little bit more. Special music Sunday morning featured a piece for violin and handbells that included the hymn It Is Well with My Soul. Though I had grown up in a church with a large music program, I had not known that hymn until I came to Ridgecrest (the Baptist assembly near Asheville) as a high schooler and heard it for the first time. I loved it. Still do. When I returned home from Ridgecrest, pulled out a hymnal, and played the hymn for my parents (this “new” hymn I had “discovered”), my dad was quick to say that it had been his father’s favorite hymn and had been sung at his funeral. That would be the service Dr. Louie Newton had led.

The inscription on the chalice reads “Drink from it, all of you!” In addition to these poignant reminders of my dad and of his dad, Sunday’s service was a powerful witness to our oneness in Christ, stronger than barriers of language, distances of geography, and differences in styles of worship.

–George Reed, Executive Director