LGBT Adoption & Fostering Week 2015 closed on Sunday 8 March, reaching a record number of potential LGBT adopters and foster carers. The week brought together 90 agencies across the United Kingdom, with 55 awareness-raising events stretching across the country. In London, New Family Social welcomed over 100 guests to Friday’s flagship information event following strong attendance at the Manchester event that kicked the week off. Setting Twitter alight - #LGBT2015, the week’s hashtag, was seen by 9.4 million – the week was supported by the likes of Alan Cumming, Coronation Street‘s Brooke Vincent, Julian Clary, Charlie Condou, Lorraine Pascale and Miss Dynamite. Media coverage was hard to ignore with over 30 pieces appearing from Frome to Trafford. New Family Social’s Paul Parker sat on the sofa with Lorraine Kelly and Chief Executive Tor Docherty spoke to The Guardian about the importance of the week. Gay Star News, Attitude, Gaydio and media partners Pink News all showed their support too. The success of the week pushed NFS’ social media followers to an all-time high too; with over 7,000 people around the world now following or liking the charity on Facebook or Twitter. There’s still time to find out more about LGBT adoption & fostering as there are information events still taking place. You can find the nearest to you on the ‘In your area’ section on this website. LGBT Adoption & Fostering Week is kindly supported by Barnardo’s and After Adoption. Source: https://www.newfamilysocial.org.uk/record-breaking-lgbt-adoption-fostering-week-closes/ I have been asked to contribute some photographs to an exhibition in Tokyo organised by a gay rights group called Love is Colourful. I would like to take some pictures of gay families in London. The exhibition will take place in April so I need to get some photos this month. Would you be able to share this with your members? This is a great opportunity to help raise awareness of gay adoption etc and put it on the agenda in Japan. If you would be interested in helping Robert with this, please contact him on robert9williams@hotmail.com Robert is aware of the security issues around photographing adopted children. Source: https://www.newfamilysocial.org.uk/photographer-needs-lgbt-families-in-london/ ADOPTION charity Parents And Children Together has helped create 30 LGBT families through adoption and fostering since a landmark law change in 2005. It has been 10 years since the implementation of the Adoption and Children Act which gave LGBT couples the same rights as heterosexual adopters. In that time PACT has been at the forefront of enabling people from the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) community to become parents. As part of LGBT Adoption and Fostering Week, a PACT dad has shared his experiences of adopting three children. David* and his partner adopted their daughter and first son through their local authority but came to PACT for their third child. “PACT has been great and our latest addition arrived five weeks ago - a beautiful baby boy aged one. “PACT has been so supportive and upfront with the whole process. They have always demonstrated to have our interests at heart and they are a constant source of contact and support should the need arise.” You can read David’s full story at www.pactcharity.org/davids-story PACT Director of Adoption and Fostering Shirley Elliott said: “Around 18%** of the adopters we are currently working with are from the LGBT community. “We confirmed our commitment to offering an excellent service to LGBT people wishing to adopt by launching our Inclusive Adoption service last year and opening a new office in Brighton. “We are proud to be a member of New Family Social – the UK network for LGBT adopters and foster carers – and delighted to be a part of LGBT adoption and fostering week.” PACT supports families across the London and the south through adoption, fostering, award-winning therapeutic services and community projects. A free PACT Guide to Adoption is available from the PACT website atwww.pactcharity.org/PACT-Guides along with dates of Information evenings onwww.pactcharity.org/info. Source: http://pactcharity.org/news-events/latest-news/pact-marks-lgbt-adoption-and-fostering-week ‘These children have been rescued and will have better lives’ - Emma Brough, foster parent “I didn’t want to go into a high-powered job straight after university, so opted to do some volunteer mentoring with teenagers. My husband and I – we’d only just got married – ended up taking in a 15-year-old girl whose mum had kicked her out. Just being with us, part of our regular life, made such a difference to her. So we started looking into fostering. I was 23 when we started, and we’ve fostered 15 children so far. It can be exhausting and it’s daunting, especially when you hear about the children’s experiences. What I feel I can do is bring them into a safe place, and I can love them, and I can give them a positive routine. There are so many positives to balance those times. I can’t imagine not fostering. There are the awful situations faced by children whose stories end tragically, and I just rejoice to be a part of the stories we won’t hear, because these children, the ones we look after, have been rescued and will have a better life.” ‘The rewards are huge’ - Carole Kloss, social worker “Potential adopters quite often come with expectations: they want a baby, as young as possible. But the children we see are not given up for adoption at birth; generally they’ve been through care proceedings and suffered things like neglect or abuse. You have to do a robust assessment to ensure an adopter can manage, whatever might come along. It can be hard, but adoption is a commitment for life: the stakes are so high for these children. Our professional skill is to encourage people to be really honest, instead of just saying what they think we want to hear. All social workers are credible, but when you’re able to say to someone that you’ve been looking after these sorts of children for the past 28 years, I think that’s invaluable. I can see the social work practice theory, but also how that plays out in children’s lives. The rewards are huge. Children who come into care will have experienced horrible things. When you put them with an adoptive family who really care about them, you actually see a physical change in them, and in how happy they are. Children are amazingly resilient. If you put them in the right environment, with the right people, they can absolutely soar. I love being part of making their lives better.” ‘She’s perfect for me and I’m perfect for her’ - Karen McKellar, adoptive parent Karen McKellar has always been upfront with her little girl about her adoption. Six-year-old Grace will happily tell people she comes “from her mummy’s heart not her tummy.” But McKellar knows that could change in the future – and so the fact that her daughter looks like she comes from the same ethnic background is an advantage. “People only know my daughter is adopted when I tell them – if you see us together you wouldn’t know,” she says. “For me, I didn’t care if she looked like me or not. I remember there was one little girl who was matched with another lady because they said she looked more like her and at the time I thought: ‘How can you expect us to look like the children we want to adopt when we didn’t give birth to them?‘ It seemed unfair.” Now, however, she appreciates the fact her daughter will not feel she as if she does not belong in family photos. “I want her to grow up very confident and very comfortable with things and so this is one less issue for her to have to deal with. When she’s older, she’ll have the power to decide who she wants to let know and who she doesn’t.” In fact, McKellar does not know Grace’s ethnic background – her little girl was a foundling adopted at just 11 months old. She is being brought up to love her mother’s Jamaican heritage. “I’m proud of where I come from and for me bringing her up with that culture and heritage is very important,” says McKellar. It was almost three years from the start of McKellar’s assessment as a would-be adopter to the point where she could take her daughter home. She is now a passionate advocate for adoption and has begun fostering babies to help give them the best start in life. “As long as the adoption process may be, as hard as it may be, as intrusive as it may be, don’t give up and quit. Once you are matched with your child it’s all worth it. If it had gone any faster I wouldn’t have had my daughter. She’s the perfect child for me and I am perfect for her.” Source: http://www.theguardian.com/social-care-network/2015/mar/04/parents-stories-adoption-fostering When word got out locally, back in the late 1980s, that Jo and her partner Liz were planning to adopt Lucy*, the little girl they had been fostering, it was not an easy time. “We had dog poo through our door, people saying it was shameful, that we shouldn’t be doing this,” Jo, now 60, remembers. And the adoption would not even have been on the cards had it not been for the fact that Lucy’s birth mother had proposed it to social services herself. “We’d previously been told there was no way we could adopt,” Jo says. In fact, only Jo would be listed on the adoption paperwork, because same-sex couples have only been able to adopt together, rather than in the name of just one partner, since 2006. That change in the law has undoubtedly encouraged more such couples to adopt, says Tor Docherty, chief executive of New Family Social(NFS), the charity for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) adopters and foster carers. The numbers have gone up every year: in 2014, some 7% of the children adopted in England went to same-sex couples, compared to 6% the year before. “The fact that the couple can both be legal parents matters enormously, because otherwise one has legal rights and one doesn’t,” Docherty says. Jo agrees, saying she and Liz, who died four years ago, never felt like equals as parents. This week is LGBT Adoption and Fostering Week, run by NFS, and the charity is appealing for more LGBT people to consider adopting or fostering a child. It estimates that if just 1% of the LGBT population were to adopt or foster, there would no longer be any children waiting for a new home. What is more, says Docherty, they are often more willing than heterosexual couples – who may arrive at adoption after being unable to conceive via fertility treatment – to consider adopting harder-to-place children such as those who are older, have special needs, or are in sibling groups. James and Owen, both 33, adopted a three-year-old boy, Rhys, in 2012. “The surrogacy route felt too manufactured for us,” says James. “We loved the idea, as cheesy as it sounds, that we were going to give a child a home. The heterosexual couples seemed to come in with criteria they wanted to meet – they wanted a baby. My partner and I were far more open, and were happy to adopt an older child. It’s been fantastic.” Jemma, 31, and Laura, 30, who adopted their daughter Chloe* two years ago when she was 20 months old, were clear they wanted to adopt, rather than use a sperm donor. “It just didn’t make sense to us when there were children that needed a home and it wasn’t going to be genetically both of ours anyway,” Jemma says. “The change in Chloe has been incredible. The rewards we reap in terms of seeing what’s going on in that child are quite amazing.” Although prejudice against same-sex couples may not be as overt these days as that suffered by Jo and Liz, challenges remain. Research by Action for Children in 2013 revealed that 32% of LGBT people in the UK believe that being LGBT means you cannot foster, and in an NFS survey of 400 LGBT adopters and foster carersconducted last year, a third of the respondents who had already adopted thought the process would have been easier if they had been heterosexual. “We do sometimes hear from our members that they aren’t having an easy time being assessed or matched,” Docherty says. “Problems can be down to individual social workers. There are pockets of bad practice, but that’s a minority, and there is also excellent practice.” And there is evidence of positive attitudes too. Another NFS survey found that three quarters of social workers thought lesbian and gay people’s openness to difference, and ability to support a child with a sense of difference, was a significant strength. “We know LGBT people can be particularly resilient as adopters,” Docherty says. Paul*, a transgender adopter, believes his own life experiences were seen as a positive in the run-up to adopting a two-year-old boy last June. “The fact that I’d struggled with my identity, been through a lot of adversity, had advocated for myself and come through it all as a stronger person was a great bunch of assets for an adoptive parent in the eyes of the agency,” the 40-year-old says. “It makes you a good role model and source of support for an adopted child who may then struggle with their own background and history.” He thinks getting approval as a single trans adopter would have been harder before the new law in 2006. Adoption has been a life changing experience, Paul says: “I couldn’t have wished for a better match. He’s absolutely brilliant and we just get along like we were meant to be. I can’t imagine life with anyone else, really.” Transgender parenting: finding fulfilmentJoan* is relishing the delights of becoming a grandparent – a role she never thought she would take on. One son was not interested in becoming a father and her other child, David*, came out as transgender when he was 22 so she wrote off any hopes of him having children. But all that changed last year, when David became one of only a few transgender adults in the UK not only to adopt, but to adopt alone. Joan says: “When David was 13 he told me he never wanted his own children and was going to adopt, so I knew it was in the back of his mind. When he told me he was adopting Joe* I wasn’t really surprised – more worried about how he would cope on his own. I remember googling it and finding just one case of a trans person who had adopted and nobody who was trans who had adopted alone. I was worried he would face a lot of prejudice, but his social worker was fantastic and helped dispel my fears. “As grandparents, my husband and I want to be as involved as much as we can with Joe. I just couldn’t wait to meet him, but it was a slow process, because at first we were only allowed to observe him from a distance. I remember that we went to Ikea and just sat in the same cafe as he was in with David, just so we could see him. Since then we have had more contact; we’ve been to the shops with him and taken him on the tram. “David is a much more of a full person now than he ever was before. He is both a mother and a father to Joe and I feel adoption is right for him. Looking to the future, I worry about what will happen when Joe goes to school – whether he will be bullied because he is an adopted child with a trans parent. The scope for bullying is my biggest worry. Both my husband and I were graduates and I know we would have been very upset if our children hadn’t gone to university. But with Joe I don’t make those kind of assumptions – I just want him to be an extremely happy child and do what is right for him.” Debbie Andalo * names have been changed Source: http://www.theguardian.com/social-care-network/2015/mar/04/gay-bisexual-transgender-foster-parents-adopters LGBT Adoption and Fostering Week 2015 is taking place from Monday 2 March to Sunday 8 March 2015, and is run by the UK’s largest network for LGBT adopter’s and foster carers, the charity New Family Social. James Foyle, foster carer recruitment expert at The Fostering Network, welcomed the week saying: “LGBT Adoption and Fostering Week is a fantastic opportunity to demonstrate the diversity of people who can and do foster. It is a time for fostering services to consider how they engage with the LGBT community, address any misconceptions that may exist and help those thinking of fostering to identify whether they have the right skills and qualities to foster. “By applying to become part of the fostering community, yours could be one of around 55,000 households across the UK caring for and making a difference to the lives of some of society’s most vulnerable children. Your experience and knowledge could be the difference in helping a young person in your care achieve their full potential. “The journey can be difficult and it is a role that requires patience and perseverance, but the ultimate outcome can be one of the most rewarding and fulfilling decisions you ever make.” If you believe you have the skills to foster then visit couldyoufoster.org.uk to find out more. You can find out more about LGBT Adoption and Fostering Week, and their events throughout the UK this week, on their website. Source: https://www.fostering.net/news/2015/fostering-network-backs-lgbt-adoption-and-fostering-week-2015#.VP7cy_msU1a Carers from across England, Scotland and Wales are celebrating the tenth anniversary since the implementation of the Adoption and Children Act2 which gave LGBT couples the same equal legal rights as heterosexual adopters.This year New Family Social – the charity which supports adopters and foster carers from LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender) communities – has joined forces with children’s charity Barnardo’s to mark LGBT Adoption and Fostering Week. This year’s campaign will highlight there is still a need for more carers to come forward and adopt or foster children, in particular sibling groups who often wait the longest to find new forever families. The number of children adopted by LGBT couples has tripled since the landmark law change in 2005 - a total of 1,313. Javed Khan, Chief Executive at Barnardo’s, said: “Barnardo’s has always encouraged and supported adopters and foster carers from LGBT communities, long before the legal changes were introduced. “As the UK’s largest adoption agency in the voluntary sector, we are delighted to support this year’s campaign. “I’m proud to say that of the 123 children we placed for adoption in the year up to December 2014, 16 are placed with LGBT adopters – a rate of 13% - which is more than twice the national average. “We specialise in finding adopters for older children, children in sibling groups and children with additional or uncertain needs. We are very proud of the contribution our adopters and carers from the LGBT community make towards the work of Barnardo’s in turning around the lives of some of the most vulnerable children in the UK.” Source: http://www.barnardos.org.uk/news/LGBT_Adoption_and_Fostering_Week_2015_/latest-news.htm?ref=102901 |
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