Right now, there are 115 children in Chatham County living in foster care.
That’s 115 children without a permanent home, away from their birth families and living in some level of uncertainty about their futures.
“Foster care is designed to be temporary, and while we have wonderful foster families caring for our children, those kids know it’s not forever,” said Meagan Faraone, the Chatham organizer for National Adoption Day, which takes place Saturday. “Most of those 115 children won’t need adoptive homes, but the ones that do have experienced a lot of loss, anger and disappointment in their young lives, and they deserve families who can support them as they deal with those experiences.”
The Chatham County Department of Social Services is hosting an event from 10 a.m. to noon this Saturday to mark National Adoption Day. More than 70,000 children have been adopted on National Adoption Day since the event’s institution in 2000. Saturday’s event, which will take place at the Chatham County Justice Center in Pittsboro, will be the location for two more of those adoptions.
That’s right: two families will complete the adoption process on Saturday in the eyes of the public. Faraone said the families “wanted their ceremonies to be open to the public as a way to include the community and raise awareness.”
Pittsboro will join 400 other cities in the United States in hosting similar events, and while it’s just one day a year, the effort to publicize and increase access to the adoption process has been going on for years.
According to the Adoption Network Law Center, a California-based group providing adoption services, around 428,000 children are currently in foster care in the United States and 135,000 children are adopted each year. The average child waits for an adoptive family for more than three years and the average age of a child waiting for adoption is 8 years old.
In light of the nationwide recognition of National Adoption Day, the Chatham County Board of Commissioners marked Saturday as National Adoption Day in Chatham County, saying in a resolution that it “urges all citizens to join in a national effort to raise awareness about the importance of adoption and giving every child a safe place to grow.”
Saturday’s event is a way to learn more about adoption, said Wilder Horner, the social work supervisor with Chatham DSS.
“We hope you will join us to learn more about what foster care and adoption look like in our local community, while celebrating the local families who will be celebrating adoption milestones,” she said in a press release. “It also is a chance to find new ways to become involved through programs like Communities in Schools, Guardian Ad Litem and FACES of Chatham County.”
The day’s program will start at 10:30 a.m. where families and professionals who are involved in adoption will talk about what it means for them, Faraone said. That will be followed by the announced adoptions. Attendees will also be able to get information about “how to get involved and support the children of Chatham,” she added, along with baked goods from Willy’s Cinnamon Rolls and “interactive exhibits for people to share about the importance of family.”
The major theme of this year’s National Adoption Day is “Celebrating a Family for Every Child.”
“We are who we are because of family, for better or worse,” Faraone said. “Whether it’s the family we are born into, the family who commits to us, the family we choose or the family we grow for ourselves, these relationships are often how we define ourselves. Family helps us understand the world, decide who we want to be and figure out what we value and believe.”
It’s this role families play, she said, that’s part of why Saturday’s event will be held and why Chatham residents should play a role in the lives of children waiting to be adopted.
“Adoption offers an opportunity for healing to begin for those kids through a committed relationship of unconditional love,” Faraone said. “Our hope is that by sharing the stories of some of our children and families, more people will want to be a part of helping the children of Chatham who need permanence through adoption.”
Reporter Zachary Horner can be reached at zhorner@chathamnr.com or on Twitter at @ZachHornerCNR.