FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Wednesday, September 18, 2002
Contact: ACF Press Office (202) 401-9215

ACF AWARDS $22 MILLION TO DENVER'S ADOPTION EXCHANGE ASSOCIATION
TO OPERATE ADOPTUSKIDS WEBSITE

The Administration for Children and Families (ACF), within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), today announced that the Adoption Exchange Association (AEA) in Denver will run AdoptUSKids, a website created to increase adoption by linking children in foster care with potential adoptive families across the country.

The AEA will operate AdoptUSKids for five years under a $22 million cooperative agreement with ACF. The AEA is a national organization that works with adoption exchanges to link waiting children with potential adoptive families and has had extensive experience in managing national grants in the area of adoption.

"AdoptUSKids offers hope that more foster children will be adopted into permanent, loving homes," said HHS Secretary Tommy G. Thompson. "It shows what can happen when we apply the latest technology to the urgent needs of foster children. AdoptUSKids gives these children a much better chance of growing up in a permanent family."

President Bush launched the website -- http://www.adoptuskids.org -- in July. Developed as a public-private partnership, the AdoptUSKids website features photographs and biographies of more than 6,500 children in foster care. AEA will manage and run the site, which is designed to raise public awareness, recruit adoptive families for waiting children, supply information and referral services to prospective adoptive families, and provide training to states and adoption agencies. To preserve privacy, the site does not include children's last names, birth dates and locations, but steers interested families to the appropriate state agency for information about a specific child.

"I am looking forward to working with the Adoption Exchange Association on this very important project," said HHS Assistant Secretary for Children and Families, Wade F. Horn, Ph.D. "They have pulled together a strong collaborative of agencies with excellent records in adoption, and they are committed to matching children in foster care who are legally free for adoption with adoptive families that are right for them."

There are currently some 134,000 children in public foster care. At least 88 percent of these children have special needs, such as a physical, emotional or cognitive challenge or they are part of a sibling group that should stay together. In 2000, 50,000 foster care children were adopted, an increase of nearly 79 percent since fiscal year 1997.

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