Guest Blog: This Adoption Recruiter says, “You Gotta Believe!”

Pat O’Brien is a Wendy’s Wonderful Kids recruiter who works each day to find loving, permanent homes for children in foster care.

I’ve been working to find adoptive homes for children in foster care for 30 years. After 18 years working at a nonprofit, that I founded, called “You Gotta Believe!” which focuses on finding permanent families for youth on the verge of aging out, I moved on to become a Wendy’s Wonderful Kids (WWK) recruiter. It was a job I knew well as I worked with these men and women for 18 years before deciding that I too should be a recruiter.

The job comes with many challenges and sometimes the largest challenge is convincing the employees of residential care that there really are committed families who want to give forever homes to the young in danger of aging out. When we use our Child-Focused Recruitment strategy we are only looking for people who care about our youth and will sign up for a lifetime commitment.  Hence, the next family we recruit will have a dramatically different parenting philosophy from all the previous parents that this youth had.    

One story that sticks out is a young boy who lived with his great grandparents.…read the full blog here.

The Wendy’s Wonderful Kids program is the signature child-focused recruitment model of the Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption. The Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption is a national nonprofit public charity dedicated exclusively to finding permanent homes for the more than 130,000 children waiting in North America’s foster care systems. Created by Wendy’s® founder Dave Thomas who was adopted, the Foundation implements evidence-based, results-driven national service programs, foster care adoption awareness campaigns and innovative grantmaking. To learn more, visit davethomasfoundation.org or call 1-800-ASK-DTFA.