North Dakota
How a new partnership is helping spotlight North Dakota kids waiting for adoption
FARGO — Many children awaiting adoption in foster care have to wait a long time before finding their adoptive families. Some never do.
Eight years ago in Minnesota a project was created to help children and teens find permemant homes through customized videos that feature a foster child’s unique personality and interests.
Fastforward to 2024 and the project now finds itself making impacts across North Dakota.
The
Reel Hope Project is a Minneapolis-based organization that specializes in customized videos
for children awaiting adoption. The videos allow waiting youth to connect to potential adopters through expertly crafted videos that are widely shared online.
Contributed / The Reel Hope Project
The project began working in North Dakota just a few months ago after being approached by
Adults Adopting Special Kids
(AASK) – a Fargo-based adoption service through Catholic Charities North Dakota.
The two foster care groups say the newfound partnership is a game-changer for adoption in North Dakota, one that is anticipated to have big impacts for kids in the coming years.
Treated like a movie star
AASK Program Director Kara Eastlund said the new collobartion “has been phenomenal.”
Adding video allows her team to feature the personalities of kids in a way that goes beyond words and a photo.
The videos highlight each child in a brand new way and bring more awareness and connections by being shared online, making it easier for waiting children to find their match.
Contributed / The Reel Hope Project
The concept hasn’t been done before in North Dakota, Eastlund said.
Weeks before The Forum intervieweed the two foster care groups, a North Dakota boy in the foster care system was adopted thanks in part to the new video format.
Abby Marino, the director of operations and outreach at The Reel Hope Project, said the boy’s video premiered across social media sites like
and
and garnered over 40 inquiries from potential adoptive households.
Those kinds of inquiry numbers are huge, Eastlund said, and difficult to obtain.
Often, the videos prompt prospective adoptive parents to get licensed, Marino added, and push them to connect with adoption agencies to start the process.
On top of all of that, the North Dakota kids who have made videos so far have really enjoyed the process, Eastlund said.
The youth have a lot of input into what goes into the video, Marino said, and the end goal is for each child to feel celebrated and valued.
“Kids are enjoying it,” Eastland said. “It’s really a way to show them how incredible they are.”
Before the film crew arrives, The Reel Hope Project team works with each child and their care team to help pick out a fun activity that the kid wants to do during the video.
What follows is a fun day out where each child is treated like a movie star.
“We want it to be a fun day for them,” Marino said, as well as a confidence boost during the adoption process.
Contributed / Catholic Charities North Dakota
‘No child should be waiting’
On any given day there are between
20 to 30 kids in North Dakota
who are waiting for a permanent home, Eastlund said. Children find themselves in the foster care system for a variety of reasons.
All kids that come into foster care have had some level of abuse or neglect in their life, she said, and if they are seeking an adoption that means they weren’t able to be reunified with their birth family. In those cases it means that their parents’ parental rights were terminated.
Losing birth parents, no matter the circumstances, is often extremely difficult for a young person.
“Every child that we work with has experienced immense trauma; immense loss,” Eastlund said. Many children experienced neglect or abuse.
Finding homes and families for the kids not only provides them with a place to call home but also helps them heal from the past, she added.
“No child should be waiting,” Eastlund said. “One is too many.”
Older children often face extra hurdles to finding their forever homes, Eastlund continued, adding that it takes the right family to jump into parenting an adolescent or teenager. They make up a large portion of children waiting in foster care.
These kids might require extra time and care from their new family and often have family connections that they want to maintain, Eastland said. It’s important for the child that their adoptive families support these relationships, she added.
Raising awareness for tweens and teens awaiting adoption is near and dear to The Reel Hope Project’s heart as well.
Contributed / The Reel Hope Project
The project was created in 2016 after founder Kaycee Stanley saw a need for innovative changes in the adoption field. She met her adopted teenage son on the day of his own video shoot, Marino said.
There hasn’t been a lot of change in child recruitment efforts over the decades across the nation, Marino said, and the introduction of video shakes things up.
The project
relies on private donations to fund their work
and now operates in seven states, with a goal to have a footprint in all 50 states, according to Marino. The
webpage features galleries
of kids up for adoption,
including in North Dakota.
“What fuels me is how effective it is,” Marino said. “Over half of the kids that we’ve made a (video) for since 2016 have been adopted.”
The average age of a child they feature in a video is 12 years old, Marino said.
“Oftentimes, if a child has been in the system for several years, or they reach teenage age, the added recruitment resource of a profile video can be a game changer,” Marino wrote in a message to The Forum.
The Reel Hope Project’s videography team now comes in on the regular to meet with North Dakota kids. The organization has six videos planned for 2024 and have five more in the works so far, said Marino, adding once a child is adopted, the video is deleted to protect privacy.
While the efforts have helped many kids find homes, some do age out of the system without ever finding a family. Those kids often face some “scary statistics,” Eastlund said.
Those who fall out of the system are at higher risk of experiencing homelessness, unplanned pregnancies, trafficking, addiction or incarceration, she said.
“There is a lot of general trauma that is happening right now in the foster care system across the county,” Marino said.
Adoption mitigates these outcomes for youth, Marino said, and helps them handle the hand that they were dealt.
“We’ve found that the power of video breaks through all of those labels,” Marino said. “It helps people remember that these are just kids and they need a family.”
Today in History revisits the Tuesday, December 29. 1959 edition of the Grand Forks Herald and highlights a story on the UND Hockey team being names North Dakota team of the year.
The University of North Dakota hockey team was named “Team of the Year” after winning the NCAA Championship in a 4-3 overtime victory over Michigan State. Forward Reg Morelli was voted the tournament’s Most Valuable Player. Runner-up honors went to the Bismarck High basketball team for winning its third straight Class A title.
Sioux Ice Champs N. D. Team Of Year
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS (as published by the Grand Forks Herald on Dec. 29, 1959)
North Dakota hockey stock reached a peak early in 1959 when the University sextet captured the NCAA championship with a 4-3 overtime victory over Michigan State.
The feat earned the Sioux icemen the accolade of “team of the year” in the annual Associated Press poll of sports editors and sports directors.
Runner-up honors in the balloting went to the Bismarck high school basketball team, which won its third straight Class A high school title.
The St. Mary’s high school football team, which came from no- where to win the Class A grid crown, won third place.
The University hockey team had taken western championship for the first time the year before, and finished second to Denver in the 1957-58 NCAA tournament.
As the 1958-59 campaign rolled around there were many problems to be solved if the Sioux were to maintain their position atop the college hockey world.
One by one the questions were resolved, and on March 14, at Troy, N. Y., North Dakota went into overtime to cop the coveted NCAA title.
Tremendous spirit marked the Sioux climb to the top. The North Dakota team won four games during the season in overtime, including two in the NCAA meet.
Members of the championship team included George Gratton and Bob Peabody, goalies; Ralph Lyndon, Julian Butherta, Pete Gaze- ly and Bob Began on defense; and Jerry Walford, Stan Paschke, Guy LaFrance, Art Miller, Ed Thomlinson, Joe Poole, Les Merrifield, Ron King, Bart Larson, Bernie Haley, Garth Perry and Reg Morelli, forwards.
Morelli Voted Most Valuable
Morelli was voted most valuable player in the NCAA tourney. Morelli and Thomlinson were on the first team and Lyndon and Poole on the tournament’s second team.
The Bismarck basketball feat of three straight state championships tied a record set by Fargo in 1922- 23-24. The Demons had an overall 21-3 record, averaged 61.6 points per game and held opponents to 49.3 per tilt on the season.
Starters were Ron Carlson and Bob Smith at forward, Rod Tjaden at center and Art Winter and Rich Olthoff at guards.
Carlson and Winter were all-west choices.
Here are “team of the year” choices, points in parenthesis:
- UND hockey (37)
- Bismarck high basketball (24)
- St. Mary’s high football (16)
- Bottineau high basketball (11)
- Valley City Teachers basket- ball (10)
- Williston high wrestling (5)
- Grand Forks Legion baseball (2)
- Shanley high football (1)
- NDAC football (1).
Our newsroom occasionally reports stories under a byline of “staff.” Often, the “staff” byline is used when rewriting basic news briefs that originate from official sources, such as a city press release about a road closure, and which require little or no reporting. At times, this byline is used when a news story includes numerous authors or when the story is formed by aggregating previously reported news from various sources. If outside sources are used, it is noted within the story.
A storm bearing down on the Great Lakes and New England is expected to bring rain, snow, and high winds over the next few days.
A narrow band from Fargo, North Dakota south to approximately Mason City, Iowa is under a blizzard warning ahead of the storm. That includes parts of of both states as well as parts of Minnesota. Winds in the affected areas are forecast to reach 45 miles per hour and, paired with an expected 3 to 8 inches of snow, are expected to create whiteout conditions through the start of the week.
Michigan’s upper peninsula is under a blizzard warning as well. There, snowfall is expected to be between 9 inches and 2 feet, and winds are expected to reach as high as 60 miles per hour, ABC News reports.
The National Weather Service has issued winter weather advisories for parts of the northeast, from the Scranton, Pennsylvania up through Burlington, Vermont and Portland, Maine. Freezing rain is expected in that area on Sunday and Monday.
Buffalo and Jamestown, New York, are also both under flood watches from Sunday afternoon until Monday afternoon.
Back in the Great Lakes region, both Cleveland and Detroit are bracing for high winds. Forecasters expect the cities will see gusts of up to 60 miles per hour on Sunday night through early Tuesday morning.
In the upper midwest, both Minneapolis and Green Bay are forecast to see between 5 to 9 inches of snow. A level 1 of 5 severe storm threat exists in a stretch from northern Indiana south into Missouri. That band includes Indianapolis, St Louis, Louisville, and Nashville. The affected region will be subject to high speed, damaging wind gusts, according to Fox Weather.
The storm began dropping snow on Sioux Falls and Fargo early on Sunday morning, and will continue to sweep east across the northern sections of the U.S. The midwest will begin to see storm conditions on Sunday afternoon, and the northeast will be affected shortly thereafter.
Road travelers in the affected regions should be wary. Parts of the I-95 corridor between Philadelphia and Boston may be made treacherous by freezing rain around 5 pm on Sunday night.
Forecasters believe that the storm system will clear by Monday night, though lake-effect snow is likely to follow in its wake for Great Lakes communities. That snow will likely continue into Tuesday and potentially Wednesday.
In northern New England, wintry precipitation may produce up to a quarter of an inch of ice in the area. While the interior northeast is expected to receive some lake-effect snow as well, forecasters believe snowfall in the region will be lighter.
The storm comes on the heels of another winter weather system that swept across the northeast earlier this week, dropping snow on New York and New Jersey and forcing thousands of flights to be either cancelled or delayed.
LINCOLN, N.D. (KFYR) – Lincoln got its very own cat cafe last week.
Ashley Kneavel learned about cat cafes while visiting another state.
“I fell in love with the concept and wanted to bring something like that to North Dakota,” said Kneavel.
And so with the help of Furry Friends Rockin’ Rescue director Julie Schirado, she got to work.
“About a year ago, I think it was, we started building this together,” said Kneavel.
Furry Friends’ role in the operation? Providing the cats. All of them are pre-vetted, meaning they are spayed and neutered and fully vaccinated.
Meaning they’re also ready for adoption.
“Instead of them sitting at a shop, they get to sit in an atmosphere that’s closely resembled to a home,” said Kneavel.
The cafe has already had three of its four-legged residents adopted.
“It’s a great thing to see when somebody comes in and connects with them on a deep level and takes them home,” said Kneavel. “It’s just… I don’t even know how to describe it, it’s just very rewarding.”
One of her goals in the future is to install a drive-thru window.
To learn how to adopt a furry pal from the cafe, or how to book a visit, click here.
Copyright 2025 KFYR. All rights reserved.
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