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.

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.

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.

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

Facebook

and

Instagram

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.

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.

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.”