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Wendy’s Wonderful Kids (WWK) is making a difference for thousands of children—one child at a time. The Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption awards grants to public and private adoption agencies to hire adoption professionals who implement proactive, child-focused recruitment programs targeted exclusively on moving America’s longest-waiting children from foster care into adoptive families.
These professionals, known as Wendy’s Wonderful Kids recruiters, work on caseloads of children the system has forgotten, ensuring they have the time and resources to give each child as much attention as he or she deserves. These recruiters employ the Wendy’s Wonderful Kids evidence-based Child Focused Recruitment Model to find the best home for a child. Recruiters begin with familiar circles of family, friends and neighbors, and then reach out to the communities in which they live to find a forever family. Recently-released research from a five-year evaluation of Wendy’s Wonderful Kids shows that children referred to the program are up to three times more likely to get adopted.
The Fostering Connections Act, which aims to promote permanency and improved outcomes for children in foster care, has increased the Dave Thomas Foundation’s ability to do more family finding work in the state of Maryland, serving Baltimore City, Baltimore County, Montgomery County, Frederick County and Wicomico County.