November is National Adoption Awareness Month
During the entire month of November, we’ll be celebrating by donating a portion of proceeds from our dessert sales to directly support Hephzibah Children’s Association and will help spread awareness for adoption. This is an annual tradition for us and one we look forward to it every year. We’re also sharing our adoption story, third-generation family member, Michelle, is adopted!
We hope you’ll join us! Book your table, and leave room for dessert this month!! ✨
Now more than ever, the need for foster parents, families willing to adopt and places like Hephzibah are important. Stay tuned throughout the month while we discuss more. ✨
About Hephzibah Children’s Association
Hephzibah Children’s Association provides a warm and nurturing environment for children who have been traumatized by abuse, neglect, multiple foster care placements or failed adoptions. Their family-based services renew and strengthen family bonds and their foster care services create new, loving and secure family ties. Hephzibah’s daycare program offers an award-winning educational experience for children in the community- regardless of their family’s ability to pay. For more about Hephzibah’s adoption program and how children have been connected with their Forever Families, you can watch this video.
All children deserve loving, permanent homes. National Adoption Awareness Month is a nationwide campaign, celebrated annually since 1990, to encourage families throughout the United States and Canada to open their hearts and homes to children in foster care who are waiting to be adopted. It also works to increase the number of families willing to consider foster care adoption and celebrates the unique joys of creating families through foster care adoption. Adoption statistics are staggering and exemplify the importance of raising awareness for organizations like Hephzibah.
- Today, more than 100,000 children in the U.S. foster care system are available for adoption. These children entered foster care through no fault of their own, as victims of child abuse, neglect or abandonment and their parents’ legal rights have been terminated.
- Each year, more children enter the system than are adopted.
- There were over 16,000 children in the Illinois foster care system this past year, approximately 25% or 4,000 children were eligible for adoption.
- The typical child who is eligible for adoption is at least 8 years old, moves three or more times in foster care, may have been separated from siblings, and will wait five years or more to be adopted.
- Tragically, tens of thousands will never be adopted and will leave the system at age 18 without families.
- Of the youth who age out of foster care without a permanent home: 20% will be immediately homeless, only half will find gainful employment, and less than 3% will go to college.