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22° in the providence
Join Date: Jan 2005
Location: But what it takes to cross the great divide seems more than all the courage I can muster up inside. But we get to have some answers when we reach the other side. The prize is always worth the rocky ride.
Posts: 42,027
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Okay, someone brought some negative feelings to my attention, and I guess I felt the need to clarify some points:
First, let me say that I am in no way asking for members of this community to fund my adoption. I'm sorry if it seemed that way. My husband and I were having a discussion about fundraising and I wanted an outsider's point of view, so I posted here to pose the question to people whom, I hoped, would give different perspectives on fundraising and saving for adoption.
Second, we are working our butts off to save and earn the money ourselves as well. A home equity loan is not an option because we just bought our first home last year and don't have much equity. We are applying for grants, but the funds are often very limited in those. We are hosting a garage sale, started collecting printer cartridges, are in contact with a pile of other fundraising groups, and are saving from our own budget by shaving what we can and reducing our expenses overall. We also are applying for DH's work to begin offering adoption benefits to all employees and are selling a car. We plan to pay everything we can out of our pockets.
Third, I never meant to make anyone feel badly about the fact that God has blessed us with biological children and we are moving foward with an adoption. Honestly, when my husband brought it to me, I thought he was nuts, too. We both adore children and come from big families, but I had never even considered buildling a family through adoption. Everyone I knew had adopted out of necessity due to infertility. He called that day, this stoic man, crying after hearing a story on Focus on the Family on the way to work. He asked if we could begin praying about it, and we did. Within a few months we both felt led by the Spirit, and called to adopt. Throughout the next year we began requesting information packets. We have spoken to people from every "big" agency we could find (Dillon, Holt, Bethany, Genesis, Children's Hope, CWA, All Gods Children, etc.) as well as the State agency that services our area. We narrowed our options and at times gave up hope that we'd ever adopt. We began our quest to adopt looking for a child in South Korea, but were unable to find an agency that could work in our area (we had to be within a certain number of miles from Chicago). We prayed about it again, and looked into other options. My husband has a terrible fear of failed domestic adoptions because there were problems when his brother was adopted, so he is adamantly opposed to that. Eventually, we feel the Lord brought us back to the calling and things started falling into place. We located a local attorney who has an agency, which gave my husband more peace than a facilitator. We finally, after a year of research, came to a decision to work with this agency and felt amazing peace with our prayerful decisions.
To be honest, I guess I didn't feel that you all would want to or need to know any of that, since it was just a question of "fundraising" - and because I didn't want to offend anyone by getting into a heavily-religious point of view (I know many are diverse faiths/beliefs here) I already belong to and read message boards on adopting and know the other ways we can save the money for this. But, I hoped maybe someone would have input on what an appropriate/ethical method of raising money would be (since I hear raffles are "illegal" and ebay has some kind of limitations from what I read in an auction a couple weeks ago).
I meant no harm - and I meant, by no means, that you should send us some sort of donation. I only meant to ask what you thought about an IRL fundraiser with our church, community, and DH's professional contacts.
But, since it seemed to raise so many concerns and problems with people, I guess I've gotten my answer.
Thank you.
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Jenn
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