Move over Catholic Charities... We've now met Barker. I think you can tell already that we liked Barker a lot.
The Barker Foundation was founded in 1945 by the Barkers in Washington, D.C., at the request of the Department of the Navy, who was finding that it had female Naval officers who had gotten unexpectedly pregnant. It started in their home, where the top two floors were dormitories for young pregnant women, and they had information meetings in their living room every Sunday. Apparently, Barker (a tax attorney) is responsible for some of the current policy on adoption.
Barker, like all ethical adoption agencies, is Hague accredited, and has a ton of experience in all aspects of adoption. There agency is broken up into different departments for each type of adoption path - International, Domestic and an older child adoption program called Project Wait No Longer. We met with the director of the International program and with the director of the Wait no Longer program. We will likely schedule a second meeting with the director of the Domestic program as she was not available yesterday for questions.
We also got more information on the key differences between International and Domestic adoption. Basically, International adoption is a queue. You file your paperwork, pay your fees, wait in line, and the governing body in the foreign country matches you with a child. The birth mother has very little say in the placement, but also, frequently, the birth mother may not even be known. Domestic adoption tends to be more of a lottery system. The birth mother has a lot more say in which family she wants to raise the child, and your wait time can be very unpredictable. One of the directors said something very interesting. She said that you shouldn't go in to it until you are absolutely, positively ready to take home a child. Yes, average wait times are long - say 12 to 18 months. But there are plenty of cases where the prospective parents get a phone call three days after they turn in a completed profile book. You just never know.
One of the really interesting things about Barker is that they allow you to pursue several adoption paths concurrently. You can prepare a dossier for the Domestic and International program simultaneously and either terminate both when you get matched with a child, or keep the second application alive even as you finalize your first adoption. I doubt we'll go this route, but it's nice to have the option. For me, I am looking for the path with the shortest wait time, and while that can be unpredictable, I think, overall, Domestic adoptions tend to be faster. They gave us really great information on the countries they specialize in for International adoption. China, for example, used to have a wait time of 6 months (in the beginning), but now they are seeing waits as long as 4.5 years. I think the average is around 2 years, but the adoptions out of China are slowing considerably. There are also rules specific to each country that you have to take in to account, and Barker laid all of those out quite nicely. For example, some countries require both parents to be over 30 (which cuts us out), and some go so far as to require that both parents have a certain body mass index. (Yes, really.) It seems weird to us to require something like that, but, hey, I don't make the rules. And what is important in the U.S. is not necessarily what's important to China or Korea or Ethiopia.
Barker also gave us our first glimpse into parent profile books. The ones we saw are basically Snapfish photo books with a lot of text explaining the couples background and various aspects of their lives that they find important. I'm sure we'll get more insight into how to prepare these books when we finish our home study, but I've been imagining ours as a scrapbook with quilt scraps and knit swatches and other little tactile embellishments.
Barker is similar to Catholic Charities in that they have a pool of families who are ready to adopt. The difference is that Barker's pool is much larger. There are between 50-60 families with completed home studies and profile books currently on file. Though that's quite a bit larger than the Catholic Charities pool, with Barker there is no waiting list. Once you have finished your profile book, it goes straight into the pool. I think the overall wait times for actually receiving your child are similar between the agencies, but at Catholic Charities they want you to wait with no expectations for a while. I really like the idea of going straight into the pool. It gives the birth parent(s) more choice for placement, and it makes us feel like we are being considered a lot more frequently than if we were languishing on a waiting list.
We have another info session next weekend, but if we were to choose right now, we'd pick Barker over Catholic Charities. Both are ethical, reputable agencies, but Barker seems to be a better fit for us in terms of our goals and how to best go about achieving those goals. The only thing we'll have to guard against is not letting our hopes get too high once we get in to the Barker pool!
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