Saturday, November 21, 2020

Applying for Adoption Grants and Fundraising!

Let me tell you...it's worth it! 


I had the absolute pleasure to come alongside Tessa and Ryan in their adoption journey. I remember one of our first conversations after they officially turned in their application to get started was about the best way to navigate and apply for grants. I remember when my husband and I were in our own personal adoption journey and the thought of where to even start felt overwhelming. Do we qualify? Does income matter? When are they awarded? Would we have a chance? Well, Tessa and Ryan took on applying for grants with purpose and was awarded over $20,000 for their adoption! Yes, you heard me right...$20,000!!! They felt so passionate about this process that they wanted to write their own approach and how they navigated applying for adoption grants and how worth it it really is. Take a look at their words and be encouraged. Don't let finances be the reason for not saying yes to that urge you have in your heart to start your own adoption journey. 

In Ryans and Tessa's Words:


Hello!


My name is Ryan and my wife and I have been clients of CAC for the past 18 months or so. For the sake of this blog post, I am going to be focusing on finances, specifically grants. We had always known, even before we got married, that we were going to adopt to grow our family and have children. Adoption had always been the plan, but our biggest hiccup was the finances. Looking at average costs and estimates, we knew we would never be able to save roughly $50,000 to pay for an adoption. We started looking into what we should do to help offset that cost and the main thing we found was fundraisers. 


From selling t-shirts to bake sales, to instagram auctions, literally anything can be a fundraiser. We started fundraising before we even knew what we were going to be doing as far as what approach to take or where to start. Once we signed on with CAC we thought that once we were clients there would be this amazing fundraising opportunity that we just simply hadn’t thought of, as if CAC had some secret fundraiser that nobody had ever heard of that would miraculously make us $20,000. Well I’m here to tell you that they do.


CAC has an amazing, vetted, list of grants that you can apply for (about 20 different ones, specifically). These grants are open to anyone, but I’ll tell you from my personal experience, it's not an easy undertaking to find adoption grants, so having a list is a life-saver. One of the first things we talked with our consultant, Fallon, about was the finances. She was very encouraging and kept reminding us that the Lord would provide, she told us to make sure we apply for the grants that they have on their list. She told us that a lot of adoption grants go unawarded, meaning that not enough people applied to receive all the money that they had at the ready to provide to families.They were a lot of work. I mean, like, a lot! The payoff? So worth it. 


So you're probably thinking to yourself “yeah Ryan, we’ve heard of adoption grants, but like, nobody actually gets those and they are so much work.”  I’m here to tell you that people do actually get these adoption grants. I’m also not going to lie to you and say that they aren’t really that much work. They are that much work. I spent many hours tirelessly applying for grants. If I am being honest, I hated it from the very beginning. But the payoff was massive. For the work I put in the payoff was $20,000! We received 4 different grants we applied for! We have already been funded about 40% of our total cost from grants alone! 


Now what does this mean for you, the reader. Well, my hope is that I have inspired you to actually take the time and effort to apply for grants. If I have not inspired you, you can stop reading this post. If I have inspired you, which I hope I have, keep reading.


Our system:


My wonderful wife, Tessa, had been spear heading our fundraising from the very beginning and she was amazing at it. Organizing community garage sales, finding t-shirt fundraisers, and 3 separate auctions we did on instagram, just to name a few (follow us @bringbabyRV2home). I had promised her (without realizing how much work it would be) that if she was in charge of fundraising, I would be in charge of applying for grants. 


Now grant applications are a bit different, the first thing you want to do is make sure the application is actually going to be worth your time. You do not want to spend hours on an application for a grant that has a $25 application fee, if the grant is only for $250. This piece of advice came directly from Fallon, our consultant. She also told us to make sure that you qualify for the grant that you are looking to apply for. Most grants require that you be working with a non profit adoption agency (specifically with 501c3 status).  Many agencies on CAC’s agency list are.  What I did for all of our grant applications was save every single piece of information that was requested in a google drive. It took about 8 hours to complete the first application. I had to gather every piece of documentation they were wanting from every legal document I had ever had. Scans of drivers licenses, social security cards, bank statements, a print out of our credit reports, we had to know every tidbit of our expenses, broken down weekly, monthly, yearly (depending on the application). Each of these grant applications ask several adoption and/or faith based questions regarding how and why you are adopting, and what your faith looks like. Some of the applications only had 3-5 questions, while others had 25-30. Almost all of these questions were repeated on each application. So in saving every piece of documentation we needed, we saved every single question and answer on every single application, and were able to copy and paste the answers back and forth for each new application.


So I mentioned that the first application took about 8 hours, the more grants I applied for the easier it got. Fallon had advised us to start with the longest grant and in doing that it allowed us to have what we needed for the other grants. One little caveat about grants, however. You have to be in this middle stage of having your home study complete, and not having your adoption finalized. So depending on how quickly you get matched and placed with a baby, this might not leave you much time to apply for grants. We got really lucky (I like to think) because we had our home study completed by February of 2020, and were matched by April of 2020. This was lucky for a number of reasons, but for grants it gave us plenty of time to keep applying because our birth mama wasn’t due until October of 2020. I gave myself the goal of applying for 1 grant a week, knowing that we had ~28 weeks to keep applying.


My advice? Just don’t give up. With everything adoption related there is a literal mountain of paperwork and thousands of reasons to give up. But keep your head up and keep applying! The Lord truly will provide. 




***If you are interested in learning more about adoption and services we provide at Christian Adoption Consultants, I would love to chat! Feel free to email me, Fallon Palacios, at   Fallon@christianadoptionconsultant.com and check out www.christianadoptionconsultants.com for more information!! ***