My Nonprofit Reviews

This agency is so damaging as to border on malpractice. They treated us like a transaction, not a family with a working relationship with them.

We joined their "Flexible Families" program in 2019 via meting with Program Director and paid to join program, for homestudy, homestudy updates, parts of licensing.

2022: We took emergency placement of a 10 year old girl. Program Director knew this child when she was at a residential placement she worked at, and same child was previously in a different Adoption Options home! Her team minimized her needs when presenting her to us. This child has a long history of significant violence in every placement. Her level of calculated violence is extreme even for this population, and often becomes criminal assault level. Adoption Options was in a position to share needs and missed several opportunities to share or advocate the team share more.

The child ended up going on M1 holds to the hospital and was in a series of emergency and long term higher level placements to try and resolve this. Regardless of how much we showed up for her/her needs her team refused to acknowledge basic safety for her as a need. They often overlooked or forgot our ongoing involvement and they resorted to coercion and threats to us about discharging her early, moving her to new home, etc.

Here are some ways Adoption Option failed to do their jobs:

1. As child's team repeatedly threatened us/child's placement, our caseworker never intervened.
2. Adoption Options did not advocate for us to receive a child family study in a timely way to get more info on this child. It should happen before placement. Ours didn't happen until child had been in our home for nearly five months
3. Child received two independent evaluations. One added four diagnoses to her list. The other stated she was a clear candidate for residential care or psychiatric residential care. Treatment was a long process and we stayed involved with weekly visits, therapy, calls, participation in special occasions and more. Team repeatedly questioned our "commitment" to this child. Our caseworker did not advocate for is. Instead, she told us she too questioned our commitment. In response to us talking about the damaging relationship with the team, Program Director counseled us to consider severing ties with the child rather than rebuilding trust with the team.
4. Child needed treatment for a year. Without any explanation, Adoption Options caseworker just stopped talking to us while the child wasn't with us.
5. We were not offered any support, training, or education for more than a year by the agency!
6. Child completed treatment program and came home. Sadly, she demonstrated a need to assault once home and violence was severe. (We sustained injuries. Furniture was outright shattered. Etc.) We reached out to both our caseworker and the team for help and support and received none, as this continued night after night, we finally called 911.
7. Child's team stonewalled us once this happened, for over a day. Adoption Options did not help us get in touch with them. They counseled us to discharge child from hospital (with no safety plan, and having heard that the clinician there did not want to send her home). When we said we needed contact from the team and had spent hours trying to get in touch, she counseled us to "put in our notice" (stop parenting her)
8. After child did not come home ("disruption") Adoption Options had no contact with us - nothing to support us in the hospital asking us for help with child's need, no help in understanding what happens to her personal items, nothing about "what next." For weeks.
9. We contacted team to get child's things. They said inappropriate and inaccurate things about us in an email with caseworker. Caseworker said nothing helpful or advocating.
10. We asked to transfer our license. Caseworker agreed. Instead, the agency CLOSED our license which means we have to go through a complete homestudy and training again. We paid for our homestudy with this agency!
11. The information that Adoption Options did send to our new licensing body was inaccurate in at least three ways.
12. When I submitted a grievance, according to their own policy, they have 30 days to respond. On day 31, they told me they needed more time. Then they told me they had no other responses and would not have a conversation with me. They don't even follow their own grievance procedures.

They are damaging to older child placements and do not help families understand or advocate to meet complex needs in children. Hint: almost all older children in the system have complex needs.

Look at their other reviews on other sites. They're going to tell me "they exhausted every option to resolve my complaints." No. Executive Director told me in an email she believes her staff did their job correctly and wouldn't even get on the phone with me. We're not a transaction; we're a family that trusted them to help us grow our family. It was a terrible decision to work with them and costly, too. They are unethical.