Every child deserves a home

A core value of Youth Villages is that children are raised best by families. Through our Intensive In-Home Services programs, we provide help to struggling families, hoping to strengthen them and allow children to stay with their birth parents. Sometimes, this is not possible.

In Tennessee, the Youth Villages adoption program partners with the state of Tennessee's Department of Children's Services to find permanent homes for the children in our care who have adoption as a goal. In the other states we serve, our counselors work with state officials to facilitate adoption for children who can not return to their birth families.

Right now, our Tennessee staff are seeking adoptive parents for more than 70 Youth Villages children who range in age from five to 18.

We began our adoption program in 1999 as a natural extension of our treatment foster care program. For some people, fostering a child with special needs is the first step toward adoption. Many of our foster parents adopt the children in their homes when they become eligible for adoption. Other parents come to us with adoption as their immediate goal.

The children available for adoption face special challenges. Most of them have suffered some emotional trauma in their childhood; many have suffered from abuse or neglect. They have received counseling and good care from us. To reach their full potential, all they need now is the kind of security that only a real family can provide.

Youth Villages offers an array of training, support and assistance to potential adoptive parents. Many adoptive parents also are eligible for continuing adoption subsidies from the state.