What's New
June 2009

What's new, first and foremost, is our under-construction-website itself. Our thanks go to Cynthia van Elk for taking the beautiful pictures of so many of our families and their children and then allowing us to use them on this website. Our thanks go also to staff members, Rich Buley-Neumar and Joanne Ferrante, for the hours and hours that they have invested in learning how to do whatever it takes to do websites. They are doing one classy job.

Under construction means, of course, exactly that. Some of the links you hit will not work; some will take you to old pages from the old site. Pages may not line up the way we'd like them to, or stay the same size from page to page. We do not have a finished project yet, and so we ask everyone to bear with us while we work on it. We would welcome any and all feedback about any and all things. Email us at ffas@familyfocusadoption.org.

We have spent long hours on discussing the website and what we wanted to do with it. In the end, we want the site to be 'Family Focus Central.' We want it to explain simply and clearly what we do, why we do it, and how we do it. Our mission is primarily public adoption, but public adoption that isn't about foster parents adopting their foster children. Such adoption is a small minority of the field. It has its own strengths and its own weaknesses and we want to explore those strengths and develop tools for adoption workers across the country to fix those weaknesses. In our twenty two years in business, we have learned a lot and we wish to give our knowledge to the field, always in the interests of creating strong, permanent, healing homes for the multiply rejected children, too many of whom are still waiting for permanent families.

This column, to be written as needed, but certainly at the beginning of each month, will advise all of what's new on the website. Whether we added a new page, or created a new agency program, or changed even one word of one of our documents in order to be clearer, we will announce it here. We will announce newly uploaded publications, all of which will be available for downloading. Even something as simple as calendar changes will be announced here so that one doesn't need to search the entire site looking for what's been changed. If it's new on the site, it will be announced here first.

We hope that adoption caseworkers and adoptive families across the country are able to make use of the information that we put up on this site.

Jack Brennan
Associate Director

The website continues to develop, both behind the scenes and visibly. We have nearly completed all the 'gateway' pages that we wanted and now are going about filling in all the explanatory pages. It takes a long time and a lot of work, all of which has to be done on top of normal responsibilities.

We have gotten much positive feedback on the site and continue to welcome such from any - and every- one: ffas@familyfocusadoption.org.

The news of the month for us has been reading Ashley Rhodes-Courter's memoir, Three Little Words, which has been read by many of our staff these past weeks. Ashley is a twenty-four-year-old former foster child, adopted from the public system at twelve. With the research help of her adoptive parents, Ashley has done an incredible job of re-creating her history. We strongly recommend the book to all adoption workers and all adults considering adopting a child from the foster care system. And we are providing a direct link to Amazon to be able to order it right from this site.

The link to our newest program, Adoption Guides, on our 'Resources' gateway page will become 'live' or 'active' or whatever the lingo is later this month. On the same gateway page, 'Transition,' 'Covenants,' and 'On-Line Resources' were activated in June.

The 'History,' 'Board,' and 'Staff' pages were also activated in June. They are reached through 'The Agency' link followed by the 'About Family Focus' link. The 'History' is really more a description of the agency, but our founding and current executive director, Maris Blechner, promises to give us the full story 'soon.'

'I Never Dreamed,' 'Testimonials,' and 'Contact Us/ Directions' have also been redesigned and newly activated.

Continual change during the summer is our plan, with a more or less finished website by mid-September.

Jack Brennan
Associate Director