Adriel has a long and rich history of caring for children in need. Founded as the Mennonite Children’s Home in 1896, Adriel’s mission has always focused on serving those children who either have no family or whose family environment is not safe or healthy.
As the needs of children and families have changed, Adriel has adapted and expanded its services to meet them. Today, Adriel provides foster care and adoption services for children.
Our programs use the Teaching-Family Model of Care, an evidence-based practice model that reinforces positive behavior and diminishes negative behavior. Children are empowered to make good decisions for their lives.
About Foster Care
Adriel’s Foster Care Program offers youth needing out-of-home placement the opportunity to live in a safe and loving home with a family in a community setting. Prospective foster parents are carefully screened, licensed, and trained. Training includes extensive instruction in the evidence-based Teaching-Family Model.
The youth are matched with foster families by a team of social workers. Foster families are provided with intensive support to help each youth attain goals. The objective is to encourage each youth to be as successful as possible and to reunite them with their family. Adriel can dually license families for both foster care and adoption.
About Adoption
Some families decide to foster with the intention of adopting a child (or children). Other families decide after fostering for a time that they would like to adopt. Finally, some families have the passion to adopt only without fostering. Adriel will help families reach their goal of adoption in a way that meets their needs.
Adriel adoption assessors assist families in the adoption process by completing the home study required to make adoption possible. We dually license families as both foster and adoptive homes. These homes, referred to as foster-to-adopt, are legally capable of providing placement for both foster and adoptive children. We do not charge any fees for this dual licensing. We also approve families as adoption-only homes. These homes are legally capable of providing placement for adoptive placements only. Adriel does charge a fee for completing an adoption-only homestudy.
Family Coaching
Family Coaching is a community-based service that promotes the stability and well-being of children and families.
Adriel is dedicated to serving children and extending these supports to biological families, helping them meet their unique needs and successfully maintain the biological family structure. In pursuit of this goal, Adriel will contract with counties to provide Family Coaching services to these families.
Adriel will provide a family coach who will work with the entire family with the goal of maintaining the family while providing tools and techniques for building and maintaining relationships.
Adriel will provide one or more of the following services to the family:
Attend and participate in team meetings, and make recommendations for treatment programming. Non-clinical in-home visitsNon-clinical parent support groupIf appropriate, the Family Coach will link the family with others with similar goals/or strugglesMentoringPlanned activities for the youth and/or caregiver (in-home or out-of-home)Parent EducationClassroom parenting training for the caregiver: If appropriate, the family will be encouraged to attend parent education training in the Teaching-Family Model, appropriate consequences and motivation techniques. **The training may be offered in a group setting or individually. Structured activities to improve family functioningA variety of activities may be used to help the family meet their set goals. These may include cooking as a family, role-playing, and recreational activities.
Family Visitation
Adriel offers supervised visitation services for families whose children are in out-of-home placement and working toward reunification. Adriel contracts with counties that have assigned families to attend supervised visitation.
Adriel staff supervises the visits and prepares a written report of the interactions among all participants.