Co-Founder, Promise Love Foundation
I always knew I would one day be an adoptive mom. My heart was called to it. I wasn't sure how it was going to happen but from a very young age, adoption was always there. I wanted to have the experience of loving a child that you chose everyday, a child that needed love, a child that you could see your love making a difference in their life and above all, encompassing the definition of my faith that is close to the heart of the Father. This is what called to me.
After my husband and I started our family with two beautiful biological babies, we strongly felt that we also wanted to begin our adoption story. We started with the feeling that International adoption would be part of our story, so we signed up with a local international adoption agency. In classes to pursue this avenue, domestic infant adoption was presented as well and both my husband and myself felt an undeniable draw to move in that direction. As we started that journey, finances started to be a concern, we hadn't considered the cost of adoption. It was clear this would be a real barrier for us. As we prayed about it, a friend phoned one day and said have you considered foster care, there are so many children in the system that could use a family. We prayed and realized that this was the journey that we had set out for all along, it just took us some time to get there. As we opened up to this avenue of adoption, the process moved very quickly for us and we saw the doors were flying open.
We began our journey as foster parents, fostering for five years and were blessed enough to adopt our first and second foster placement—a rare thing. Through foster care, we believe our forever family is now complete. It has been hard and challenging in so many ways, but we wouldn't change a thing. This journey has been a HUGE blessing to our lives.
Through this process I learned so much along the way and I kept hearing people say, we would adopt if only we had enough money or if only we knew where to start. So with close friends of ours we started the Promise Love Foundation to help families walk through this journey of adoption with support and direction. It can be challenging to decide where to start or even which avenue to choose. Promise Love Foundation support and help fundraise for families who are adopting. We walk alongside them on their adoption journey whether that is the beginning stages or all the way through finalization and directing them to resources afterwards. It is an absolute gift and joy to be able to be able to coach families through their own adoption story and to be able to give back to families who are pursuing a forever family.