Need financial help to complete an adoption? Apply for a grant from the LGBTQ-friendly Helpusadopt.org! Their spring deadline is coming up, and they’d love to have more LGBTQ people apply.
Helpusadopt.org offers grants between $500 and $15,000Â to prospective adoptive parents who have already completed a home study. Their grants, they tell us, “are not intended as adoption start-up money, they are intended to help the grant recipient complete their adoption so that they can bring their child/children home.”
The organization was founded in 2007 by spouses Becky and Kipp Fawcett, after their own infertility struggle and adoption process. They depleted most of their savings doing so, and decided they wanted to help other adoptive families who might be facing even greater financial obstacles.
Becky told me in a phone interview that she initially wanted to find an adoption-grant organization and offer her services as a publicist pro bono. She discovered, however, that none of the ones she found welcomed same-sex or single parents—and that wasn’t the kind of organization she wanted to support. She and Kipp therefore decided to start their own “equality-based adoption grant program.”
Now they have a staff of five and a board of 18. To date, they have awarded 208 grants totaling more than $1.8 million dollars. Grantees have included same-sex and single parents as well as different-sex parents, and Becky noted that transgender parents have been among them, too. “We take our diversity very seriously here,” she affirmed.
A total of 16 percent of their grant money has gone to LGBTQ parents, she said, and she’d like to increase that number. Grants may be used for foster-to-adopt, international, and domestic adoptions. They may also be used for second-parent adoptions in cases where one parent is adopting to begin with (say, if adopting from a country that does not allow same-sex parents to adopt jointly), but the application must be made before the first adoption is final. Prospective applicants who have questions about whether their adoption would qualify should contact them at info@helpusadopt.org.
They award grants three times per year, at the end of February, June, and October, with application deadlines in April, August, and December. The April 15 deadline will soon be upon us, so apply soon if you want to have a chance in this cycle. There is no application fee—another point that differentiates Helpusadopt.org from many other adoption-grant organizations.
For more details and requirements, please visit their website. If you’re not adopting, or already have, please also consider a donation to Helpusadopt.org so they may continue to help other families.