The Reel Hope Project

Our mission is to find a forever family for every child. We do that by creating two-minute profile videos of kids in our state who are waiting to be adopted. We know that family is the foundation for for every good thing, and that lack of family leads to all kinds of challenges. We believe if we can find a forever family for every child, we can get ahead of many of the issues our nation faces - from poverty to incarceration rates to sex trafficking - it all comes back to family. We think our system is replicable and our team is ready to scale. We think that with your help, we are one giant leap closer to accomplishing our mission. 

As the founder of our organization, I always knew that I wanted to adopt kids some day. And the more I learned about the adoption system, the more I learned that adopting an infant can actually be an incredibly competitive process. There are more than enough families looking to adopt babies. But the older kids - and especially teenagers - are the ones who get stuck in the system. We started filming two-minute profiles videos about kids waiting for adoption in 2016, and we saw a huge response. In 2018 we filmed a video for a 12 year old boy, and fell in love with him on his shoot. We adopted him 6 months later. Our goal is to replicate what is happening in our state to find a forever family for every child. 

There are 400,000 kids in the foster care system in the United States. The goal of foster care is reunification with biological families: hopefully, mom or dad gets back on their feet, and the kids can go back home. But for 100,000 kids in the foster care system (1 in 4), going home is no longer an option. They are wards of state. Their legal guardian is their government until a family steps in to adopt them. 

When families step forward to adopt, the first thing most families are given is a "rap sheet" of every issue, trauma story, and challenge that child has been through and the often negative ways those challenges manifest. Our goal is for social workers to be able to pair that important and necessary information with a video highlighting that child's best qualities and characteristics to help remind prospective families AND the general public that this is a real child with a laugh and a smile and a goofy weird little personality. They deserve a family. 

We are the only ones doing this in the midwest (as far as we know). We provide overly taxed social workers with a joyful day having fun with a child on their caseload. We capture it all on film, and edit it down to the best two minutes. These videos bring the child to life way more than a statistic or a piece of paper describing them ever could. Our team is extremely creative and innovative in finding ways to get nervous, often shy or guarded kids who have been through hell and back to open up and laugh, play, and show their real heart and true personality. We are trauma-informed and child-centric, and our video team is top notch. 

We have thus far made reels for over 200 kids in our state, and we have seen about half of those kids get matched with families. We've also connected over 600 families to adoption agencies & counties to learn more about adoption and start the adoption process. We're also swimming upstream to 1. Make videos about foster families who are working to be a temporary safe place of healing before kids are returned to biological families or move forward into an adoptive home, and 2. Make videos of moms and birth families who were in crisis and on the edge of having their children removed, but were able to stay together because of a ministry, church, or organization that supported them. Our hope is to prevent as many kids as possible from entering the system, but making sure that 100% of those that do find a forever home before they age out.