Why Did We Start FFTA? Joy is a strong proponent of providing education and counseling for everyone involved in the adoption process. Once a child enters the foster care system, his or her chance of ever growing up in a loving, nurturing, secure and forever home is significantly reduced. Foster care is not the safety net that people so often believe it is. The Goldstein’s personally know the fulfillment of a “forever family,” and Joy and the FFTA staff are in a position to help mothers of unplanned pregnancies find peace in the decision to place their babies for adoption. Finally, a primary motivation for starting FFTA was to help children from the Dominican Republic. When Americans consider adopting a child from another country, they immediately focus on Russia, China, or other areas in the Pacific Rim. So although FFTA can help guide families through the process of adopting children from anywhere in the world, FFTA has chosen to focus its in-house international adoption program on children much closer to home. And now the staff at FFTA are able to first identify the children in need of adoption, and then to actively seek good homes for them. |
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FFTA’s founders, Joy and Michael Goldstein have dedicated their lives to helping birth parents, adoptive parents and, of course, children. And though most of the babies they helped to place through Michael’s law practice are healthy, Caucasian infants, they have a particular fondness for harder-to-place children, including those that have been drug or alcohol exposed, the result of rape or incest, or the offspring of incarcerated mothers, or is black or bi-racial. Only by forming a state-authorized agency could they help to actively identify those children and then find permanent loving homes for them. In her role as FFTA’s Executive Director, Joy can now do just that.