Guest Blog: Waiting for the Miracle

Grace Lindgren, is a Wendy’s Wonderful Kid’s recruiter and works every day to find forever homes for children in foster care.

Adoption is a niche that I fell into serendipitously. Long before I knew what “social work” really was, I knew that I wanted to help people. I wanted to work with vulnerable populations, specifically. So there I was fresh out of undergrad with a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology. I needed a job and child protective services made an offer. I found myself in the adoption preparation unit, carrying a caseload of 29 kids whose parental rights had just been terminated and who would age out of foster care alone unless I found them a permanent home. As a 22 year old, I was both overwhelmed and invigorated. I was forced to develop organization, assertiveness, strong boundaries and self-care skills quickly—it was truly sink or swim. On my worst day, a day that involved a child’s death and the hospitalization of another child, a day that started 48 hours of no sleep, my mom asked me, “Why don’t you just quit?” She’s my mom and she didn’t want to see me hurting, so why not find something else with more hope and less heartbreak, something with more room for advancements and a larger paycheck? It was a legitimate question…read the full blog here.

The Wendy’s Wonderful Kids program is the signature child-focused recruitment model of the Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption. The Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption is a national nonprofit public charity dedicated exclusively to finding permanent homes for the more than 130,000 children waiting in North America’s foster care systems. Created by Wendy’s® founder Dave Thomas who was adopted, the Foundation implements evidence- based, results-driven national service programs, foster care adoption awareness campaigns and innovative grantmaking. To learn more, visit davethomasfoundation.org or call 1-800-ASK-DTFA.