Good Neighbor Podcast: Fort Collins
Bringing together local businesses and neighbors of Fort Collins. Good Neighbor Podcast hosted by Nick George helps residents discover and connect with your local business owners in and around Fort Collins, Colorado.
Is your business serving the residents of Fort Collins? Then, we need to talk! Visit gnpFortCollins.com to schedule your free interview.
Good Neighbor Podcast: Fort Collins
E14: Every Child Deserves a Safe Haven: Inside a Community-Focused Adoption Agency
What happens when professional expertise meets genuine compassion in the complex world of adoption? Cindy Sarai and Ginger DeReus answer this question through their remarkable work at Adoption Dreams Come True, a nonprofit that's redefining what an adoption agency can be.
The conversation reveals a unique organization built on three pillars of service. Their primary work licenses prospective parents through comprehensive home studies, but with a crucial difference—a sliding fee scale that ensures financial barriers don't prevent qualified individuals from adopting. "We never wanted to really price good parents out of the market," Cindy explains, highlighting their commitment to accessibility. Unlike larger agencies juggling multiple programs, they focus exclusively on domestic infant adoptions, limiting themselves to about 30 families at a time to maintain quality and personalization.
Equally impressive is their birth parent program, offering free counseling to individuals facing unplanned pregnancies. This judgment-free approach allows birth parents to explore all options while maintaining agency throughout the process—choosing adoptive families, building relationships before delivery, and creating the experience that feels right for them. Complementing these services is their resource room, providing free diapers, clothing, and baby accessories to anyone in the community with children from birth to age two.
The founders' personal journeys mirror the heart of their organization. Cindy, who overcame undiagnosed dyslexia to earn a perfect GPA in graduate school after years of academic struggle, brings the same determination to creating ethical adoption practices. Ginger transitioned from Vice President of Human Resources in corporate America to the nonprofit world, finding greater fulfillment in building families than climbing corporate ladders. Together, they've facilitated over 500 adoptions while maintaining their commitment to operating without bias and with unwavering integrity.
Ready to learn more about adoption or support this vital community resource? Visit https://www.adoptiondreams.org/ or call 970-493-2557 for a free consultation. Your involvement could help create the next beautiful family story.
This is the Good Neighbor Podcast, the place where local businesses and neighbors come together. Here's your host, Nick George.
Speaker 2:Welcome to Good Neighbor Podcast. Are you considering donating to a meaningful charity organization? One might be closer than you think. Today I have the pleasure of introducing your good neighbor Cindy Sarai and Ginger DeRoos. I hope I got that right With Adoption. Dreams Come True, cindy. Ginger, how's it going? Good, how are you Good?
Speaker 3:We're excited to learn all about your organization. Please tell us about it. Well, we're a small, not-for-profit 501c3 adoption agency. We focus on domestic infant adoptions. So we have three primary programs that we do and one of those is we license people to become adoptive parents and so we do what we call a home study and we put together a kind of a psychological evaluation to allow them to go forward and be adoptive parents. So we do kind of a background checks and interviewing and compilation of documents to create a home study for them and once they're licensed, then they're ready to be adoptive parents.
Speaker 3:Through my agency we only take about 30 families at a time. We work on a sliding fee scale based on your income, because we never wanted to really price good parents out of the market and we feel like we do really good work and we have focused on one program, whereas a lot of agencies have multiple types of programs. So we just do domestic infants. That would be our first program. The second program would be our birth parent program. That's free counseling to all birth parents who find themselves with an unplanned pregnancy, so they can come in and ask for resources. They could talk about adoption, they could talk about their choices. If they're choosing adoption, they get to choose a family, spend time with that family prior to delivery if they so want to. They really come to us kind of at all stages of the pregnancy. So sometimes we have nine months with them and sometimes they've already delivered baby and we get the call from the hospital.
Speaker 3:So there's a gamut of time when birth parents come to us and if they're placing for adoption, they get to choose their family, they get to know them, they have a relationship. Sometimes the adoptive parents are allowed to be in the birthing rooms and babies getinquish their rights. We'll monitor the placement with the adoptive parents for six months and then we give them consent to adopt and they get to have their forever family. And then our third program is a resource room in our basement. It serves children zero to two with diapers, clothing, baby accessories. Anyone in need can come. It's free to the public. We're open Tuesday, wednesday, thursday from 11 to 1 for anyone who has needs and they can come and shop for their baby. So that's kind of the short answer.
Speaker 2:How did you and Ginger get into this?
Speaker 3:We both have different stories, so I'll tell you mine first and then let Ginger tell you hers second. We both have different stories, so I'll tell you mine first and then let Ginger tell you her second. I started in school with social work degrees, worked in child protection, in sex abuse, investigations of children under the age of three for many years and I met a woman when I was working at the department in Garfield County who was opening an adoption agency at 50. And we hit it off really great and one day she just said someday I'd like you to work for me. So I took a little break from the department because I needed that. So I went to work for a dentist, believe it or not, because I needed crowns. And that's how I got my free crowns. And little did I know that would teach me how to run a business, because I was the manager and do hiring and things like that.
Speaker 3:At one point the woman in Glenwood her name was Sandy Whitten called me and said hey, can you help me out? I have a birth mother for you to counsel, and so it was kind of my gotcha moment. She was a woman from Morocco. She lived in or she was in Boulder, had found herself with an unplanned pregnancy, she would have been exiled from her country had she gone back. So she wanted to do a relinquishment. So I got an interpreter and went and met with her multiple times and she placed the baby with the family and I was kind of hooked after that.
Speaker 3:So I worked with her on and off contractually for a couple of years and then just quit my job and started working for her full time and had some side jobs to supplement my income. And then we opened an office here in Fort Collins. I worked with her till 19, well, from till 1997. And then went to grad school and kind of worked for her part time through school, opened my own agency in 2005, when she retired. So, and that I did that primarily because I really loved the way we did things and there aren't many agencies that work like us. We do. We're non-faith based, we do single parents, biracial, same-sex parents, we do kind of the gamut of people adopting, and then we do talk about choices with our birth parents and we have great relationships with different entities in the community that help collaborate with us, with different entities in the community that help collaborate with us, and so probably to date, over 507 placements of babies in my career, but during that time I did meet Ginger and I'll let you talk to her here.
Speaker 4:I came from corporate America. I retired after 25 years and I ran human resources and labor relations with the phone company which is now currently Lumen I believe is the new name. And then I had retired, I met Cindy through a group of friends and had no idea about adoption, what it looked like, what it felt like, and pretty soon I was kind of sucked into this world. I volunteered and then Cindy offered me the job of director of development, and that was 12 years ago. So it's a very different world than corporate America, but the outcome is so much better than working in the corporate world. So it's been a great experience and it's pretty amazing what happens here.
Speaker 2:Either one of you can answer this who are your target donors or supporters? How do you attract them? Or is that how this works?
Speaker 3:Yeah, you know, as far as clients, I think people find us word of mouth. But as far as donors, I think also kind of word of mouth has been part of it. They find us through people who have adopted children and have seen the work we do or have come in for free diapers or. You know, we're kind of a small niche agency so it's been kind of a progression of time working for and looking for donations and people that want to jump on. But once I think that they see what we do. We're kind of a full service agency so we do a lot of promotion through social media and websites, but I would say our biggest base of people comes from word of mouth and kind of the work that we do. People tend to, once they meet us, stick around forever.
Speaker 3:I have a volunteer guild that started with me and they help raise money. They started with me when I started, so we're talking 26 years ago and with the other agency and they've followed me all along. We have our original founder of that volunteer guild is 90 right now and she's been with me for 26 years. She's been amazing. So they have come full circle and helped us put together the dream room. They do bingo for fundraising. They help us run. We do small fundraisers throughout town, like our next one is going to be June 14th at Avogadro's number. We're doing just live music and a small auction. We used to do big galas. People would come, corporate tables would bring people. Our following was quite large. Then, you know, covid came and those big events kind of went out the door. So we're doing some smaller events which seem to be super successful. We do a mailing. Sometimes past clients or people that have children from us end up bringing donations. So we're kind of all over the board where we get them from.
Speaker 4:Yeah, the other source for our donations our board of directors. We have nine directors on the board and most of them are significant leaders in the local community and because of their connections they're great. They help us a lot with the donations and to bring people into the agency to understand who we are. So we have to give them a lot of credit as well.
Speaker 2:We can't hear you, ginger.
Speaker 4:Yes, outside of work, what do you do for fun? I play golf, love to play golf, did you hear that? What? No, okay, no, I didn't hear you.
Speaker 2:That's just what I was wondering.
Speaker 4:Oh, okay.
Speaker 2:Oh no, I just was wondering what you did for fun. Then I was going to ask Ginger, and then I was going to ask Cindy the same thing yeah, well, I golf with Ginger.
Speaker 3:I travel a lot. What's that?
Speaker 2:no, no, I just okay yeah, I golf, I backpack there's a delay in the communication.
Speaker 3:Sorry that's alright. I just got my European Union dual citizenship through Hungary, so I like to travel.
Speaker 2:Nice. I just started going overseas recently. That's a lot of fun. Let's switch gears. Can you describe a hardship or a life challenge and either one of you can take this question that you overcame and how it made you stronger? What comes to mind?
Speaker 3:For me. When people ask me what my biggest goal was, you would think it would be opening the agency, but for me it was. I'm dyslexic and I have scotopic syndrome and I wasn't diagnosed until I got into graduate school. And no one wanted me to go to graduate school because my grades were so bad. I knew I was smart, I just didn't have the right tools. So I ended up sitting outside the dean's office for quite a few months and they finally did let me in and I graduated. The only A I ever had was in PE until I got into grad school and I graduated with a 4.0. So that would be my biggest.
Speaker 2:Nice Ginger.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I think that when I was much younger, I just I raised my kids and then, when the kids were four and eight, I had a good friend who said why don't you come to work? And it was. I don't know what skills I have, so I interviewed at the phone company in Des Moines, Iowa, and I was a clerk and after 25 years and progressing through the company, I left the company as a vice president of human resources, and so it was learning. I had the abilities to do things. I had a great support system within the corporation. I had amazing mentors who guided me along, and it was quite a learning experience for me to go from, you know, a clerk all the way up to the ranks in the corporation, but when I retired it was the best thing I ever did.
Speaker 2:Cindy and Ginger. Please tell the listeners one thing that they should remember about adoption dreams.
Speaker 3:I believe we're a safe haven.
Speaker 2:Adoption dreams come true.
Speaker 3:Yeah, thank you. We're a safe haven for anyone seeking help in forming a family or finding themselves with an infant pregnancy we have no bias. A family or finding themselves with an impending pregnancy we have no bias. We're open to all populations and we really feel like we're an agency with a lot of integrity and we do a lot of free work to kind of help people and we don't want to have people without resources. So I feel like if that would be the primary thing that we do.
Speaker 4:I think one of the things we hear from our clients is that they will visit other agencies and they end up coming back to us and they say it's because they felt so welcome and cared for here. They say that they were treated like family as opposed to a business, and we also are extremely nonjudgmental. I mean, life happens and the goal is to do whatever is right for the birth parents and the child and we stick by that. We don't get attached to the outcome, we just want to help the people and the kids.
Speaker 2:How can our listeners learn more about Adoption? Dreams Come True.
Speaker 3:You could go to our website, which is adoptiondreamsorg, or you could call in fora free consult. We do have some social media sites we're older so we didn't know about those in the beginning but we do have Facebook and Instagram now and all things that all the young kids have. So our website's probably the most informative, but people can call us at any time. We're always willing to take a phone call and that number is 970-493-2557.
Speaker 2:Well, Cindy and Ginger, I really appreciate you guys being on our show. We wish you and your business the best moving forward. I guess it's okay to call it a business.
Speaker 3:Yes, yes.
Speaker 2:We really appreciate you.
Speaker 4:Thank you.
Speaker 1:Thank you for listening to the Good Neighbor Podcast. To nominate your favorite local businesses to be featured on the show, go to gnpfortcollinscom. That's gnpfortcollinscom, or call 970-438-0825.