Funding Permanent Families

Adoption Subsidies Help Create Families

Massachusetts couple Michael and Sarah Ibanez were eager to adopt. Then, when they got the call about Jacob, a baby who had just been born, it took them only a few minutes to decide that they were meant to be his parents.

It didn’t matter to them that Jacob’s birth mother had struggled with addiction, nor that Jacob was showing signs of addiction, too. They just wanted to meet him, take him home and start their lives together.

Mary Fournier, Wide Horizons For Children’s Domestic Adoption program manager, met the couple at the Massachusetts hospital where Jacob was being monitored. “We know from our experience counseling both parties that the meeting is a transformative experience—both see the humanity in each other,” she explains.

Since the second we brought him home, the bonds have been amazing.

Sarah, Mom to Jacob

There, the Ibanezes received two more rounds of good news: First, Jacob was healthy and not born addicted as first thought. Second, the couple would receive a subsidy to help with the cost of Jacob’s adoption.

“I immediately filled up with tears, but they were happy tears,” says Sarah. “It lessened many stressors for us at a time when all we wanted to do was focus on our little man.”

In addition to subsidies for domestic adoptions, Wide Horizons For Children also provides support to adoptive families during the adoption process and for months—and sometimes years—after their child arrives home through post-adoption services.

For Michael and Sarah, the adjustment to a new family was a reason to celebrate. They got to take Jacob home from the hospital, just in time to share their first Thanksgiving together. “Since the second we brought him home, the bonds have been amazing,” Sarah says.

Today Jacob is a bright, happy child. “He has a huge gift to make people smile,” adds Sarah. “He is so easygoing and loving that it seems he’s always been in our family.”