Gladney Center for Adoption

Your North Texas Giving Day donation will support our Adoptions from Foster Care program and the Gladney Home for foster youth.

Gladney’s mission of creating bright futures through adoption is based on a belief that every child deserves a loving and caring family, and every means every. Every child includes a healthy baby, a medically fragile infant, or a toddler being placed for adoption by their birth mother. Every child includes a child who has experienced loss, abuse, or neglect and is waiting in state foster care or an international orphanage. Every child needs a place to call home and people to call family … forever. 

Gladney remains committed to advocating on behalf of waiting children in foster care, recruiting loving and resourceful adoptive families, and equipping families to thrive through our pre-adoption training. These children have medical needs, have experienced abuse or neglect, are school age, and/or are part of large sibling groups. Finding families equipped for this type of commitment requires extensive communication and evaluation: sharing transparently about children’s experiences, needs, and challenges; having open conversations with prospective adoptive parents about their expectations and about what is expected of them; and properly preparing and supporting adoptive parents through the lifelong journey of adoption. Gladney’s pre-adoption training supports parents in understanding trauma and meeting their children’s emotional, physical, and cognitive needs, as well as building trust with their child and connecting as a family. Because of Gladney, these children learn they are not alone, they can trust and depend on their new families, and they can just be kids. We are collaborating with others to find more families for waiting children in foster care, in order to make a difference on a wider scale for more children. We know we cannot do it alone. As one example of collaboration, Gladney is proud to be a partner tasked with implementing and managing the Heart Gallery of North Texas, an online platform and community-based outreach effort to advocate for children legally available for adoption in the state foster care system.  

 Our Gladney Home program provides foster care and adoption advocacy for pre-teen and teen girls in a residential home located at our Fort Worth campus. Our objectives are to provide security, nurture, and normalcy for the girls, with an ultimate goal of finding an adoptive family for each of them or helping them transition to adulthood. We meet the girls’ daily food, education, social, medical, and psychological needs; facilitate nurture groups; provide life skills education; assess their history; evaluate current needs; provide individual counseling; and advocate to find adoptive families for them (if they are legally free for adoption and want to be adopted). The girls are active participants in the process – we want them to be empowered to use their voices and make choices about what they want and need. 

Gladney’s clients have life-long support, including counseling services. We are currently offering counseling for the teen girls in foster care who live on our Fort Worth campus in the Gladney Home, as well as post adoption counseling for adoptive families, birth parents, and adult adoptees in Texas. We offer in-person counseling in Fort Worth and Addison (plus Houston) and virtual counseling (for adult clients) throughout the state. We are eager to grow in clinical services and to elevate education, support, and training for our clients by expanding research efforts around trauma for the most vulnerable among us.  

This is an inspiring time to be involved with Gladney! As we move forward, we will build on our legacy of hope; help find permanent, loving, and resourceful homes for children; and give them and their families the support they need to thrive. 

Scroll down for more information and stories about futures made brighter through adoption.