Adoption Hope: Stability for Three Brothers

Our family is trying to reach financial stability so we can finally adopt our “bonus boys,” Mack, Miguel and Jonah.

Up front, it’s very difficult for me to ask for financial assistance from anyone, but this cause is worth me setting aside my ego.

A little background….

4 years ago, my wife (Amber) and I began exploring the possibility of serving as a foster family. We already had children of our own, and because we’re a military family we assumed we wouldn’t be good candidates for foster care because of how often we move. Still, we wanted to try to help pull children out of the broken foster care system and give them the kind of childhood we never had growing up.

We became a foster resource family while we were stationed in Alaska, and soon after we took in 3 little boys, all brothers, who had been bounced around the foster care system since they were very young (the twins were 3 & Jonah was just 1 year old). Often times the brothers were separated due to a shortage of foster families in Alaska in general, and virtually no foster families willing to take on 3 children at once. They were eventually placed with relatives who served as a long-term foster family. When the boys came to our home in September 2021, it was only supposed to be a short-term placement known as "respite care" to allow their relatives (the permanent foster family) to travel out of state for a few weeks. But during their short stay with our family we noticed behaviors and heard comments from the boys that made our “Spidey Senses” tingle, if you know what I mean. Something just didn’t seem right. After some digging, including talking to each of the boys seperately, my wife and I learned that the boys were abused (physically and mentally) by the relatives they’d been placed with. We immediately called Alaska’s Office of Children Services (OCS) to inform them and offered to serve as a new long-term home for the boys. The call went about like this..."you'll need to bring a lot of men with a lot of guns if you want to take these boys back to that house with those people." The boys' guardian ad litem and OCS case worker investigated the allegations and, after determining our boys were telling us the truth about how they were treated by those entrusted to care for them, they agreed to transition us to a long-term foster home for the boys despite the fact we'd only been approved to take in 1-2 children in our foster care application. We told them we'd make it work, and so we did. However, I had recently recieved reassignment orders and our family would be leaving Alaska for a new duty station. We knew the boys couldn’t move out of state with us unless we took further action, so we petitioned for and were awarded legal guardianship of the boys, which prevented them from being thrown back into the foster care system just because the Army was moving the one family who didn't give up on them.

Meanwhile, the boys’ biological parents were supposed to seek help with drug addiction and take steps toward eventually regaining custody of the boys. After 4 years, they haven’t made any efforts to get clean and only occasionally speak with the boys on the phone or Zoom calls, but they still occasionally get the urge to threaten us with legal action and fight to get the boys back or to at least have them taken from us and placed with friends of the family who won't take the same steps to protect them from the life their parents and other family members have chosen.

Today...

Fast forward 4 years later and the boys are an integral part of the Elders family. “Mr. Jake” and “Mrs. Amber” are now “mom” and “dad,” and boys and our biological children only know each other siblings (and they fight like it to boot!). The two youngest of the Elders Clan, Aurora and Gavin, have never known a life without their “bonus bubbas.”

Our goal....

Our family wants to pursue full adoption of our “bonus boys.” However, we currently receive a subsidy from the state of Alaska for being the boys’ legal guardians. This subsidy helps with living expenses associated with having a large family, while my military income goes toward paying down debts from before we had the boys. We know we can’t sustain without the monthly guardianship subsidy right now, but we desperately want to cut the cord from government assistance, end the constant rigamarole of court dates, and get rid of the looming threat of our boys to be taken away some day by people who don’t know them. It's an ongoing concern for the entire family, including the boys who constantly ask if they're going to have to go back with "those people" someday.

All donations to this cause will be used to pay down debts so our family can stop relying on government assistance and can once and for all fully adopt our “bonus boys” as full-fledged members of the "Elders Clan."

Any support you can provide to our family is greatly appreciated.