Wendy’s Wonderful Kids®

Rita Soronen (Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption® President & CEO) and Denny would get together from time to time to update each other on the Foundation, and Wendy’s activities. Wendy’s had thousands of restaurants across America that would serve as touchpoints for adoption messages. Delivering these messages enabled the franchisee to show support for Dave’s cause and could lead to greater support.

One of the first projects was a poster campaign featuring photos of children available for adoption. Contact numbers were included, and the children were followed in hopes they would get adopted. In the first year, 12 -15 were featured. Local franchisees liked the idea so much they wanted a child in their town included on the posters. The project quickly grew to nearly 100 children in featured photos.

The poster campaign raised awareness and interest in the children based on the growing number of calls and letters to the #800 number. After several years, however, it didn’t dramatically increase the number of adoptions.

A beautiful footnote: Dave was doing a live radio interview when a lady called into the station to tell her story about adopting a boy from the Wendy’s poster. She had just learned that she could not bear children and walked into Wendy’s feeling depressed. While eating she saw the poster and noticed a little boy from her state. You could hear the joy and gratitude in the woman’s voice.

In the later months of 2001, Dave’s illness was progressing, and it was time to have serious conversations about the future. When Denny called Dave every couple of weeks, he’d share what’s going on with DTFA projects and any good news he could recall. Dave would often ask how many kids DTFA got adopted.

Denny didn’t know but he assured Dave it was well into the hundreds. Dave asked what it would take to get thousands adopted. Denny promised him that the board and Rita would find the right solution to get thousands of foster children adopted every year. It was one of the last times Denny spoke to Dave.

The urgency to increase adoptions led Rita and her board to address the obvious: To get more children adopted faster, the Foundation would need to create and fund its own initiatives. DTFA would move from awareness and education to proactively finding adoptive families, and from accepting child welfare business as usual to forging a better and more effective method to lift children from foster care into the comfort and safety that only a permanent, loving family can provide.

The Foundation knew the foster care system in America was burdened with entrenched bureaucracy, which dramatically slowed down any progress to adoption. They also were continuing to dispel the myths and misperceptions that follow these children – that they are too old or can successfully age out of care without a family. DTFA believed they could test a different approach that would serve the children much more effectively and efficiently.

DTFA would provide financial grants to local and state adoption agencies to hire experienced adoption recruiters. The recruiters’ sole focus would be finding adoptive families for the longest waiting children in their care.

These professionals would be rigorously trained to use a child-focused recruitment approach to find a match best suited for the child. They would have much smaller caseloads (12-15 vs. up to 30 for child welfare workers) and must meet regularly with each child to learn their likes and dislikes as well as who they remember fondly among family, teachers, coaches, or foster parents.

Then the recruiter contacts the child’s connections and tries to strengthen the bond to achieve an ultimate adoption.

In essence, DTFA would grant selected adoption agencies funds to hire an extra professional whose sole purpose was to recruit adoptive parents for their foster children.

The recruiter would focus on those children most at risk of aging out of care (at 18 yrs.) – older youth, children in a sibling group and/or those who had one or more special needs. More than half of these children had been in foster care at least four years, and one-third had experienced six or more placements in foster homes. Getting to know the child was critical to building their trust. This high-level understanding greatly increased the likelihood of a successful adoption match.

The recruiting effort was named Wendy’s Wonderful Kids (WWK) as a tribute to Dave. Wendy’s franchisee Larry Fleming created the name for a local picture book program featuring foster children available for adoption. He generously approved the name for this DTFA signature program. Thousands of Wendy’s franchisees and company employees also embraced WWK and raised critical monies to launch the program, initiate the research, and support test markets.