New & Distressing Developments...

Families signed with our agency received this in their emails over the last 48 hours.
Thank god we left them and are hopefully doing a domestic adoption! I can't say that I'm too broken up about this news with the exception that so many families will be affected by this...I hope CAII makes good on their word for a change.
Gina
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Dear families,

With a deep sadness and concern, we are writing to tell you that Commonwealth Adoptions International Inc. has made a very difficult decision to cease providing adoption services. The Board of Directors met Thursday, July 31st to review the status of the company and all options. The Board concluded that it was necessary to seize operation and begin to transition families to other adoption providers. That said, please know that we will do everything possible to transition your adoption into another adoption agency. We have informed our licensing authorities and believe that we will have guidance, support and cooperation from them. We are still a licensed agency, have not closed our doors and will do our very best to assist all families in their process to the best of our ability.

In order to insure uninterrupted adoptions we are talking with several other tax-exempt adoption agencies so they may take over certain programs and see these adoptions to completions. We will communicate with each family individually regarding your specific adoption, including the agency we are recommending to work with. If you have preference to be transitioned to an agency that is different from what we will recommend, please inform us about it in writing by sending an email to MarinaM@commonwealthadoption.org. Please be sure to put your name and country of adoption in the subject line.

Difficult economic times and the failure of obtaining Hague certification (which we very strongly believe was unjustified) was devastating to CAII and its programs. This denial immediately affected almost one third of our families and several programs. Established programs have longer waiting times from matching to placement or travel, which is prohibitive to most adoptive parents and costly. Other programs have simply closed down. A few promising new programs are small and cannot yet reliably serve the number of families willing to risk starting over again, as our contract spelled out, we have no control over the foreign agencies and how they handle their adoption programs. International adoptions in general have recently been subject to dramatic changes.

We have tried to be proactive with regards to the general changes in international adoptions, but our very aggressive attempts to regroup, restructure and downsize in the past year did not bring the results we were aiming for. We believed we had looked at every option available to CAII in this regards.

Our situation is not unique. In the past few months we became aware of other agencies that had closed their doors and there are many, if not all, experiencing difficulties to some degree where they have to lay off staff and generally downsize their operations. Please know that we will do all we can to stand by you and work with you so not to disrupt your adoption process or at least minimize the disruption.

This is very disappointing to us since we felt that we successfully addressed the economic situation. However, the denial of Hague certification a month ago and failure for us to complete an affiliation with another tax-exempt organizations that we have been in discussion with for some time brought us to a place where we have to begin to transition families to other agencies.

Please be gentle with us. Know that we will do whatever we can to make this process as painless as possible for you. There is going to be a subsequent letter sent to you regarding your specific program arrangement.

We will be contacting you shortly.

Thank you,

Marina L. Mayhew, MBA
President

Dawn Hill, PhD (provisional)
Executive Director

Commonwealth Adoptions International Inc.