This Foundation was established to ensure the ongoing financial stability of the agency, and to perpetuate the philosophy of NOAS—that every child should have the opportunity to grow up in a family of their own.  With the passing of NOAS founder, Barbara Lewis Roberts, in 1994, the Foundation’s name was changed to The Eileen Price Lewis, Barbara Lewis Roberts Foundation.

Also in 1986, NOAS developed a community-based treatment level foster care program for children with emotional and behavioral challenges who might otherwise be placed in more restrictive and costly institutional placements.

The Council joined NOAS in 1989 to promote community and agency collaboration, coordination, and communication in order to strengthen services for families, and to decrease the need for placements of children outside their homes.

NOAS operated this Project in fifteen northeast Ohio counties to provide a referral and consultation network of mental health professionals, able to provide services to children and families regarding adoption issues.

NOAS operated the Project, which developed using a mental health model and offered a continuum of services, such as case management, family preservation, family life education, support groups, respite, medical, and financial consultation.

This Project was designed to increase adoptive placements of minority children, to reduce barriers to adoption for minority families, to operate a regional minority adoption exchange, and to provide cultural sensitivity and competence training to child welfare staff.

This Project was designed to build upon the collaborative relationship between and among the Summit County Children Services Board, the Northeast Ohio Adoption Services, and the providers of residential treatment in this region.  The goal of the program was reunification with families of origin, placement with adoptive families, and development of other long-range family-type connections.

In 1991, with state funding, NOAS developed a program to teach independent living skills to teens growing up in the child welfare system.  Ohio Families for Kids, funded by the Kellogg Co., provided answering and referral services to prospective adoptive parents for nine counties in northeast Ohio.

This Project, in collaboration with Summit County Children Services, offered leadership development to adoptive parents, provided support to adoptive parent support groups, and built a network of adoptive family support groups.

This Project, in collaboration with Kent State University’s School of Exercise, Leisure, and Sport, and NOAS provided respite to meet the special needs of each child, and thereby increase the stability of adoptive families through therapeutic recreation programming.

Families for Teens, another collaborative project with Summit County Children Services and Portage County Department of Human Services, coordinated the efforts of counties in Northeast Ohio to advocate for the rights of older teens to be adopted.

In collaboration with the Cuyahoga County Department of Children and Family Services, this Project developed and implemented an initiative to eliminate barriers and increase the number of siblings placed together in adoptive homes.  An important outcome of this Project was the placement of siblings and development of the Sibling Decision-Making Matrix.  The Matrix is a step-by-step process that can be used by professionals in making sibling placement decisions.  It has been adopted by Minnesota as the state standard for making sibling placements.

NOAS used the Targeted Community Outreach to demonstrate a radically different approach for recruiting new families by applying social marketing and community organizing theory/practice to the problem of too many waiting children, and by building community capacity to conduct targeted outreach efforts.  Long-term outcomes include a strengthened sense of community support for waiting children and adoptive families, an increase in the number of adoptive parents, an increase in the number of adoptions, and a decrease in the time that children wait.

RTCO, a federal demonstration, funded an opportunity for NOAS to implement the innovative social marketing/community organizing concepts developed in TCO grant in rural Ohio.  The approach to recruiting adoptive families is rather unique in the child welfare system.  Portage, Columbiana, Licking, and Knox Counties were pilot sites for RTCO.

In 2007, Northeast Ohio Adoption Services became a Wendy’s Wonderful Kids (WWK) program.  A signature program of the Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption, WWK funds a NOAS recruiter to develop/recruit adoptive families for specific waiting children.  Being involved with WWK has allowed NOAS to network with adoption agencies from all parts of North America.

NOAS is committed to supporting its families during the licensing process, when they have a placement, and after adoption. With this in mind, NOAS began to offer a monthly support group for its parents to come together and discuss the joys and challenges of parenting children raised in the foster care system. Dinner and childcare is provided, allowing families to focus on developing their parenting skills, relationship with other families, and education.

NOAS is proud to achieve the 2020 Solid Tied of Recognition from the Human Rights Campaign Foundation. The staff conducted an internal self-assessment, provided professional development to staff, and implemented ACAF’s “Benchmarks of LGBTQ Inclusion,” which track policy and practice changes within agencies.

HRC’s All Children – All Families, a project of the Human Rights Campaign Foundation, promotes LGBTQ inclusive policies and affirming practices among child welfare agencies and formally recognizes those agencies that are leading the field with innovative approaches to inclusion.

ALL CHILDREN – ALL FAMILIES 2019 REPORT

After seeing the need to support foster youth coping with loneliness and distance from the community, NOAS created the “IGNITE Foster Youth Mentoring Program: Mentor One Who Needs Someone”. This program matches current and former foster youth with healthy adult connections who can help them reach their full potential while forming a close, trusting relationship.

In October of 2019, two NOAS staff members traveled to The Karyn Purvis Institute of Child Development, a program of the Department of Psychology in the TCU College of Science & Engineering in Fort Worth, Texas to become certified TBRI® practitioners TBRI^® is an attachment-based, trauma-informed intervention that is designed to meet the complex needs of vulnerable children. TBRI^® uses Empowering Principles to address physical needs, Connecting Principles for attachment needs, and Correcting Principles to disarm fear-based behaviors. While the intervention is based on years of attachment, sensory processing, and neuroscience research, the heartbeat of TBRI^® is connection. NOAS offers TBRI® classes, as well as in-home coaching to better serve our families.