CHICAGO PROGRAM SHOWS RESULTS

By the middle of 1982 the One Church–One Child approach was showing measurable results. In the first full year of operation the number of black children in Cook County awaiting adoption dropped from 702 to 400.

In October 1982 the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services gave DCFS a $150,000 grant to help extend the One Church–One Child program throughout Illinois. As the program went statewide, regional staff were given training and orientation of the kind offered by the Cook County pilot project. The number of regional staff assigned to adoption was increased from 61 to 129. Janis Forte and Gary Morgan, assigned to train staff to work with the black church statewide, faced some of the same kind of skepticism and resistance they had encountered in the pilot program. Now, however, they were able to allay doubts and anxieties by citing the dramatic decreases in the number of children awaiting adoption in Cook County.

In its expansion throughout Illinois, the One Church–One Child program retained a high public profile. Board meetings became media events. Information about children available for adoption was presented to the congregation and other community residents at evening meetings in the host church. Awards were presented to an adoptive family or to journalists for their coverage of adoption issues.

Throughout the 1980s placement rates for black children continued to rise both in Chicago and downstate. In 1983 the number of children waiting in Cook County was again cut in half, to 212. By 1984 it was cut to 113, and by December 1986 only 39 black children were waiting for adoption. In the rest of the state, that number dropped from an estimated 310 in 1980 to 147 in 1986. In 1989 the monthly average number of black children awaiting adoption fluctuated between 125 and 165 statewide and between 45 and 65 in Cook County.

Today DCFS staff work the telephones for days before meetings, calling lists of members of the congregation provided by the ministers, using a professional telemarketing strategy that includes persistent followup calls when they fail to get answers to initial calls. On meeting days they help organize car pools to get people to the meetings and to shuttle board members from their hotels to the host church.

HOW ONE CHURCH PLAYS IN PEORIA

The Peoria meeting demonstrates the strong impact that One Church–One Child can have on an Illinois community. It also reveals the high level of cooperation between state officials and church leaders that is one of the program's particular strengths.

In Peoria, as he has done in Champaign, Chicago, Decatur, Cairo, and elsewhere at the request of the ministers, Gordon Johnson presides at