Our History
The story of the National Adoption Center is the story of hope...the hope that somewhere there were families who would consider adopting children whose parents could not care for them.
The story began in the early 1970's when Paddy Noyes, an adoptive mother of a little girl, then considered "hard-to-place" because of her East Indian heritage, and Carolyn Johnson, who had adopted three children, wondered whether there were other families who would be interested in children who were not healthy infants. Would someone be willing to give a home to a child with Down syndrome or cerebral palsy? Would someone adopt a family of children--three or four brothers or sisters who wanted to stay together?
Paddy convinced a Philadelphia newspaper to run stories of waiting children up for adoption, and there was a startlingly large response. Carolyn went on to work at her kitchen table from a wooden recipe box with sections for "waiting children," "prospective parents," and possible "matches."
This "home-grown" program originated in the geographical area that covered southeastern Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware, later expanded to include several adjoining states, and eventually became a model for the country. It demonstrated that once families knew about the "waiting children", they came forth to adopt them.
In 1982, the Center was selected by the federal government's Department of Health and Human Services to operate a national program to find families for children around the country whose parents could not care for them.
The Center developed a national public awareness and recruitment campaign, the centerpiece of which became its national website, FACES of Adoption: America's Waiting Children, which featured photographs and descriptions of thousands of children waiting to be adopted. In late July 2002, the FACES site was absorbed into a new, national website, AdoptUSKids, an initiative of the Children's Bureau of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The site was developed and launched by the National Adoption Center.
Since 1972 when the Center started, it has found families for more than 20,000 children up for adoption. Ken Mullner is its Executive Director.