Is Your Company Considered Adoption-Friendly?
November is one of my favorite months. Not only does it usher in the holiday season where thanksgiving, family gathering, values, and giving weigh more heavily on our minds, but November has also been designated National Adoption Month. Like the holidays, celebrating adoption gives us an opportunity to reflect, give thanks, and center our minds on the importance of family. While we all may celebrate National Adoption Month in a diversity of ways, there are also incredible opportunities to get involved in causes that can have a ripple effect throughout the entire adoption community. One such cause is encouraging our employers to support adoption by means of offering financial benefits to employees.
Where does one begin addressing this topic? Dave Thomas, the founder of Wendy’s restaurants, was adopted himself and spent a great deal of his life advocating on behalf of the adoption community. In fact, he started the Dave Thomas Foundation that centers around supporting, advocating, and providing benefits and education to adoption-related causes throughout the world. The Dave Thomas Foundation has developed an impressive amount of resources to help adoptive couples encourage their employers to begin offering adoption benefits. Each year, the foundation publishes its 100 top adoption-friendly businesses in the United States and provides tools on how we can make a difference within our own place of employment by encouraging the same.
According to the Dave Thomas Foundation website, top 100 adoption-friendly workplaces offer, on average, $9,362 in financial reimbursement to couples wishing to adopt. One of the nation’s top pro-adoption companies, NVIDIA, offers all full- and part-time employees unlimited financial aid and up to 20 weeks of paid parental leave for adoption. Pretty impressive! Many other companies are not too far behind, making it possible for employees to realize their goal of building their families by means of adoption.
If you’d like more information on how to get The Dave Thomas Foundation’s toolkit that will help step you through how to address this need with your Human Resources Department, go to https://www.davethomasfoundation.org/library/adoption-friendly-workplace-employer-toolkit-2/. You can also review the top 100 adoption-friendly companies by going to https://www.davethomasfoundation.org/library/2019-100-best-adoption-friendly-workplaces-list/.
Thank you for making a difference and happy National Adoption Month!
by Matthew D. Barkdull