The following is a conversation between Rita Soronen, President & CEO of the Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption, and Denver Frederick, the Host of The Business of Giving.
Denver: The Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption is a national nonprofit that is committed to dramatically increasing the number of adoptions of children in foster care systems. Right now, well over a hundred thousand children are waiting to be adopted from foster care in the United States.
They’re racing against the clock to find permanent, loving homes for these young people before they age out of foster care. And here to tell us about this work is Rita Soronen, the president and CEO of the Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption.
Welcome back to The Business of Giving, Rita.
Rita Soronen President & CEO Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption
Rita: Thank you, Denver. I am so excited to be with you.
Denver: It’s great to have you here. The foundation was of course founded by Dave Thomas. And for listeners who may not be familiar with him, tell us who he was.
Rita: So Dave Thomas was the creator of the Wendy’s company, and depending on what part of the country in, you’re much more familiar with Wendy’s than perhaps other parts, but it’s that fast- service, quick- service business that has square hamburgers and Frosties and incredible french fries.
So he founded that restaurant a number of years ago, in 1986, I believe. But he was adopted, and so as he was moving toward the later stages of his position as CEO of the Wendy’s company… Built into the DNA of that organization is giving back to the community.
And so they wanted to set something formal up and decided to create the Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption, but as an independent nonprofit corporation… not as a corporate foundation, not as a family foundation… to focus exclusively on children in foster care or waiting to be adopted. He had a personal passion.
He was in foster care briefly as an infant, but when he was adopted, his adoptive mother passed away when he was relatively young. His father was an itinerant worker moving from place to place. He was raised by his grandmother frequently, and he left home at age 16. So uniquely understood some of our children in foster care who experienced much of the same, even though he had a family.
“These are children who have been abused or neglected or abandoned and are in foster care through no fault of their own. Do they have issues with grief and loss and trauma because of what they’ve experienced? Absolutely! And may have behaviors that are a result of that, but those are understandable behaviors and should not disqualify them from a family of their own.”
Denver: Wow. He left a wonderful legacy, that is for sure. What are some of the common myths or misconceptions we have about adopting from foster care?
Rita: So really profound ones that we work to address every day. One, that these children are in care because they’ve done something wrong… they’re juvenile delinquents, and so they don’t deserve a family, when nothing could be further from the truth.
These are children who have been abused or neglected or abandoned and are in foster care through no fault of their own. Do they have issues with grief and loss and trauma because of what they’ve experienced? Absolutely! And may have behaviors that are a result of that, but those are understandable behaviors and should not disqualify them from a family of their own.
People also believe that it must be way too expensive to adopt, and so they choose not to. And in fact, it’s fairly expensive to, say, adopt an infant domestically or adopt a child internationally because of the costs implied with travel, with medical expenses, with attorneys.
But to adopt from foster care, and this is not to diminish the value of these children… I always hesitate saying this, but to adopt from foster care is relatively inexpensive because they’re in the custody of the state or the county in which they live, and they cover those costs.
And in fact, there tend to be subsidies that follow these children once they’re adopted… or other supports until they’re 18 or 21, depending on the state. There are lots of other financial kinds of incentives, I guess is the word, for these children because we want to get them into adoptive homes …so it’s not expensive.
And I think the last thing is that, well, I couldn’t possibly adopt; I’m a single parent, or I’m in a same sex scenario, or I’m 50 or 60 years old, I couldn’t possibly adopt, when really the door is wide open that single parents can adopt. You don’t have to be wealthy to adopt.
You don’t have to own your own home to adopt. You have to be able to provide a safe environment for these children, and certainly be able to care for them in a home and in an environment where they can grow and thrive and go to school. But you don’t have to be a very stereotypical, two-parent, upper middle class, live-in-the-suburbs kind of family.
Denver: Yeah. Yeah. Those are some big-time misconceptions, I must say. So thanks for clearing them up because I think a lot of people do hold those things that you just mentioned. So, if I was so inclined to maybe look into this, give me an idea, Rita, of what the process of adoption is like; and how long does it take?
Rita: Yeah, and it can feel a little daunting at first. Look, you’re dealing with government systems, the state child welfare association or the county one; you’re dealing with government systems, first of all. But they’re set up to provide safety for the child. And so I think that at that first point of inquiry, where do I go? How do I find out about this?
It’s either going to the Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption; we’ve got a great Beginner’s Guide to Adoption that walks people through steps. But really, it’s connecting with your local adoption agency, and it may be a county agency, a private agency, a state agency, and finding out what their steps are.
And typically that involves an intensive interview. It involves a background check. It involves a home check, folks coming into your home and making sure that it’s safe. It has all of the things that can safely support a child. It involves a fairly intensive… depending on the organization… aid or 12-week training period, where you learn about the dynamics of abuse and neglect and the issues that this child has experienced.
And then there’s this period of time where you can say to the organization, “Look, I really don’t want to adopt an infant. I’ve had infants in my life. I’m not ready for diapers and all that, but I would consider a school-aged child or a teenager.” And so expressing who you’re thinking about might be best for your family.
And then that’s where the agency works with you to begin to find children and make sure that you’re the best match for a child. So this whole process– from first point of contact to matching with a child– and then most states have a six-month waiting period once the family is matched before it is finalized in the court. So it can be anywhere from 12 to 18 months, sometimes longer, sometimes shorter.
But I wouldn’t go into this thinking, Oh, I really want to adopt. I’m motivated now. Children are waiting to be adopted. 113,000 children in this country are waiting to be adopted. I’m ready, let’s go. I can have a child in my home in the next couple of months. It probably isn’t going to happen that way, but that intent is critical, that sense of urgency is critical, that desire to help a child is important.
Denver: Yeah. It’s got to be a really thoughtful process, and that does take time. You just want to have it like an Amazon delivery type of thing where it’s happening the next day. It really does take some time.
When I think about the impact that COVID has had on me and the work that I’ve done in organizations, I can’t help but think the impact it must have had on these children in foster care. And in turn, in the work that you do, Rita, tell us a little bit about what that impact has been.
Rita: Yeah. Well, imagine, first of all, these are children who tend to be in substitute care. They’re not with family members. They’re in, you know, stranger’s, or they were in some kind of institutional, perhaps, care or group home care. When everything closed down, all of those visits from potential family members, from social workers, from even extended family members who were still connected to that child, all of that closed down.
And so a child that’s already feeling separated and isolated was even more isolated. And things slow down at courtrooms so that adoptions that were ready to finalize… or this process, it’s a legal process. And so a child moves through the foster care system through a series of court steps. Courts closed down, so everything slowed down for children who were simply waiting.
Look, childhood is fleeting. One day in foster care is a day too many. But if you’d think that average time of maybe 12 to 18 months suddenly got pushed to 24 to 36 months, it really put a cloud, I think, over so many children. And this disconnection from school, from all of those points where they might have had connections, just completely disconnected.
And similarly, so the foundation very quickly realized we had to pivot very quickly. We had to pivot our messaging. We had to pivot our fundraising. We had to pivot who we were as an organization culturally because we were also experiencing that separation, but most important for these children. So we had to quickly get the messaging out.
Wait a minute, if you’re thinking about fostering or adopting, don’t stop that process during the pandemic. Now is a perfect time to get some of that paperwork done, get those interviews done, get all of the other work done so that when the gates did open back up, there wasn’t this lag. And of course, nationally, we know there is a lag in terms of foster parents waiting to foster.
So it became something that we had to think about internally, of: How do we change our messaging? How do we let donors know that it’s just as important now to donate to a cause like this to make sure that we can keep some of our programs going that work exactly on that population of children that are waiting to be adopted?
And we found, quite honestly, the generosity of individuals, once they understood the need, didn’t lessen during the pandemic. In fact, for us it increased. And so that was important. But that internal culture was something that was really important to us because we were also growing significantly at the time.
I think during the pandemic, we hired, I may be misstating this, but I think we hired at least 20 new employees.
Denver: Wow.
Rita: Well, imagine you’re interviewing somebody on a screen; they’re trying to get oriented and start their work, working with their manager screen to screen rather than in-person to in-person. And so all of that, we had to really figure out: How do we keep very open and transparent and consistent communication, and much more communication perhaps than we were doing pre-pandemic, which was a good thing.
You kind of fall into: Well, we’ll talk in the hallway, or we’ll talk in your office. You had to be very deliberate about what did your communication look like while you’re keeping people encouraged who are going through the terror at times of the pandemic personally– either family members, or friends, or colleagues.
And so how could we provide the kind of support that staff needed while we kept the business of the business moving? It was for everyone… This obviously wasn’t unique to us, but it was a great learning experience for us about how to be very deliberate about some things that we were maybe doing a little bit ad hoc before.
Denver: No question about it. It’s always hard to scale a culture in the best of times because cultures, when they’re small, you can kind of just do it in an ad hoc way. When an organization grows, I’ve talked to people about scaling, they’ll give me all the metrics and all the tactics they do, and I’ll say, “What was the most difficult?” They’ll say, “Oh, scaling the culture. How do I scale the culture?”
But you’re absolutely right about the intentionality. And one of the things that I’ve noticed in speaking to people, Rita, is that they said they have written a lot more processes down than they ever did before because it used to be you were just able to go down the hall and stick your head into Gary’s office: He’ll tell you about it.
And they weren’t able to do that. And then people were leaving the organization. They just got everything down on a piece of paper, and that has made them that much more effective. Well, let’s turn to specifically what you do, and that is Wendy’s wonderful Wonderful Kids Program that supports the adoption process. Tell us about that.
Rita: So it was created in response to this notion that: Look, when children are freed for adoption– because our first goal is to get children back home to their familie–what can we do to support this family? Make this family safe. That’s where children should grow and thrive. That’s where they identify.
But for too many children, for whatever reason, that can’t happen. The issues are so profound, or whatever it is is so deep that the court finally decides: I’m going to permanently separate this child from family; so we now have legal orphans in this country. And what we’ve found is every year, year over year, our promise to them, as soon as that happens, is we’ll find you a family, a new family, because that’s your birthright.
But 20,000 children year, over year, over year, were turning 18 and leaving with a failed promise. They left without an adoptive family. So that’s where the Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption began to look at: How do we jump into this piece? Because 20,000 one year, year over year, over year, suddenly that’s hundreds of thousands of children motherless, without the safety net of family.
And we created the Wendy’s Wonderful Kids Program to be responsive to that population of children, teenagers, children and sibling groups, children with special needs, children who have given up on themselves, and therefore family because they’ve been in care for so long, who are the most likely to age out of care. And we created an evidence-based, data-driven program that created this model that works with that population of children in a very unique and different way.
And what we said is: we’ll take this program to scale if we can generate the kind of resources, so that we can provide grants to organizations that will use this model, hire full-time adoption professionals that utilize this model, but carry much smaller caseloads so that they can focus on individual children and get these kids adopted.
We started it with a pilot project in 2004 in seven sites. And today it’s grown to… we’re scaled or scaling in 15 states, which means we have supported enough recruiters… we call them Wendy’s Wonderful Kids recruiters… because Wendy’s folks, stepped in in a big way and started fundraising in the restaurants for this as well.
Scaling means we can help provide the resources so that those agencies can hire enough recruiters to cover that focus population in their community or their state in order to get these kids adopted. And to date, we’ve finalized more than 13,000…
Denver: That’s great.
Rita: …adoptions of some of the longest waiting children, who in their case file the case workers have written “unadoptable,” and they will age out of care.
So we’re excited about the program, but that’s what has grown and scaled and caused the program to grow and scale significantly over the past five or six years.
Denver: Yeah, I know you’ve always looked at these children as individuals, but sometimes there’s this tendency to look at it as a demographic. And when you’ve got the case workers and you’ve got the smaller caseloads, they’re really becoming individuals.
And I’ve seen that in homelessness and other examples. When you treat that population as they say, as an individual, results are dramatically changed. It is really an amazing thing to watch.
Rita: And the recruiters can just do what they’ve been trained to do: good social work rather than eight hours of paperwork on 50 children that they’re trying to follow all the rules and regulations for, which they have to do, but they don’t have time to develop those one-on-one relationships.
Denver: Generally speaking, how does adoption impact the identity formation of children and their sense of belonging?
Rita: Yeah. It goes two different ways. It’s a tug and pull, right? I think, obviously, being part of a family and a family structure and the love and the culture that that family identifies is profound and important and critical.
But even infants, people that are adopted as infants, at some point in their growth and their development, will go, “Wait, why did these people not want me? Why am I in this family and not with my original family?” So that sense of grief and loss is ever present in adoptive children, whether they were adopted as infants or out of foster care.
And when you add to that, that layer of trauma that children have experienced in foster care, you’ve got a lot of complex dynamics going on in a child. And so I think the best adoptive parents understand what those dynamics are, understand that they are loved by this child, but there may be some presenting behaviors at times that are expressions of that: Who am I? Why did this happen to me? Why couldn’t I have stayed in my family of origin?
So all of that is… it’s a beautiful tapestry. It can be a complex tapestry, but I think it’s one that we in the adoption world and the child welfare world have come to understand much better over the past couple of decades. The alternative was: Be grateful that you’ve been adopted by a family… and that’s the end of the sentence, you know?
Denver: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Rita: That’s just not the case.
Denver: No, and I think for everybody, I think negative outcomes or consequences of things stick with us a lot more than the positive ones. When somebody says, Rita, you did a great job, and 25 people say you did a great job; one person says, Hey, you’re a little off tonight. You know what I mean? That’s the only thing you’re going to remember. I mean, it just… it carries a lot of weight.
So looking at the adoptive parents, what are some of the rewards and challenges that they experience?
Rita: So the rewards are profound. Look, we all have this sense of family. It’s woven into who we are, this need for family, this identity with family. And so I think having a child join your family, whether it’s by birth or by adoption, for so many people fulfills that sense of family.
But I think it is for adoptive parents, the challenges can be: How do I make sure, for example, if this child came from a different culture than I am…How do I make sure that I respect that and have that child understand who their culture of origin, what their culture of origin is, and that they will identify with that as well as identifying with who we are now as a family?
And so that’s one of those challenges, I think, of adoptive parents when you adopt cross culture, cross race. I think understanding that this notion of forever… yes, this family is forever, but children will always quest and wonder and search for: But who was I at the beginning? And respecting that, not being fearful of that. They’re not going to turn away from you as a parent. It just helps enrich who they are as an individual.
And then that sense of, I think particularly we hear from parents who are unable to have children and want to have an infant and so adopt infants, that sense of failure frequently creeps up. And we would hope that they could find that it’s not a failure, it’s just a circumstance. And this ability to create a family in alternate ways, whatever that choice is, can be a profound gift to them.
Denver: Mm-hmm. We’re talking about individuals, we’re talking about parents, but much of that happens through champion employers, and one of those would be Cardinal Health. Tell us about them.
Rita: So Cardinal Health is one of those that we know… one of our programs, our signature programs, is the Adoption-Friendly Workplace Program. And we provide tools to help organizations. And actually, this was a legacy program of Dave Thomas.
What he said is, If you provide benefits to families in your employee organization, if you provide benefits to families that are formed through birth, understanding it’s a medical exercise, but if you provide benefits to families that are formed through birth, do you also provide benefits to families that are formed through adoption?
It’s really pretty simple. Paid leave, time off. Or, do you also provide that to families that are fostering because that need for some flexibility there is profound. And so we encourage employers to add benefits to their workplace benefits that include paid leave for families that adopt, perhaps financial assistance if their budget can allow it, for families that adopt.
And we create a hundred best Adoption-Friendly Workplaces every year. And so businesses like Cardinal and so many others have taken on that challenge and said,” Yes, we’re going to provide benefits to our families who adopt.”
“I would change this misperception that adoption is second best; it’s a second-best family; it’s an alternative family. No, it is a family, and it’s not a second-best choice. And that every child needs to be valued no matter what…No matter what their circumstance through the foster care system has been, or their circumstance coming from another country has been, no matter their age, no matter their special challenges… that every child is valuable and needs to have a family.
I think we’ve got to get that leap and get that perception that some children will be okay on their own out of our systems.“
Denver: Fantastic. If you could change one thing about the current adoption system, Rita, what would it be and why?
Rita: I would change this misperception that adoption is second best; it’s a second-best family; it’s an alternative family. No, it is a family, and it’s not a second-best choice. And that every child needs to be valued no matter what… No matter what their circumstance through the foster care system has been, or their circumstance coming from another country has been, no matter their age, no matter their special challenges… that every child is valuable and needs to have a family.
I think we’ve got to get that leap and get that perception that some children will be okay on their own out of our systems.
Denver: Yeah, that’s a great changing of the lens. There’s no question about it. Share with listeners, Rita, a little bit about your business model, where you get your revenues from. We obviously know Wendy’s is a big partner. We also know you had a pretty good three-year period during COVID when people really stepped up. But what is that business model, and where does your support come from?
Rita: Yeah, no, it’s a great question, and we’ve worked very hard. When we first started in 1992, the Wendy’s company, and mostly that’s through their franchisees and customers of the franchisees, those in restaurant campaigns, was about 99% of our budget. And it was a much smaller budget, but we were a single source. And we all know in nonprofits, you can’t be…
Denver: Whoa, that’s not good.
Rita: Not good. Not good to have single-source funders. But we began to diversify that very slowly and then had an opportunity as we were growing Wendy’s Wonderful Kids… had a rigorous evaluation, had tested it. We had a major funder step forward who said, “We want to help you take this program to scale” and made a major commitment to this.
And then we realized part of that commitment was we also had to significantly diversify our funding because we had to begin to look at long-term sustainability. Wendy’s, we believe, will always be with us, but you never know.
Denver: You never know. You’re right.
Rita: Large funders will always be with us, but not necessarily. And so we’ve done… we were probably slower than most organizations, but over the past decade we have really matured our fundraising to include those typical routes of… we created an endowment. We are supporting planned giving exercises with individuals. We are nurturing major gift donors. That’s the big side of giving.
But we also realized that particularly foster care adoption, this is about everybody owning this notion that in our community, children are waiting to be adopted. And so have done a really good job of attracting individual donors at small levels, at whatever level you can give, and have worked a really rigorous strategy of making sure they understand what they’re giving to, keeping in touch with them.
Hopefully, I’m helping promote them up the ladder of giving if they choose and become monthly givers or become moved toward major givers. But respecting that the $5, $10, $15 donors are just as valuable as our potential million-dollar estates that come our way.
Denver: Was there any one of those approaches that was just an unexpected surprise in terms of how well it did for you?
Rita: I think one we believed erroneously and we talked with experts on this, that those mail campaigns are dead. People just tear them up and put them in their recycling bin. To the contrary, we have enticed a fairly significant number of new donors to us through both direct mail campaigns and now digital campaigns.
Digital campaigns are profound, and we’re still watching the trending, and it goes up and down. But those two campaigns– direct mail and digital have been significant. And then the recent emphasis for us on planned giving of estates and trusts, we’ve really built a program. We’ve had a significant number of people.
Now, there’s no legal commitment to this, but we asked, Are we in your will? Can we record that? And we’ve had a significant number of people say, Yes, you are. So that was a surprise to us.
“Look, this is an organization to a person, and I hope when you chat with people, you’ll hear this… to a person: they are committed to this sense of urgency about this cause that, again, childhood is fleeting. A day in foster care is too much. And if we delay too much and get too tied up in, of course, we’re data-driven and goal-driven and tactical-driven, but if we get too twisted in stuff and forget this sense of urgency, we’re going to fail too many more children.”
Denver: Yeah. The reason people don’t do it is that they were never asked. And usually when you ask people, they’ll say, Oh, oh yeah, sure! And the thing about direct mail, which I think surprises a lot of people– because it is junk mail and it’s old and all the rest of it– is that there’s nothing in our mailbox anymore.
Rita: Yep.
Denver: I remember 20 years ago when I would get these things, it’d be like in a pile like this with all my credit card applications and things. Now, when I get a direct mail from a nonprofit organization, it’s one of the two pieces of mail that I receive. And since I kind of have this habitual habit of maybe wanting to open up an envelope, you open it up. So it’s sort of contrary thinking, but it has really paid great, great dividends.
We talked a little bit about the workplace before. How would you describe the workplace culture at the Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption?
Rita: It’s an exciting time. Look, we’re getting… again, we’re still bringing new people in the door. We’ve grown from about 15 people to, now, 63 people, and we’ve got about six more positions that we’re recruiting for… have grown. So it’s an exciting time of that dynamic of change, which can be daunting for some people, but we find it exciting.
But it’s a culture that we’re committed to transparency. We’re committed to individual and professional and personal development. We’re committed to, now that we are big enough, we can have layers of advancement. So we want to make sure that when we do have open positions, that we look first internally rather than externally.
It’s an organization that has created, like most, a much more elevated commitment to equity and inclusion. Again, much more deliberately than we were doing pre-pandemic… shame on us… but we’re doing it better now, I think. And it’s an organization where we’re committed to an individual success, knowing that that builds to the greater success of the organization.
Look, this is an organization to a person, and I hope when you chat with people, you’ll hear this… to a person: they are committed to this sense of urgency about this cause that, again, childhood is fleeting. A day in foster care is too much. And if we delay too much and get too tied up in, of course, we’re data-driven and goal-driven and tactical-driven, but if we get too twisted in stuff and forget this sense of urgency, we’re going to fail too many more children.
And I think this culture supports that. Yes, let’s get going. Let’s get the job done. Let’s do this because this is an urgent issue, but let’s do it in a way that you feel supported, that you feel like your voice is important in this organization, and that we all communicate openly and freely and with a sense of honesty about all that we do.
Denver: Do you have an overarching philosophy of leadership, and how does that philosophy shape and influence the culture?
Rita: I do. I hope that I hire the best in order to let them do their job. I am not a micromanager. Do I like to know what’s going on? You bet. And some of that has grown from when we were a staff of five, I knew everybody’s business. I knew every piece of paper that was happening. I can’t do that now. I just don’t… I can’t do that.
But the good news is, I have an incredibly talented staff that knows exactly what they’re doing and how to do it, and bring to the table such profound skills, whether they’re a senior vice president or a program manager, they all… I think my theory is that leadership is at your table, it’s not just at my table, that everybody owns leadership, in your area, in your expertise, in your goals.
And so I hope that trickles down… the sense of : I support and trust you to do your job. We’re going to be held accountable, of course, to each other. We’ve got a business plan and a strategic plan and individual departmental plans with goals that we all adhere to. But ultimately, I trust that you’re going to do your job well.
“There’s nothing easy about being a parent, but that reward of watching a child grow, of watching a child form into a thriving adult, and then having a relationship with an adult child, there’s nothing more profound. And so If you’re thinking about adopting, get as much information as you can because there’s a lot of information out there. And then step forward with a sense of courage and a sense of excitement because it’s a journey like no other.”
Denver: Yeah. And there’s so many different forms of leadership. So much of our thinking is that leadership is what’s on the org chart, but there’s expert leadership, and there’s relational leadership and all the rest. And everybody in that organization, all 63, have that one special talent that really sets them apart.
Finally, Rita, what message would you like to leave with individuals or families considering adoption?
Rita: Listen, there is no better exercise than understanding that there’s a child in need, that it may not be a child that you thought about before. It might be an older child, it might be a toddler, it might be a child with special needs, but there is a child that you will uniquely identify with as you’re going down this adoption journey. And don’t give up.
It will be arduous. Even once the adoption is finalized, parenting is not easy, no matter how you go about it.
Denver: Oh, yes.
Rita: There’s nothing easy about being a parent, but that reward of watching a child grow, of watching a child form into a thriving adult, and then having a relationship with an adult child, there’s nothing more profound. And so If you’re thinking about adopting, get as much information as you can because there’s a lot of information out there.
And then step forward with a sense of courage and a sense of excitement, because it’s a journey like no other.
Denver: Oh, yeah. Yeah. If you really want to make an impact with your life, this is certainly one road to consider. There’s no question about it.
For listeners who want to learn more about the Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption, or maybe financially support this work, tell us about your website and the kind of information that listeners will find there, Rita.
Rita: Yep. The website is easy, davethomasfoundation.org. Lots of resources. If you get on the front page, you’ll be able to link to resources, videos of families that have come together through adoption, links to the donor side if you’d like to donate, links to the Beginner’s Guide to Adoption that we talked about, and just general information about who we are.
The staff list… so you can look and see who the staff is. All of that information. Of course, the background, financial information is there. Our annual report, our audit report, our 990s, there’s links to those so you can dig in and find out who we are.
If you’re very interested in adopting, I would suggest that Beginner’s guide, but we also have an 800 line, 800-ASK-DTFA. That’s during normal business, Eastern time hours. But if you leave a voicemail, if you don’t get somebody, we will get back to you because sometimes you just want to talk to somebody about this process.
A manual is fine, but you want to talk to somebody, and we love talking to people about adoption, too, so the website or the 800 line.
Denver: Well, you’re doing wonderful work, and I want to thank you, Rita, so much for being here today. It was a real delight to have you on the program.
Rita: It is always a pleasure to talk to you, Denver. Thank you so much for having us.
Denver Frederick, Host of The Business of Giving serves as a Trusted Advisor and Executive Coach to Nonprofit Leaders. His Book, The Business of Giving: New Best Practices for Nonprofit and Philanthropic Leaders in an Uncertain World, is available now on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.