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Family Shares Adoption Story During National Adoption Month

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November is National Adoption Month, and Child and Family Services of Northwestern Michigan say they’re always looking for families to foster and adopt children.

Courtesy of Kelly Gravelle

“Every year, our agency alone does about between 50 to 70 adoptions,” said Adoption Services Supervisor Lisa Wisniewski. “In the state of Michigan, there’s 14,000 kids in care at any given time. During that time, there’s 3,000 children available waiting for adoption.”

Child and Family Services of Northwestern Michigan serves a 15-county region, and have about 80 foster homes. Wisniewski says it’s hard to recruit families to take in teenagers and siblings.

“Those are really tough families to recruit for,” she said. “When people want to foster or adopt they generally think about the little cute kids, and it’s much tougher to find people to foster and adopt the older kids. There’s such an incredible need.”

Kelly Gravelle, who lives in Suttons Bay, says her first instinct to become a foster parent happened when she took in an 18-year-old NMC student.

“When she got here, she didn’t have a drivers license, she didn’t know how to use an ATM card, and I started doing all these things with her and I thought, ‘I like this’,” said Kelly. “I realized that I really liked having her around and doing those kinds of life skills.”

Kelly looked into different agencies to start the fostering process, and came across Child and Family Services.

“They told me what all the options were. I said I only want to do teenagers, I don’t think I could do under 12,” said Kelly.

Child and Family Services told Kelly about a 15-year-old in Marquette, named Leila, looking for a home.

“They called and said we have this kid, they told me about her when they first came to do my house inspection,” said Kelly.

Kelly met Leila over Zoom for the first time in July 2020. She says they instantly had things in common.

“We had written our bios and then we exchanged them and they were very similar,” she said. “The person where she was had a desk with a bunch of unicorns on it. We just got into this conversation about unicorns and alicorns and we just kind of connected.”

Leila says she doesn’t remember the first time she met Kelly, other than that she was nervous.

Courtesy of Kelly Gravelle

“I was nervous that I was meeting a new person and that I would end up living with them if I agreed to it,” she said. “You can see where that would be nervous after living in the same place for a year and never moving from there.”

They also both enjoy fantasy books, and that was one way they connected, too.

“I had just finished this book series and I said I’ll send her the first book in the series, see if she’ll like it,” said Kelly. “She gets it and she says, ‘This is for babies’ because it had this cartoon cover. I said ‘It’s not for babies, give it a try’. She read the first book and then she called me and she was like, ‘Can you send me the next book?’.”

Kelly and Leila were in a foster to adopt program.

“I talked to her about it when I came to see her in Marquette,” said Kelly. “I talked to her about whether she wanted that. It was her decision, she was 15 at the time, and I said we’re not going to make you do something you don’t want to do. She was like, ‘Well, you can adopt me under these circumstances’.”

Leila had hopes to return to her biological family.

“My first want for being adopted was that I could go back to my biological family,” said Leila. “After getting to know Kelly, and realizing that, ‘Hey, maybe they weren’t the best for you,’, my want to get adopted was just to have somebody to be a good caring parent that teaches you how to be a good adult.”

Kelly knew she wanted to be in Leila’s life.

“The first time I talked to her, I was like, ‘This is someone I need in my life for the rest of my life’,” she said.

In September 2021, on Leila’s birthday, Kelly officially adopted Leila into her family.

“I have learned more compassion, empathy, and how to better take care of myself,” said Lelia. “Kelly’s been trying to teach me how to make things, too.”

“It’s the best thing I’ve ever done,” said Kelly. “I should have done it sooner, but I didn’t know enough about it. Once I started researching it, this is absolutely what I should be doing.”

To find out how you can support Child and Family Services of Northwestern Michigan, or to become a foster family, you can head to their website .

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