Matching and Link Maker

[ILovekeylime]

Hi

I’ve been reading this forum and it’s been very helpful.

I was approved at panel a couple of months ago and currently waiting to start the matching process. I haven’t looked at any profiles yet and it looks like we’re heading to Link Maker.

Has anyone recently used it and did anyone else go straight into Link Maker?

Any tips from those who have used it?

We didn’t use link maker. Our match was found through our family finder but I just wanted to say congratulations to you

Thanks.

I was relieved to get through panel but haven’t really been properly excited yet as I know there’s a long way to go yet.

I know how you feel. We were matched within 3 months. It’s difficult to get too excited when you don’t yet have a match and don’t have an exact time scale. It will soon creep up on you and before you know it, your little one/s will be with you

Yes we used linkmaker. We were with a VA so they don't have their own children to place and we went straight to linkmaker. I found it incredibly overwhelming but we were very open minded in terms of our age range, gender and the needs we thought we could meet so we were matched very quickly with our son.

Yep, my two were placed through Linkmaker too - drop me a message if you’ve got any questions. And congratulations on being approved.

Thanks for your replies.
Like you @poppet31 I’m open in terms of age, gender, race, needs etc.

I was starting to feel like my social worker has given up as I haven’t looked at any profiles since I was approved 2 months ago.

From browsing previous posts here, I know 2 months is nothing in the adoption world but I’m a person who like to know what’s next on the list. I’m trying to keep busy with work for now.

I need to stop seeing Link Maker as a last resort since it feels like that’s how it was presented to me

We were put on Linkmaker straight away, but our SW matched us in the end.

We were approved a while back and our LA has not sent us a single profile. We are looking on Linkmaker but not much luck there either... Starting to feel a bit disheartened..

We were also with a VA and used Linkmaker from when we were in stage 2. I was prepared to find it incredibly overwhelming but actually it was really helpful in helping us reflect on what needs we could manage, and also in feeling like we were doing something 'concrete'. We were pretty broad on our age range and needs etc but we were definitely looking for sibling groups and older children, so Linkmaker had lots of children that were theoretically within our matching criteria.

We used the 'bookmark' feature and then shared some profiles with our social worker so she could tell us whether she thought they might be a good match and whether we should express interest. In hindsight we probably bookmarked too many profiles - for some children the information is really limited so it's hard to get a good feel for whether they might be the right match for you. When we went through again to look at our bookmarks we narrowed it down more to children who really 'hooked' us for one reason or another, rather than a wider number of children who broadly met our matching criteria.

We did express interest in a few children and it was a bit of a mixed bag in terms of responses from social workers, some were very swift and some never came back to us. So try not to be on tenterhooks for days as soon as you click 'send'! Most of the time we set our profile as 'private', as for the brief period we didn't we were a little overwhelmed by the number of social workers contacting us about their children, many of whom had more significant needs than we felt we could manage. But if your matching criteria are more specific and this is clear on your profile it might be more helpful.

We didn't find our children via Linkmaker in the end but that was more a result of circumstances and their profile being shared locally though social workers at the same time as them going onto Linkmaker. It's probably not for everyone but it worked really well for us.