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I wanted to take a moment and say “thanks” to all our new and long time members on Precious.org. On June 22nd, just over three weeks ago, we released Precious 2.0, our completely redesigned website, the response has been amazing! In the last 22 days we have added over 4000 new registered members to the Precious community! And the children featured on Precious have been individually viewed over one million times!

What does this mean? A lot! Because it’s not the numbers themselves that excite me; it’s the opportunities they represent for children to connect with parents that blows me away! As of the posting of this blog, 16 children have been matched to their parents on Precious in the last three weeks! Over the last 13 years, we’ve seen that same process happen about 27,000 times.

At Precious, we are committed to helping “create a safe path between children and their forever families”, and we have been walking the talk. We are near completion of a review process of all our current agencies. As of this post, we have received copies of current state licenses for 90% of our agencies. In the next 10 days, our review will be complete. Our membership standards also require all of our member agencies to be actively working towards compliance with the Hague Convention being implemented in the United States in late 2007. Precious.org has been working closely with Hague Convention officials to insure that we represent the very highest standards of this international agreement.

I would encourage all of our members of the Precious community to read Katie’s blog entries on “The Tyranny of Adoption Fraud” and “Unethical Adoption Practices Hurt Everyone” to read more on our stand in the area of ethical adoption practices. Our new Agency Watch feature has already yielded important results.

So what’s ahead?? Well I can’t tell you everything yet (that would give away the surprise!). But be assured that we are working hard at Precious to create new and innovative ways to connect parents and children, and to create ways for those that aren’t planning to adopt to reach out and embrace the world’s orphans!

To date, one of every eight children adopted into the U.S. in the last 13 years were featured on Precious.org (we about fell out of our chairs when we figured that one out!). Never had we dreamed that this was what Precious was to become. Thanks again for all you’ve done to make Precious.org the nation’s most powerful resource for connecting parents and the world’s orphans.

I have been privileged to lead Precious.org for the last 18 months. We’re not perfect, but we’re determined to partner with you to do all we can for the Fatherless. We’ve really been working hard to do all we can to serve all of you and we hope it shows! Please post a comment if you have any thoughts. I’d also love to hear your ideas or suggestions on how we can do better in finding a home for every child!

It’s been 18 months for me. I’m looking foward to the next 18 years! Thanks for loving the children! We’re in this together!

Jason

This entry was posted on Friday, July 20th, 2007 at 10:42 am and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.