The forum was organized on the initiative of the Ministry for Family, Youth, and Sports (Minsimii) and supported by President Viktor Yushchenko of Ukraine. It gathered some 500 children and parents from all over Ukraine.
The forum’s honorary participants were parents and foster parents who had adopted children, organized foster families or homes, or were granted guardianship over orphans. Minsimii statistics show that there are 35,000 children adopted by Ukrainian citizens, nearly 64,000 children placed under guardianship, and 6,000 kids raised by foster parents and in family-type children’s homes.
The forum was organized to conclude the 2008 National Adoption Year, which also pertained to other ways of raising orphans and children deprived of parental care in families. Ipsos Ukraine carried out a sociological study commissioned by the State Department for Adoption and Protection of Children’s Rights. It showed that 80 percent of Ukrainians believe that a parentless child will feel happier in a foster family than in a boarding school. The respondents were answer to answer two groups of questions. The first one had to do with the populace’s attitude to orphans and children deprived of parental care and possible ways of taking care of them. The second group had to do with public attitude to adoption. Respondents had to choose from five measures that would improve these children’s situation. Most respondents (some 43 percent) chose “facilitating adoption” above all others, while 24 percent placed it second; foster families and family-type children’s homes were favored by 17 and 28 percent respectively.
