Letter From The President

Dear Great Wall and Children of All Nations Families,

We hope your New Year, whether celebrated on January 1st and/or February 4th, is off to a great start! Bai nian! For us, it is a year of renewed commitment to serve children around the world by recruiting forever families, opening programs in new countries to expand the reach of our forever families, and continually finding new ways we can support charity missions to these areas.

Happily, we kicked off 2011 with the launch of our newest country program, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly known as Zaire) in central Africa. Neighboring Uganda, the vast country of the DRC has suffered greatly during many years of war and turmoil, which has only recently ceased, leaving behind over 5 million estimated orphaned children.

We and our wonderful DRC team begin our work here with great passion and fervor, for the beautiful, spirited children who deserve loving arms to hold them. Our staff was amazed to witness the generous, vivacious, and tenacious spirit of these babies and kids from the Congo (read their story on our DRC page) despite their circumstances.

We ask you, as families with welcoming hearts, to wonder if these Congolese children could be one of your own. Please review the requirements and children available and contact us with questions about adopting from the Congo!

Looking back on 2010, we are happy to report great strides in our mission to find families and homes for orphans on a global scale. In 2010 we launched and are carrying out 5 country programs (Haiti, Latvia, the Ukraine, Peru, and Uganda), and 2011 will see new countries added to our ever-widening scope. The first four CAN programs to launch continue to flourish. Please see the progam updates tabs on the left for the most recent news on these programs, including the Philippines and Ethiopia! We also continue to move forward with our Charity efforts, like our Libraries of Love, with more news on the horizon as we ourselves continue to have our eyes opened to specific needs of these children and communities around the world. We continue to assist Rwanda in the finalization of implementing the Hague Convention. Last year we welcomed their adoption authorities to our offices in Austin and traveled to join them in Rwanda in order to train judges, lawyers, and other adoption workers. We anticipate their re-opening in the near future, and many of our Rwanda families will soon be matched! In September, we held our Beyond Borders adoption conference in San Antonio, where we connected with and educated many GW & CAN families and adoption authorities from China, Haiti, Peru, and the Philippines.

Most importantly, we placed and matched over 600 children in 2010! 246 were China waiting children, including children entrusted to us by the CCAA in our ICAN Hope: YC and SZ special projects to especially advocate for. For these Special Project orphanages, we also funded medical exams for the children and sent experts to do assessments and train their staff and caretakers. (For more details on Waiting Children from 2010 and how to get started for a Waiting Child adoption, please click on the Waiting Child tab!)

We also thank and recognize our corporate sponsor, BBVA Compass Foundation, who has generously contributed $5,000 to GW/CAN as part of their 2010 Community Giving program, toward funding our Beyond Borders conference. Their generosity has surely added to the impact of our actions in meeting the needs of orphans worldwide, and of course their future forever families in turn.

Please enjoy this edition of the GW/CAN Forever Families Newsletter, and as always, thank you for all your help and support!

Warm thoughts for this winter season,

Snow Wu
President/CEO