This week the team discussed our insights from last Wednesday’s visit to Arms Wide’s information session and the survey results from that and other information sessions. These insights include that parents are set on foster care adoption but are worried about possibly losing a child to which they become attached; parents would like support including support groups; Arms Wide could better emphasize their unique service and the cost effectiveness of adopting through the foster system; and while Arms Wide did explain the process well, they could add a follow up system.

We mapped out all the problem spaces during the adoption process timeline (from finding out about Arms Wide till post-adoption follow up). We were able to identify our problem spaces through our insights from secondary research, parent surveys, interview with Arms Wide, and the information session we attended last week. After mapping the problem spaces, we found that we could not address the issues past the application stage; those issues are generally the lengthiness of the process, possible emotional attachment, and invasion of privacy — all of which are out of our scope and are inherent to adopting. The issues before the information session stage had to do with marketing, and Arms Wide is working with a consulting firm to address these issues. We narrowed down our project’s focus to addressing issues that come up between the information session and submitting application stages, and these gaps primarily consist of support, follow up, and clarification of information.

We plan to ideate possible solutions to these gaps and figure out which solution is the most feasible and can create the largest impact. This process might involve discussing with Arms Wide, researching how other adoption agencies have addressed these issues, and mapping out the finer details of these different ideas. By doing so, we hope to take a methodological and research-based approach that will produce the best product for Arms Wide.