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With the recent round of mergers and accreditation relinquishments it has become harder to make agency recommendations. If a family is in process with an agency and that agency suddenly does not facilitate adoptions the family will lose time, money, and sometimes not have a choice about which agency they will complete the adoption through. While I do always recommend families look at the IRS 990 data for agencies that they are considering, I doubt if few do so. For this reason I took the time to compile the numbers for the thirty most frequently used agencies using ProPublica’s Nonprofit Explorer.
Remember that this is only one consideration when choosing an agency. I am not recommending that you go with the agency which looks like it is doing the best financially. You should still try to find the agency which will be the best fit for your family. Checking the substantiated claims list to see if the agency has been found to have done something unethical or illegal is also extremely important.
Finally, a few comments about this information. I included some of the agencies which have merged or relinquished their accreditation so that you can see what their finances looked like preceding that decision. They are marked with an asterisk. You can see that some of them like Bethany made the decision while still financially secure while others like WACAP were in the red for several years in a row. The information for Wide Horizons for Children is somewhat misleading. They were hundreds of thousands in the red for several years. While they did reduce operating expenses, ultimately they sold assets worth around 1.5 million in 2015 in a bid to stay solvent. You can see that it helped, but seemingly only temporarily.
CCAI’s loss in 2018 is another outlier which you have to look more deeply at the IRS 990 to see the full picture. CCAI lost 1 million in investment revenue but their program revenue from 2017 to 2018 is almost identical: 4.35 million versus 4.18 million. So 2018 is all the big investment income loss, not any change in number of clients. Their investment revenue had been steady at around $150,000 through 2014. Here is their investment revenue:
2018: -1 million
2017: +2.8 mil
2016: +1.3 mil
2015: -300,000
2014: +150,000
Some of these agencies had a significant amount of investment or real estate income each year, often making the difference in keeping them in the black. I marked those in the final column. You can see that between the rising costs of accreditation and the decline in families adopting internationally, very few are consistently generating the kind of revenue they need to stay operational.
These numbers are what the IRS 990 indicated was their bottom line figure (income minus expenditures) for the year. Black means they made a profit and red indicates a deficit. The full IRS 990 includes donations, fundraising, investments and more under income. It also lists executive salary among other expenditures. Looking over the actual form will give you a fuller picture of an agency’s finances. I only pulled out one data point for this chart.
*Agency has merged, relinquished their accreditation, or announced they will not be renewing their accreditation once it expires.
Mine in China 