Building an Adoption Agency and Securing Major Grants for Growth
Keeping Alaska’s Children in Alaska
A two-person startup grew into the state’s only domestic adoption agency, funded by grants that a small team could report on in minutes instead of hours.
In 2019, the Anchorage adoption agency where Tami Watson worked was closing its doors. Around the same time, Victoria Ross reached out to Tami to ask about a job. There wasn’t one to offer. So Victoria asked a different question: had Tami ever thought about opening an agency of her own? Tami had, though she didn’t want to do it alone.
Victoria offered to do it with her. “We literally met the next day, and it steamrolled from there,” Tami says. They were licensed as Alaska Adoption Services in Alaska that July and made their first placement in December.
What they saw was a gap no one else was filling. If Alaska lost its local adoption option, Alaskan mothers and babies would be sent out of state to be served. Most of the agency’s mothers and babies are Alaska Native, and keeping those children connected to their roots and culture means keeping the work in Alaska. “How unfair is that,” Tami says of the alternative, “that our moms would be forced to go out of state.”
The Challenge
Building an agency from nothing in Alaska is its own kind of hard. The founders worked essentially for free through most of the first year, and everything lived in paper files. The state they serve is enormous. Their mothers live in the tiniest villages, hundreds of miles away, reachable only by plane or boat and sometimes both, where internet and even cell coverage can drop out.
Growth depended on grants, and grants depend on data. To win funding and then prove impact, the agency had to produce detailed reports on completed and withdrawn home studies, families served, and outcomes. A brand-new nonprofit with almost no budget could not afford an enterprise system, and could not afford to lose people to spreadsheet work either. Most of the staff are contractors out in the field rather than in an office, so whatever they chose had to be simple enough to learn without someone standing over their shoulder.
The Solution
Victoria met Stefanie at an adoption conference where she was showing SAM. Two things stood out. It was built for adoption work, and it delivered that specialist capability at a price a new agency could justify. For a nonprofit starting from nothing, that value mattered as much as the fit. They grew into the platform with Stefanie's help, learning to build their own reports and automations as their programs multiplied.
The Outcome
The grant reporting that once took Tami most of a week now takes minutes. “It will take me ten minutes to get my numbers versus a three-hours with an Excel spreadsheet doing things manually,” she says. That reporting is what let the agency qualify for and then sustain two major grants with a state grant to perform adoption and guardianship home studies, now around 360 a year across all of Alaska, and the Wendy’s Wonderful Kids grant from the Dave Thomas Foundation, which funded a recruiter to help children in foster care find permanency.
Compliance became a non-event. At their last licensing renewal, the reviewer spent a couple of hours on site and told them theirs was the easiest agency she visits. “All the dates are in there. It’s labeled. It’s easy,” Tami says. She knows the contrast well. At the paper-based agency where she started the same review meant an eight-hour day of digging through hard files to find a document and then the date it was signed.
The system also runs the work that used to slip. When a home study writer is assigned, SAM emails the caseworker and other collaterals automatically. When a family attends an adoption workshop, they get their checklist by email without anyone drafting it.
Surveys that once went out by mail with stamps now send themselves. Client emails log straight into the family’s record. Home study writers see only the files assigned to them and lose access the moment a case closes. Even the community diaper pantry, which serves about 400 children a month around Anchorage, runs on SAM.
Room to Grow
Alaska Adoption Services now has six full-time staff and more than twenty contractors, up from the two founders who once worked for free. It is the only domestic adoption agency in the state, doing home studies from Anchorage to Nome, and it is still adding programs, including embryo adoption in 2024.
“They’ve seen our agency grow over the last six years, and they’ve been with us every step of the way,” Victoria says of the SAM team. For an agency that started with paper files and a conviction that Alaska’s children belong in Alaska, the system that made the grants reportable is a large part of how that conviction became a statewide organization.
What Alaska Adoption Services says about SAM
“We have to gather a lot of data - for impact, completed or withdrawn home studies, etc. Having accurate and on-time data is important to make sure that we get our grant. SAM does all the work for us.”