Hope's Promise

Background Statement

In 1987, Ray and Paula Freeman traveled to India to adopt their infant daughter, Hope. Hope became the Freeman's fifth child, joining four birth siblings at home in Colorado, USA. This trip to India, and Hope's subsequent adoption, led Paula Freeman to return to graduate school at Denver University to earn her Master's Degree in Social Work, and found Hope's Promise, a licensed, Christian adoption agency, in 1990.

Initially, Hope's Promise intended to place only foreign-born children for adoption with qualified US families. But early on Paula and the board of directors made a decision to make Hope's Promise a full-service adoption agency, providing both domestic and inter-country adoption. They believed domestic adoption provided a viable alternative to abortion for those women who were pregnant but not prepared to parent a child at that time in their lives.

After visiting orphanages throughout the world in her capacity as Founder and Executive Director of Hope's Promise and seeing the needs of countless orphaned children who would never be adopted, Paula Freeman asked Hope's Promise Board of Directors to prayerfully consider forming a second organization devoted to providing humanitarian aid to those children who would remain in their birth countries. As a result, Hope's Promise Orphan Ministries was incorporated as a non-profit humanitarian aid organization in September 2002. In 2007, Hope's Promise and Hope's Promise Orphan Ministries legally merged to form one organization, Hope's Promise, with two separate divisions, adoption and orphan care. In 2014, Paula Freeman resigned as Executive Director. The board of directors, after a careful and prayerful search, named Beth Woods as Paula's successor, effective February 1, 2014.

Our qualified and dedicated social work staff provide options counseling to women and men in unplanned pregnancies throughout the state of Colorado and the state required Adoptive Family Assessment and training for prospective adoptive parents. Throughout the years, Hope's Promise has had inter-country adoption programs with Nepal, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Ukraine and Sierra Leone. We have offered collaborative programs from India and Russia. Additionally, through our local services program, we have supervised internationally adopted children from several other countries, including Japan, Haiti, Ethiopia, Kazakhstan, Guatemala, Mexico and Romania among others. Hope's Promise has placed over 1,000 children through domestic and inter-country adoption. In 2020, Hope's Promise launched a foster care program to provide children living in Colorado with safe and stable foster homes while biological families work towards reunification.

The Hope's Promise orphan care program works closely with local churches and governments, recruiting, training and supervising qualified house parents, as well as assisting them with adequate financial support. Hope's Promise currently maintains small family homes with a total of 53 children in Nepal, Kenya, and Vietnam. In addition, Hope's Promise expanded its care for orphans and vulnerable children who are able to live at home with caring relatives by providing educational scholarships to these children in each of the countries in addition to Zimbabwe. Thrive scholarships ensure very poor children living in the Mathare Valley slum, Vietnam remote villages and in Zimbabwe can obtain a quality education helping them to someday move beyond their impoverished existence. Currently there are 101 children in the Thrive program around the world.

In 2017, the Colorado Department of Human Services put out a call for 1000 new foster families. Unfortunately, only 100 Coloradoans answered that call by late 2019. So, Hope's Promise, in an effort to make a difference in the state of Colorado, added foster care to its programs.

Children living in Colorado need safe and stable homes. Often biological families need love, support, and nurturing. Foster care is an opportunity to invest in the stability and permanency of Colorado families by supporting reunification efforts for youth in foster care. Some foster care placements may be short-term, some may be long-term, and some may necessitate adoption. But ultimately the goal of foster care, like all of our programs, is building strong families.