This Urban Institute report looks at the changing characteristics of parents who have adopted children from the foster care system to help agencies identify and recruit adoptive parents. Of the children adopted in 1999, 56 percent were adopted by foster parents and 20 percent by relatives--a radical shift in child welfare practice, since until recently foster parents and relatives were rarely given opportunities to adopt. Children still awaiting adoption tend to be closest in characteristics to the children adopted by relatives--older, male and black. Prospective adoptive parents who have no prior relationship with the child are slightly more likely than foster parents to adopt older and minority children, but are significantly less likely than foster parents or relatives to adopt children with special needs.

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