The Dream Room

Adoption Dreams Come True, Inc. is a private, nonprofit adoption agency serving the families of Colorado. In dealing with birth mothers who chose to parent rather than to give their child up for adoption, we realized they would need baby items to begin their role as parents. Our staff and volunteers of the Dream Guild created space in the basement level of our office building to begin gathering donated items such as cribs, clothing, toys, and diapers for our birth parents. We quickly realized that we could help other members of our county who are in need as well and expanded our program to become the “Dream Room”. In the current economic situation, many families have stretched their earning power to the limit. While some of the families qualify for government assistance, many of them are barely making ends meet and have to look for viable resources like the Dream Room. The Dream Room is a baby boutique for families in need in our county with children from birth to two years of age. These community members can shop for free from donated gently used baby items (clothes, toys, furniture, etc.) and new diapers. They can look through our inventory of boy and girl items and receive seven items in each of our specified categories per month. So potentially they could walk away with seven outfits, seven sleepers, toys, etc. each month. The intention of this program was to allow families to experience shopping in a real baby boutique, and to be dealt with respect and dignity by our caring volunteers. This program is only possible with the help of our amazing volunteers and the Microsoft Software we received through TechSoup “The Dream Room” utilizes Microsoft Access for all of our database needs. Being a nonprofit we have strict state regulations and Microsoft Access helps us comply with those regulations. Microsoft Access allows us to track the donations we receive, the hours each volunteer spends in the Dream Room, and the information about each guest; information including how to contact them, optional information regarding their ethnicity, marital status, and income level and most importantly what items they have been given, which helps us to see the impact we have had on our community. Tracking these things not only shows the state we have done our due diligence to comply to our laws, it also helps us to determine what the biggest needs are in our community and what times of the day and days of the week we see the most clients. Without Microsoft Access we would not have been able to provide such efficient and helpful services to our community with such speed. It would have taken us months of data collection to understand our community needs. Access made the needs apparent and allowed the Dream Room to address the requirements quickly. Microsoft Word was our biggest asset in promoting the Dream Room. Since the Dream Room program could not have any budgetary impact on our agency we had to be creative in designing hand outs to churches, clinics and community resource centers to inform our clients of our location and hours of operation. We were able to produce a colorful and captivating flyer in both English and Spanish using all of the efficient editing and graphic tools in Word. As soon as our flyers were distributed, we were able to influence more lives and people started talking about their experiences with the Dream Room with friends and family. Microsoft Xcel is another program that has helped our project. We have been able to track our inventory both on-site in the baby boutique as well as inventory at our off-site location. When a client is in need of larger items such as high chair or crib, we are able to tell them instantly if we can accommodate them. It saves time and resources by not having to go to the other site. We are also able to take that person’s information on our Xcel spreadsheet and contact them as soon as the item they need is donated. We also used Excel to track where, how many, and how often we distributed the Dream Room flyers. The five thousand dollars would be used to maintain and support the Dream Room. We would purchase diapers to help supplement our donations. Diapers are the most commonly asked for item. They are a large expense in the family budget and, as one Dad stated “I can buy diapers or I can buy gas for my car, not both.” Whenever we are not able to provide our clients with the right size for their child, they are simply turned away. Many people will check back often to see if a new donation supply has been brought in because they have very few options for getting diapers without our help. We need an average of forty packages per week. That comes to about five hundred dollars per month. The grant money could supply us with about one full year worth of diapers. Donations that the Dream Room does receive would supplement our supply and hopefully give us a small surplus of diapers so we could meet everyone’s diaper needs for the first time. Cribs are another important item that families request and we are able to purchase new, fully compliant, cribs at a discounted price through a local merchant. We would use a portion of the $5000 to make sure we always have a crib available upon request. “The Dream Room” opened in May, 2008. In that time we have served about five hundred families in our county and about nine hundred children. All of these children have clothes, toys, beds and more because the goal of our agency and the Dream Guild is to make sure children in our community have a safe, healthy home. The Dream Room has improved the quality of life for many families in our community. The impact we have had on our community has been a substantial one and the ever growing number of people we have been able to serve proves that even with minimal advertising and minimal financial resources, this is a much needed program, especially in these hard economic times. Without the Microsoft tools we would not be nearly as efficient or effective. The logistics of running this project would have been a nightmare had we not had the organization of our greatly appreciated Microsoft Software donation from TechSoup and our loving and compassionate volunteers who give of their time so freely. Together, our agency and Microsoft’s programs have been able to create a better life for so many children in our county and we hope that the impact we have had will only continue to grow and flourish.