2025 Recruiter of the Year: Kate from Texas
During the 2025 Wendy’s Wonderful Kids® Summit, the Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption recognized Kate, a Wendy’s Wonderful Kids recruiter with Helping Hand Home for Children in Texas, as a Recruiter of the Year.
Through our Wendy’s Wonderful Kids program, the Foundation supports the hiring of adoption recruiters, like Kate, who are dedicated to finding permanent homes for children most at risk of aging out of foster care without a family. That includes teenagers, children with special needs and siblings. These professionals use an evidence-based, child-focused recruitment model to find the right family for every child in their care. A rigorous, five-year national evaluation revealed that children referred to Wendy’s Wonderful Kids are up to 3x more likely to be adopted.
“Kate is so easy to connect with — utilizing her skills as a former therapist, understanding people’s trauma, helping those relatives not feel ashamed that they have walked those hard journeys, but then connecting them with resources,” shared Kristi, a Wendy’s Wonderful Kids supervisor. “There are new recruiters onboarding all the time in Texas, and she’s on every call, willing to help people, willing to share resources, just willing to be a friendly phone call away.”
Kate approaches each child’s case with equity and integrity, as she works the child-focused recruitment model to fidelity. Her persistence has been instrumental in achieving legal permanency for some of Texas’ longest-waiting youth in foster care.
“I think that the Wendy’s Wonderful Kids program is effective because of the relationships that we build with these kids and the way that we listen to them and find out who the important people are in their lives, and really kind of meet them where they’re at,” Kate shared. “A lot of times, kids have given up hope by the time they get close to aging out of the system, and I try to remind them that we never give up hope.”
Congratulations, Kate, for this special honor, and thank you for your commitment to finding safe, permanent families for the longest-waiting youth in foster care.