Each year, members of the Congressional Coalition on Adoption nominate an individual or couple to receive the "Angels in Adoption" award. The coalition is a bipartisan alliance that dedicates itself to promoting adoption and improving adoption policy and practice. Each nominee has dramatically affected a child's life through adoption. I am pleased to be a member of this coalition and am honored to nominate an individual from Maine to receive this award. This year, I'm honored to nominate Dawn C. Degenhardt of Houlton to receive the 2002 "Angels in Adoption" award for her effort and dedication to this cause. Dawn's wonderful story is truly inspirational. Dawn, born in Portland, Maine, was a child advocate in Cleveland, Ohio, where she founded the state chapter of the Council on Adoptable Children. Dawn and another parent also founded Spaulding of Beechbrook in Ohio, which helps to place special needs children and is still in existence today. When Dawn and her husband decided to start their own family, they began by adopting two infants. By the time their second child was a year old, Dawn and Ed pursued an older child adoption. Over the next two years, they worked to encourage more people to adopt older children. They adopted four more children — one from a Native American adoption program in South Dakota and three from Vietnam. They then moved to Maine and adopted three more older children, two through the Maine Department of Human Services and one from India. Dawn and Ed adopted nine children in total. Though their own family was now complete, in 1977, Dawn's concern for the children still waiting in the foster care system prompted her to found the Maine Adoption Placement Service (MAPS) in Houlton. Her original mission was to place special needs children and to educate and train their new adoptive families in a supportive environment. After ten years, the program expanded its services to include a housing component for pregnant teens and young women. Today, there are MAPS offices and programs with housing for pregnant and parenting teens in Portland, Bangor, and Houlton. The program also has licensed offices in Boston, Tampa, Florida, and Silverthorne, Colorado. The Colorado office has also a therapeutic foster care program. The agency Dawn founded is also licensed in Vermont, and has recently received accreditation by the Council on Accreditation of Children and Family Services (COA). MAPS was the first adoption agency to propose placement of children living in orphanages in the former Soviet Union, and that work continues to this day. The program is also functioning in Cambodia, where it offers a strong program of adoption services and humanitarian aid. MAPS also has developed programs in Kazakstan, Romania, India, Guatemala, Sierra Leone, and Ecuador; offering families more international choices while never losing sight of its original mission of placing special needs children from the foster care system. Dawn continues to serve as CEO of the Maine Adoption Placement Service. This year she and her staff celebrate their twenty-fifth anniversary of bringing children and families together. Dawn and her team of dedicated professionals have helped to place over 3,500 children in loving homes. Dawn and Ed Degenhardt have built a family not only for themselves but also for many others. Their home has been filled with love and happiness. I am proud to know that Maine is home to a couple so full of compassion and generosity, and who have inspired countless more families, to show the same compassion and caring for children in our state and around the globe.