Thank you, Madam Chair.
Barbara and I are going to share some time here, but I just want to start by saying that we really welcome the committee's decision to look at this whole issue of what the federal government can do to support adoption in Canada. We do feel that a number of areas would really benefit from this study, and we would be happy to get back to you in more detail about those issues at a different time.
But today, we'll just tell you a little bit about the Heart Gallery. The Heart Gallery is a concept that was pioneered in the United States. The Heart Gallery of America began in 2001 in New Mexico. The idea is that local photographers donate their time to take portraits of children who are waiting for permanent families. These are children in foster care.
This has been quite successful in the United States, so we looked at doing it here because we need more innovative tools and solutions. There are many thousands of children in foster care who are legally free for adoption across Canada, but our domestic adoption rates are stagnating. They really haven't risen over probably the past decade, if not more. They're roughly in the range of 1,700 to 2,000 per year. We need other ways to attract potential adoptive families and to match these children with those families.
That's why we decided on this. We spoke to the Children's Aid Society here in Ottawa, because we are here in Ottawa. The Adoption Council of Canada is a national organization, but it's headquartered in Ottawa. We also knew that the Children's Aid Society here had a good track record of trying new things, reaching out, and being quite aggressive about trying to recruit parents. We hope this will be a pilot project.
On Thursday night here on Parliament Hill, we launched the gallery. We had portraits of 18 different children from right here in Ottawa who need permanent families. Some were in sibling groups; I think we had three sibling groups. Others were single children in need of permanent homes. The idea is that this gallery will tour--hopefully--in some federal government buildings, municipal buildings, private companies, or office buildings, to attract a different audience of adoptive parents and families who might not have thought about adopting these particular children, who might not have thought about opening their homes to another child in general, and who will then follow up with the Children's Aid Society here to go through the appropriate process if they decide they would like to adopt.
That's the idea behind the Heart Gallery. As I say, it's been quite successful. Some jurisdictions in the United States have seen the numbers of calls and requests from potential adoptive parents doubling. There have been matches made, with as much as 50% of the children pictured in the galleries placed or potentially matched in some areas, and between 25% and 40% in other jurisdictions. That's why we decided to do it here. We hope it will spread across the country.