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Welcome home.

There's no place like home.

Home is where the heart is.

Home sweet home.

Our culture has much to say about that place we are most content, where we live and love, the place we return to each night. Home is our safe haven, our comfort zone.

But what if you don't have a home, or even a family, for that matter?

That is the sad state of affairs for more than 700 children in New Brunswick. They are awaiting adoption, hoping that someday they will get a real, permanent family and a real home - a bedroom that's really theirs, a place where they can make good memories, a few people they can count on to love them forever, no matter what.

About 500 of those 700 children are aged 12 and older. They are far more difficult to place than toddlers, but their needs and desires to have a family are no less poignant or pressing.

This is National Adoption Month. To help fund its activities, and even more so, to garner the attention of the public, the New Brunswick Adoption Foundation held its first annual "Home is Where the HeART is" auction on Thursday.

Since the foundation was formed in 2002, the adoption rate in New Brunswick has skyrocketed. Before the foundation came along, about 25 children were adopted each year in this province. Since 2002, about 100 kids find permanent homes annually.

That is proof that public education works. You've probably seen the ads on TV and in the newspapers about adoption in New Brunswick. That heightened awareness has contributed to this impressive increase in adoptions.

But there remains a large group still waiting for a couple of things most of us take for granted - a family and a home.

It's especially difficult for the teenagers who are so in need of positive role models in their lives. Being a teenager is tough enough. Being a teenager without the anchors of life must be particularly challenging.

These wards of the province, if they remain so, face a grim future.

Even though in most families, kids in their late teens and early 20s are still relying on their parents for many essentials, these kids, at 19, are on their own without support.

A recent Canadian study, cited on the foundation's website, states that within two to four years of leaving foster care,

* 50 per cent of these youth have not completed high school;

* 50 per cent are unemployed;

* 60 per cent of the girls have given birth, and only 20 per cent are self-supporting.

Those are grim statistics, and behind them are endless, heartbreaking stories of isolation, poverty, aimlessness and a lack of love and support.

Not everyone is in a position to adopt a teenager, or even a much younger child for that matter. But for those who can do so and have an interest, there can be few acts that would have such a positive impact as being a mom or dad to a child who has no one.