More than half a dozen Island families have been left feeling helpless after an Ontario agency specializing in international adoptions declared bankruptcy Monday.

'We don't know if they're going to somehow make a plan that these families will still get referrals.'— Tammy MacKinnon, P.E.I. Adoption Coalition

Those Islanders are among more than 400 families across Canada left in the same situation when the Imagine Adoption Agency's parent company, Kids Link, went into receivership.

For the last two years, the Cambridge, Ont.,-based agency had facilitated adoptions from Ethiopia, Ghana and Ecuador.

Tammy MacKinnon of the P.E.I. Adoption Coalition has been in contact with the Island families who were in the process of adopting from Ethiopia. None of them had reached the stage of choosing a child to adopt, but they have spent as much as $13,000 each on the application process, and they don't know if they will be able to continue the process with Ethiopian government.

"We don't know if they have a plan in place for those families who've already got dossiers in Ethiopia," MacKinnon told CBC News Wednesday.

"We don't know if they're going to somehow make a plan that these families will still get referrals and able to continue their adoptions, or if it means simply, you've lost your money and you have to start over."

Rona Brown, director of child and family services for Prince Edward Island, said Imagine Adoptions isn't licensed on P.E.I., but the province is offering all the help it can. Her department is in the process of contacting those Island families.

"This is devastating for families," said Brown.

"Our role will be to support them in terms of their anxieties, by trying to provide as much accurate information as we can gather from our colleagues across the country and facilitating that information to our Island families."

The receiver for Imagine Adoptions, BDO Dunwoody, has established a website. They say they will be updating it with information every day, as soon as it becomes available.