Our Story

Support must be trauma informed because early trauma, including in-utero stress, has lasting and often invisible impact. We seek to hold space for those with care experience to integrate all the chapters of their story. By creating trauma informed safe spaces in homes, schools, and communities, we can grow as a system to better support adoptees and foster children. Promoting the well-being and healing of adoptees and foster youth develops an educated community to better understand trauma and how it presents emotionally and behaviorally.

Parenting and practice must be adoptee centered, with all systems centered on the well-being of adoptees. With lived experiences, adoptees are the true experts who should inform parenting and practice. Moving to dissolve the power struggle and triangulation of the “adoption triad” where the adoptee always loses allows us to learn from the historical context whereby children were marginalized and treated as commodities. We must become proficient in adoptee centerdness.

We must recognize we don’t know what we don’t know. And we’re willing to do the work to educate ourselves, meeting the unique needs and honoring the full identity of others, while contextualizing resources. Being challenged to important work before considering adoption and becoming better equipped OR identifying the inability to proceed supports a system around a child. We must learn better informed responses to people from transracial adoptions and culturally contextualized responses to people in general.