7A: Use of Self: The Impact on Your Families and Yourself

Samantha Fuhrman, Renee Hettich  & Trudy Kent

The Coalition was founded by adoptive parents to support adoptive parents. Now, over 40 years later, the Coalition still strongly believes peer support is key to improving the welfare of foster, kinship and adoptive families. The Coalition is committed to supporting families with persons of lived experience (that is you!). This workshop will explore the use of your lived experience with foster, kinship, and adoptive families to improve their well-being. The workshop will define “use of self”, give you the tools to effectively use your lived experience with families, speak to the potential pitfalls of using your stories, and explore ways to ensure your well-being while you share a piece of your family with others. The workshop will have a brief presentation of concepts and then provide you an opportunity to analyze real-life scenarios and discuss questions to consider when using yourself in your work with families.

7B:  Unraveling Addiction and Adoption

Beth Syverson

What does adoption have to do with addiction? Well, 43% more adopted people have a substance use disorder in their lifetime compared to their non-adopted peers. That is a huge number! If I had known that when I adopted my son, I would have been much more alert and prepared when he hit adolescence. As it was, I was blindsided by his substance use and didn’t realize he was involved with drugs until he was strongly addicted. In this workshop, I will share our family’s struggle with addiction, which started 4 years ago; how my son’s drug usage numbs his primal wound and how my son and I have kept a positive relationship through it all.

8A: Why Don’t Typical Behavior Strategies Work for My Child: Is it Sensory or is it Behavior?          

Dr. Yvonne Swinth  & Samantha Reed

Many children who have experienced trauma, who have been exposed to drugs/alcohol in utero, or who have a diagnosis such as ADD/ADHD or Autism Spectrum Disorder have unique developmental and behavioral needs as a result of sensory challenges. Many children from hard places, including foster and foster-adopt children have challenges with sensory-processing. Often these sensory processing challenges present as behavior challenges for these children. Addressing these needs can support positive changes in behavior and  is essential for social interactions, school participation, and participation in home routines. This session is designed to provide an overview of sensory processing, help participants recognize behaviors that may be a result of sensory processing challenges, and present some practical strategies families can use to address sensory-processing needs in the home, school and community.

8B: Navigating the System After Adoption, Kinship Guardianship and Foster Care   

Shantell Lewis

Foster care to adoption and kingap are the most common pathways to a child reaching permanency. Generally, the hope and expectation is that these children and their families will thrive mentally, physically, and emotionally without further state involvement, yet it’s not always permanent as anticipated. The Law Center for Children, an organization currently working on broken adoptions -Broken Adoption projects (BAP), observed that children adopted through foster care were returning through family courts. Broken adoptions are a huge concern in New York City. It’s important to highlight that this session is not to take away from the importance of adoption and kingap. This session is to bring awareness of some issues that families may encounter. In addition, this will provide some insight and examples of solutions that both families and professionals may utilize in these situations. The goal is to help families stay intact, avoid any disruptions, enhance problem-solving and provide valuable resources and tips. In this session we will focus on uncovering systemic issues that may impact an adoptive or kingap family and ways to navigate the system so that families can better help themselves.

9: Becoming Black: Identity Development & Transracial Adoption           

Dr. Abigail Hasberry

The adoption institution has historically centered the voices of the adoptive parents, highlighting a savior experience. However, this narrative often does not represent the adoptee experience, and may even be counter or harmful to adoptees. In this informative session, Dr. Abby Hasberry, transracial adoptee, birth mother, educator, author, and therapist centers the adoptee narrative and takes deeper dive in transracial adoption and identity development. Sharing parts of her personal story and using her research on identity development, her experience as a trauma-informed therapist, and research from the field of adoption, Abby breaks down the process of forming a racial identity as a Black transracial adoptee separated from racial mirrors and Black history and culture. This session uses an intersectional lens to examine identity development, trauma, the adoption industry, and healing.

This workshop will encourage caretakers to consider the question: What do you, as a caretaker, bring to the relationship with your child? Workshop facilitators will engage caretakers in the courageous conversation of looking at how our own histories and expectations can impact our relationships with our children, how to notice when these things start getting in the way, and what we can do about it. Facilitators will suggest that foster/adoptive parenting often reveals our own wounds, and, while that can be uncomfortable, it also offers the opportunity to begin healing ourselves.

11A:  Survivor to Thriver  

Cordelia Cranshaw Skeete

Survivor to Thriver (STT) is a framework for young adults (14+) who are currently in or who have previously experienced the foster care system. STT provides a 7-step guide to ensure participants increase their ability to build healthy relationships and heal from their trauma. The interactive modules provide participants with an extrapolating illustration of how I used strategies, coping skills, and practices to find my own pathway to success.

The audience will be introduced to this framework during the presentation and will have the opportunity to discuss the critical issues addressed in Survivor to Thriver which include healing from trauma, building relationships, and preparing for adulthood.

11B: Post-Permanency Support Services Discussion

Alan Yu, Evelyn Ankoma , Samantha Callaghan, Melissa Holiday and Kassandra Rivera

What are ways that these other parts of the child welfare system can assist with post-permanency services? What shows that post-permanency services are so necessary in today’s child welfare landscape? What is the single biggest challenge families face post-permanency? Join us to discuss the answers to these question and so much more.  

12A: Improving Education for Young People in Foster Care in New York State: Listening to Those with Lived Experience               

Chantal Hinds

In New York State, students in foster care  face enormous educational odds. Statewide, during the 2021-2022 school year, only 51% of students in foster care graduated high school in four years (as compared to an 87% graduation rate for students not in foster care). Additionally, according to available data, during the 2018-2019 school year only 17 percent of 3rd through 5th graders who sat for the ELA exam scored a proficient grade—only 16 percent scored a proficient grade in math. While educational outcomes for young people in foster care are challenging, the overall life outcomes for children in care are too. Studies have revealed increased rates of incarceration, homelessness, and mental health challenges among this population, but it doesn’t have to be this way. A supportive education can help improve both educational and life outcomes for young people with foster care experience.

This workshop will share new policy research conducted by Chantal Hinds with over 75 participants with lived foster care experience in New York State. Participants included current and former foster youth and young adults, parents, adoptive parents, and foster parents. Participants shared their school and foster care experiences and provided recommendations for how our schools, agencies, and counties can provide more support to help foster youth achieve their educational goals.

12B: Raising the Grandchildren: What I Thought I Knew as a Therapist Until it Happened to Me.  

Michael McCay

The workshop will contain the personal experience of the presenter in being a caregiver to a child who has lost his parents as caregivers. It will address the challenges the presenter faced in being the parent of a child who lost his parents and talk about specific experiences that were difficult. These difficult experiences helped the presenter to be a better parent. It also talks about what the presenter had learned as a family therapist working with adopted/foster children and the strategies that worked and didn’t work in raising a child who was adopted. Also included is the topic of attachment:  how it works, what goes wrong in attachment, how that impacts children and how to effectively help children who have been adopted.

Foster Blessings and Fostering Hope; Foster Care, Adoption and Supporting All of the Players

Angela Paganelli & Rachel Doyle

Not everyone is able to foster or adopt children, but everyone can play a role in supporting the families who do. Foster Blessings and Fostering Hope Together give the practical ways for the community to come alongside the families in their community who are standing in the gap for venerable children. 

Openness in adoption is about much more than contact between two sets of parents and opening access to birth records in all 50 states. It’s about the state of mind from which we form our adoption policies and practices, including an openness to others’ perspectives. Openness is needed in families formed through adoption, and it’s also important for those of us working toward adoption reform, where “reaching across the aisle” and working together is the path to true openness.

Adoptee Sara Easterly, birth parent Kelsey Vander Vliet Ranyard, and adoptive parent Lori Holden have been collaborating together for the last two years on articles, a podcast, and a forthcoming book, Adoption Unfiltered (Rowman & Littlefield, November 2023). Together, they have not only created ground-breaking work, but they’ve also built friendship and learned to rely upon each other in ways they never had imagined at the start of their working relationship. In this session, they’ll share the highlights of what they learned in their process, ways they’ve healed and grown in their respective adoption journeys, and why they recommend others engage in similar configurations and offer suggestions for doing so.

Healing comes from understanding the hurts for adoptees, birth parents, and even adoptive parents. Across the industry, misinformed and even unethical practices abound. That the way we’re going about adoption isn’t working, and it’s high time for significant course corrections. True change can happen when adults in adoption work together in the spirit of curiosity and empathy—to learn and do better for future generations of adoptees and their first and adoptive families.

Las Estrellas (The Stars): The Building of an Adoptee Community and Our Lived Experiences  

Angela Sharp, José (aka Joshua) Stark, Carolina Khan, Rebecca Fiore & Kat Geng.

Las Estrellas, is a self-formed group of transracial adoptees who live in and around New York City with a Latin American cultural background and have been raised in, predominantly, white families throughout the U.S. Formed in the Summer of 2022, Las Estrellas, communicates through a shared Whatsapp group where they have gained support by asking questions, creating invites to connect in person, and also sharing things that we realize only other adoptees might understand, have insight on and who speak the adoption language.

In this round table presentation, we will hear from several participants of Las Estrellas about their lived experiences as transracial adoptees as well as what community building within the adoption community looks like for each of us. We all are on different paths: some of us are in reunion with their first families while some are not, different age groups are represented as well as different Latin American Backgrounds (Colombia, Ecuador, Honduras, Puerto Rico, Paraguay). Some of the lived experiences we will cover as a group in this roundtable will include discussion about normalizing one’s adoptee experience, the value of having an adoptee community vs not having one, mental health side of adoption, and representation. There will be time after the roundtable for the audience to ask questions.