A birth parent’s take on adoption awareness
Today I had the pleasure of volunteering for the Heart Gallery‘s annual exhibit at Penn Station. The mission was to raise awareness about youth in foster care and encouraging passersby to sign up to receive more information about mentoring, fostering, or adopting hard to place children and youth. The most illuminating interaction I had this afternoon, however, was with a young mother who herself had been placed in foster care and who now had three very young kids in the system. It was one of those conversations that threatened to drag on, but I sensed that she really needed to have her story heard, and I’ve gotten much better at being able to hold space for people without getting pulled into the drama of their stories. The upshot for me was that I got to learn a lot from what may be the most overlooked entity in the foster care ecosystem: the birth parent. (more…)