Thriving Adoptees - Let's Thrive

An adoptive mother of two now-adult children and a former foster parent, Gayle H. Swift is also a certified coach, co-founder of  GIFT  ( G rowing  I ntentional  F amilies  T ogether). GIFT provides family coaching before, during and after adoption, a former teacher, and former newsletter editor. As a staunch adoptee-rights activist, Gayle has presented at the North American Council on Adoptable C...

Check out www.simonbenn.co.uk to book me as a speaker Guests and the host are not (unless mentioned) licensed pscyho-therapists and speak from their own opinion only. Seek qualified advice if you need help.

Imani Z. Seunarine is Vice President of Behavioral Health and Outpatient Services at The Home for Little Wanderers   https://www.linkedin.com/in/imani-seunarine-lmhc-1b870630/ Here's some more from their website:   Here's a bit about The Home from their website: As the oldest child welfare agency in America, we have maintained our commitment to children since before the Civil War. Because every ch...

Joy Alessi is Policy Director of the Adoptee Rights Campaign, a diverse group of intercountry Adoptees and allies striving to educate, organize and advocate for U.S. citizenship. https://adopteerightscampaign.org/ https://www.facebook.com/citizenshipforalladoptees https://twitter.com/ARC_citizenship https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMgFx4PefOA0zwce09yRnjA https://www.instagram.com/adoptee_rights_c...

Check me out and get in touch at www.simonbenn.co.uk Guests and the host are not (unless mentioned) licensed pscyho-therapists and speak from their own opinion only. Seek qualified advice if you need help.

Alex is a single mother through adoption and a nonprofit professional with over 20 years of experience. In 2011, Alex started her journey to become a mother through adoption and finds herself, 10 years after the birth of her daughter, happily sharing her daughter's life with her birth family. Alex believes strongly in the importance of belonging and that radical inclusion is critical to spark soci...

Trisha and Rich work at Lifesong which  seeks to mobilize the Church to care for the orphan, where each member can provide a unique and special service: some to adopt, some to care, some to give. With caring people like you and church partnerships, we support children through global orphan care ministries, Christian adoptive families, and foster care initiatives. https://lifesong.org https://www.f...

Check out www.simonbenn.co.uk for more on my work and to book me as a speaker. Guests and the host are not (unless mentioned) licensed pscyho-therapists and speak from their own opinion only. Seek qualified advice if you need help.

You can email Jane at jigsaw_51@yahoo.co.uk - please use Simon's Podcast in the subject line Guests and the host are not (unless mentioned) licensed pscyho-therapists and speak from their own opinion only. Seek qualified advice if you need help.

Grace Retreat Foster Care and Adoption Services is a licensing agency contracted by the State of Arizona. Grace Retreat is committed to support families through the process of becoming licensed and providing a home for children. We believe that by supporting the families, they are able to better support the children in their home. We are able to serve Pima, Cochise, and Pinal counties.  Find out m...

Check out www.simonbenn.co.uk for more on my work and to book me as a speaker. Guests and the host are not (unless mentioned) licensed pscyho-therapists and speak from their own opinion only. Seek qualified advice if you need help.

Debbie B. Riley, LCMFT is the CEO and co-founder of the Center for Adoption Support and Education (C.A.S.E.), a nonprofit meeting the mental health needs of adoptive, foster and kinship families. A nationally recognized adoption expert and dynamic public speaker, Ms. Riley is a licensed marriage and family therapist with  40 years of professional experience, including extensive health care managem...

Jim Daly is president of Focus on the Family and host of its daily radio broadcast, heard by more than 6 million listeners a week on nearly 2,000 radio stations across the U.S. The show has been honored as Program of the Year by the National Religious Broadcasters (NRB). In March 2022, he celebrated his 33rd anniversary with the ministry. Daly’s personal journey from orphan to head of an internati...

Laurie is Executive Director of Heart Gallery NYC. Heart Gallery NYC , a non profit organization founded in 2006, utilizes photography to raise awareness of, and recruit permanent, loving adoptive families for children in foster care in New York City. In collaboration with the NYC Administration for Children’s Services and the foster provider agencies, Heart Gallery NYC collaborates with notable p...

Too Black to be White, and too White to be Black. Billy Williams was raised in Los Angeles, California in a loving home. His Teamster father and stay-at-home mother did their best to give Billy the charmed life that every child dreams about. Karate classes taught by Chuck Norris, designer clothes, and access to the upper echelon of Black society, Billy seemed to have it all. But, sometimes, what y...

As an adoptive mom, Terri knows how fortunate she is to have her daughter, and also how very rare her story is. Not quite ten years into raising her daughter, she did some research and found that less than one percent of girls facing unplanned pregnancy choose adoption for their babies. Digging into the reasons why that is so, Terri conducted several focus groups in her home and discovered that mo...

Katie is the founder of OrphanWise, an alumna of Lee University and has a Master’s Degree in Holistic Child Development. She worked as a preschool teacher for six years and served a term as an AmeriCorps VISTA with Habitat for Humanity. She moved to Paraguay in 2015 and spent three years working in a children’s home, where she served as director of the home and house mother. She also taught Englis...

Here's a bit about Peter from his website. Qualified as a Chartered Certified Accountant in 1999. I qualified as an NLP Practitioner in 2012. In 2017, I qualified as a Personal Performance coach with The Coaching Academy, obtaining a distinction (the highest grade available with Europe’s leading coach trainers). I have studied many self development teachers including Stephen Covey. I have also stu...

Katie serves 10.18 Strategy from a wealth of experience gained from her career as an entrepreneur, business consultant, executive officer, and strategist over the last seventeen years. Before founding 10.18 Strategy, Katie was a business consultant for over ten years, serving both for-profit and non-profit leaders with innovative strategies that brought solutions to complex problems. Katie has ser...

Here's bit about Stef from his website In 2013, my life had crashed around my ears. After struggling with a lifetime of anxiety and depression, my marriage broke down and I was contemplating losing everything I loved and had worked so hard for so many years. I was at an all time low, I couldn't sleep, couldn't eat and could not find a way out of the black hole in front of me, I could not find any...

Here's a bit about Clare from her website "Hello my name is Clare. For a long time, I wasn’t at ease with who I thought I was. I felt anxious and worried that people would think I was stupid. I worried about getting things wrong. I held myself back in case I would mess things up. I felt stressed, ill at ease, apprehensive. I didn’t like myself or how I was in the world. I spent many many years rea...

Founder of the Plus One Adoption Foundation, Inc., Michele Katz builds connections with charitable services in the space of adoption and fundraising, to help families come together and stay together. The organization’s goal to provide the resources in order to help place 2.5M children into loving families stems from the 2.5 million children lost in the Holocaust and the Jewish credence of mending...

Michele Kriegman is a storyteller by nature but she was missing her own backstory well into adulthood. Finding her birth-father helped complete it. During this session of the U.S. Supreme Court the focus of many of her public talks will be the Indian Child Welfare Act, a new battlefield in the culture wars, which played a pivotal role in her own story. She worked for many years in U.S. and Japanes...

Here's a little about Kristine's organisation from her website: Hawaii International Child (HIC) (founding name, Hawaii International Child Placement and Family Services, Inc.), was established in 1975 by members of Hawai'i’s adoption community. HIC’s founding members came from a background of personal connection to international adoption. Some had parents who’d been adopted, others had adopted ch...

Astrid founded Adoption Mosaic. Here's a bit about her from their website: Astrid has a degree in sociology with an emphasis in adoption. For twenty plus years, she has traveled the country to lead youth groups, present workshops on transracial parenting, talking with children about adoption and various other workshops focusing on adoption. Prior to creating Adoption Mosaic, Astrid worked in both...