Our Story
The Adoptee Collective seeks to be a healing adoptee community who revolutionize the systems that impact them.
The Adoptee Collective is a therapuetic private practice offering trauma-informed therapy, creating connected spaces for our foster and adoption community, and providing grounded care that honors the full story for adoptees, foster individuals, and families. This is where you can find care that actually heals.
We are also supported by our sister organization, The Adoptee Collective USA, a pending U.S.-based non-profit created to champion mental health access for adoptees and adoptive families. The non-profit strengthens our work in Kenya through charitable giving that supports programs serving the adoptee community. By supplementing operational expenses and reducing client fees, it makes therapy more affordable and accessible.
In the future, The Adoptee Collective USA will grow into a dedicated community support fund, offering financial aid to adoptees who need mental healthcare but cannot afford it. Operating under The Women’s Non-Profit Alliance (WNPA)—a U.S.-based support network for women-led nonprofits—The Adoptee Collective USA processes all tax-deductible donations through WNPA, ensuring they directly support our work in both Kenya and the United States.
Our Values
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TRAUMA INFORMED
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.
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ADOPTEE CENTERED
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.
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CULTURAL HUMILITY
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.
Our Therapuetic Approach
The Adoptee Collective seeks to create safe spaces where challenge can become connection so that healing can happen.Our therapeutic approach begins with a trauma informed, adoptee centered, and culturally humble lens. We understand that adoptees and foster youth come from hard places but believe that we are more than our stories of struggle. As adoptee therapists, our goals for our clients oftentimes include discovering new meaning to bravely live out our story, gaining awareness to create internal peace, finding harmony to live in connection.
What does Adoptee Centered mean?
Read our treaty on adoptee centeredness to better understand the normalized standard we seek for adoption and foster care practice.
We are TBRI® Practitioners
TBRI® is an attachment-based, trauma-informed intervention that is designed to meet the complex needs of vulnerable children. TBRI® uses Empowering Principles to address physical needs, Connecting Principles for attachment needs, and Correcting Principles to disarm fear-based behaviors. While the intervention is based on years of attachment, sensory processing, and neuroscience research, the heartbeat of TBRI® is connection.