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Who can find help from The Adoptee Collective?
Those with care experience
We believe those with lived experience of adoption or foster care have the right to information and ownership of their own story, with a sense of felt safety and belonging. We seek to hold space for adoptees to integrate all the chapters of their story.
Adoptive & Foster Families
Raising kids through fostering and adoption requires holding the sacred space for all their chapters to be honored. Those with lived experiences of adoption and foster care are the experts who should inform parenting and practice.
Practitioners & Initiatives
Adoption and foster care have historically catered to decision-makers rather than being transparent, adoptee centered, and trauma informed. Knowing better means doing better. We must lament the history while elevating adoptees as the experts.
What We Offer
serving those with care experience, families, and practitioners in Texas and Kenya
My Story Book
Free Guides
Parenting Tools
Sensory Tools
Training
TBRI® Practitioners
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.
Behind the Adoptee Collective
Meet the co-founders behind the Adoptee Collective
Kara Donaldson
TBRI® Practitioner
MFT Trainee
Neurotherapy Trainee
Kara is co-founder and CEO of The Adoptee Collective and serves as the Family Strengthening Coordinator at Kids Alive International and lives in Nairobi, Kenya.
As an adult adoptee, Kara desires for adoptees of all ages and children in care to live from a deep sense of felt safety through emotional healing.
She hopes the Adoptee Collective is a community that offers acceptance, understanding, belonging, and validation because each person knows that others can empathize with their story.
Creating adoptee centered, trauma informed resources from the perspective of an adoptee, along with The Adoptee Collective’s Co-Founder and a social work practitioner, Heather Enright, is a dynamic approach to offering a better, best practice approach.
Kara hopes that prospective adoptive or foster parents, guardians, and practitioners would become best equipped to empathize and connect with their child through a trauma informed lens because they acknowledge their child comes from hard places and suffers from deep grief, loss, and pain, even if adopted from infancy.
Heather Enright
LMSW-IPR
TBRI® Practitioner
Heather Enright is the co-founder of The Adoptee Collective.
Heather has been an adoption social worker since 1994, working with families from pre to post-placement support for attachment, bonding, and adjustment through the lens of trauma.
As a practitioner, Heather knows that the child in care is the most powerless within the foster and adoption process.
Heather believes the adoptee point of view should inform and reform adoption and foster practice as the experts with their lived experiences.
Adoptees need safe spaces to embrace and navigate their sacred stories confidentially, with well-informed tools to honor every part of their history.
Adoptive families, practitioners, and initiatives must be trauma informed and adoptee centered, while embracing cultural humility.
Heather has also served in her church in their foster and adoption initiatives. She continues to serve in various ways, and is working to see initiatives move past being siloed to collaborating for vulnerable children and families.