About Us
The Adoptee Collective seeks to be a healing adoptee community who revolutionize the systems that impact them.
The Adoptee Collective is a mission-driven social enterprise supporting adoptees and their families through therapy, programs, and education. In Kenya, The Adoptee Collective, LTD. provides therapeutic care and programs designed to meet the unique needs of adoptees and their families. We create safe, connected spaces for healing, learning, and community, offering care that honors each individual’s full story.
We are part of a global network. The Adoptee Collective, LLC., delivers adoptee-led consulting, while our nonprofit affiliate, The Adoptee Collective USA, secures grants and donor support to make programs more affordable and accessible. Operating under The Women’s Non-Profit Alliance (WNPA), the nonprofit helps subsidize therapy costs, expand community initiatives, and in the future will provide dedicated financial aid for adoptees who need mental healthcare but cannot afford it.
By combining local therapy services with global support, The Adoptee Collective ensures that adoptees and families can access the care, education, and community programs they need to heal, grow, and thrive.
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.