Heritage Travel is one of our three flagship grants — the one this whole piece is named for. Today is our official launch day. We could spend it just announcing that the grant exists. Instead we want to spend it explaining why.
We’re a brand-new organization asking people to trust us with something that matters to them deeply, and we haven’t earned a track record yet — we’re just getting started. So instead of asking first, we want to show our work first: what we’re funding, and the real reasoning behind it. That’s slower than a good pitch. It’s also the only way we know how to build a relationship that’s actually real, instead of just a transaction.
What we mean by “heritage travel”
We don’t call it a trip, and that’s not a style preference. A trip is optional and recreational. What we’re describing is closer to what identity researchers call a return journey — a deliberate visit to a birth country, undertaken to process something, not to sightsee. Erik Erikson’s foundational identity theory holds that actively exploring one’s ethnic origins — not just having them, but examining them — is part of forming a stable adult identity for anyone navigating more than one cultural inheritance. For an intercountry adoptee, that exploration usually can’t happen without physically going back.
That’s no longer just theory. A 2022 study followed 34 adult intercountry adoptees who made that kind of return journey and found that the experience reshaped how participants related to both their birth country and their adopted one, helped them integrate their heritage into their sense of self, and strengthened their psychological adjustment afterward. That’s a measured outcome, published in a peer-reviewed journal, of the exact intervention this Foundation funds.
The need isn’t only emotional — it’s clinical
This is the part of the case we’re most careful with, because it’s easy to either soften it into nothing or sensationalize it into something it isn’t. Neither serves anyone. So we’ll state what the research says, plainly, and then say plainly what it doesn’t mean.
“Adult intercountry adoptees face significantly elevated risk of depression and suicidality compared with non-adopted peers.”
A separate, decade-later study of 692 adopted and 540 non-adopted young people found the odds of a suicide attempt were more than four times higher among adoptees — a gap that held even after adjusting for depression and substance use. (Keyes, Malone, Sharma, Iacono & McGue, 2013, Pediatrics)
Risk, not destiny. The Keyes study’s own authors were careful to note that the large majority of adoptees are psychologically healthy. What this research shows isn’t that adoption breaks people — it’s that carrying an unresolved origin story alone, for decades, has a measurable cost, and that identity-affirming support is one of the few things shown to change that trajectory. That’s the case for funding it at scale, not as a boutique offering for whoever happens to find their way to it.
What this actually funds
The Ties Foundation exists to fund the specific interventions this research points to — not another awareness campaign about the gap, but grants sized to what each one actually costs:
Flagship Grant
$2,500 grants
Heritage Travel
Travel to a birth country, reunion visits, heritage returns — the return-journey model the 2022 study found measurably strengthens identity and psychological adjustment.
$1,000 grants
Healing & Wholeness
Adoption-competent therapy and search-and-reunion support — a direct answer to the elevated clinical risk documented above.
$500 grants
Growth & Learning
Language study, cultural education, and community conferences — the sustained ethnic-identity exploration Erikson’s framework treats as protective, kept alive between journeys.
Underneath all three sits the Evergreen Fund — a permanent endowment built so this is a standing answer, not a one-time response to a one-time campaign.
The groundswell was already there
None of this research is new, and it’s not ours. It’s the reason a specific, cultivated group of adoptee-led organizations and advocates already believed this was worth showing up for — not because we convinced them, but because the findings matched what they already knew from lived experience. That’s the right order for a launch to happen in: the groundswell comes first, and a fundraising campaign gets built on top of it, not the other way around.
