I keep doing the math. September 1 minus today. Thirty-one days.
I’ve spent over ten years leading Ties Program heritage journeys — Kazakhstan, Cambodia, India — watching adoptees stand in the place they were born, sometimes for the first time since they left it. I didn’t take that job to build a foundation. I took it because I believed in the work. The foundation found me, not the other way around.
Where this actually started
It started in Calcutta. I was leading a deep-dive Ties Program trip there with Ben and Tanya Kaanta, who own the program — a for-profit that’s spent three decades doing this well. I mentioned to them, almost in passing, that I was planning to step away from the global nonprofit I’d run for ten years. Not because I’d stopped loving the work. Because I wanted to be home. A dad. A husband. A son.
They said it felt like timing that wasn’t ours to take credit for. Then they asked if I’d be interested in building something new: a foundation, separate from their program, that could do for the many what the Ties Program had shown was possible for a few.
The number that started this
Nine thousand. That’s roughly how many adoptees and family members have gone on a Ties Program journey over the last two decades. And almost every one of them came back and said some version of the same thing: What about the rest of us? What about the ones who can’t afford this? I could barely afford it myself.
I’ve spent twenty-five years in child welfare and protection reform, in nineteen countries. I love that work, and I’m not finished with it in my heart. But there’s a difference between doing good work in a system and doing this — leaning into my own lived experience as an intercountry adoptee, for adoptees like me. That difference is not something I take lightly. It still catches me off guard some mornings.
What The Ties Foundation is not
I want to say this plainly, because Ben and Tanya said it plainly to me first: The Ties Foundation does not exist to fund the Ties Program. It exists because of what the Ties Program’s last twenty years made undeniable — that heritage travel and the healing that follows change lives, and that cost is the only thing standing between most adoptees and that experience. The debt we owe the Ties Program is a debt of evidence, not of loyalty. We grant to adoptees, wherever they’re ready to go and whoever helped them get ready to.
Where I actually am, thirty-one days out
Anxious. Excited. Grateful — genuinely, not as a formality. I’ve spent months in conversations with other leaders in this space to make sure we’re not building something the world doesn’t need. It doesn’t need another nonprofit for its own sake. It needs one thing done right: unlocking the journey home, and the healing that follows it, for people who’ve been told for years that this mattered too much to be optional and too expensive to be possible.
There’s no ego in this for me. No “it has to look like this or nothing.” Just an unmet need, and twenty-five years of caring too much to leave it unmet.
Thirty-one days. I wanted you to know what this means, before it’s official.
— Ian Forber-Pratt
Executive Director, The Ties Foundation
