Notes from Our ED — an occasional series from The Ties Foundation. One day, we hope other voices join this space too.
I’ve written a lot of documents this year. Bylaws. Policy manuals. Grant criteria. None of them were supposed to sound like me.
This one is.
Why now
The Ties Foundation exists because of a number: 1.1 million. That’s roughly how many intercountry adoptees there are worldwide — people who moved across a border, usually before they could vote on it, into a family that most often didn’t share their first language, their first food, their first skin tone. Numbers like that are easy to write and hard to feel. Behind every one of them is a specific kid, in a specific kitchen, working out who they are.
I was one of those kids. I still am, in the ways that count.
What this space is for
This isn’t going to be a newsletter that only tells you what we accomplished this month, though sometimes it will. It’s not going to be a place where adoptees are the only ones welcome, or where adoptive parents are quietly cast as the ones who need correcting, or where birth families are spoken about instead of spoken to. Adoption is not one story with one hero. It’s a shared history, carried differently by everyone who lived it — and every one of those ways of carrying it deserves room here.
If you’re an adoptive parent reading this and bracing for a scolding: there isn’t one coming. If you’re an adoptee who has spent years feeling like your questions were too complicated for polite company: they’re not too complicated for this page. If you’re a birth parent who has wondered whether anyone remembers you’re part of this story too: we do.
What we’ll actually write about
Some posts here will be practical — what “Heritage Travel” means and why we chose that phrase over “trip,” or what a birth-country search can realistically look like. Some will be harder to sit with — grief that doesn’t resolve, identity that doesn’t fit neatly, the parts of this experience that don’t have a bow to tie on them. Some, I hope, will just be good stories, because adoptees deserve to be written about with more than just our wounds in frame.
I don’t think healing and celebration are opposites. I think you need both, in the same room, to tell the truth about this experience. That’s the thesis this whole foundation is built on, and it’s the thesis this blog will try to live up to: if we strive for hope with the people we grant to, we owe ourselves the same effort.
An invitation, not a broadcast
I’m writing this alone today. I don’t intend to keep it that way. Adoptees, adoptive parents, birth families, researchers, siblings by blood and by paperwork — if you have something true to say about this experience, this is meant to become your space too, not just mine.
For now, consider this the first stamp in a book we’re only starting to fill.
— Ian Forber-Pratt
Executive Director, The Ties Foundation
