Chronicle of Philanthropy
A New Approach to Adoption
U.S. charities respond to demand to assist children overseas
May 25, 2005
By Alison Stein Wellner
The Half the Sky Foundation reaches thousands of miles around the world from its headquarters in Berkeley, Calif., to run programs at 18 government-managed orphanages scattered throughout China.
With a budget of $1.5-million, it employs more than 400 people in China to act as nannies to the orphans, providing the children with a mix of education and nurturing to help combat the deleterious effects of living in an institution. The charity plans to expand its program to each of China's 22 provinces, and each year moves closer to its goal. In 2005, Half the Sky plans to add five more institutions to its roster.
Given the challenges facing American organizations in China, that would be an accomplishment for any charity, but it was a major feat for a group that was started just seven years ago by a woman with no experience in the nonprofit world.
Jenny Bowen, a former screenwriter and film director who lives in Berkeley, got the idea for the charity after she brought her adopted daughter, Maya, home from China.
"She was almost 2 years old, she could barely walk, she could barely speak," Ms. Bowen recalls. "She was just behind in every way."
With little information available on how best to help children overcome the ill effects of orphanage life, Ms. Bowen went on her instincts. "We just loved her up, and talked to her and sang to her, and engaged her constantly in that first year," she says.
It worked, and one day, as Ms. Bowen watched her daughter romp through the backyard, she began to wonder about other youngsters in China. "There must be a way to bring those same benefits that Maya's had to the children that remain in the welfare institutions," she thought.
That brainstorm marked the beginning of the Half the Sky Foundation. But Ms. Bowen's charity is more than a simple success story: It is also emblematic of the evolving role that American charities are playing in the arena of international adoption.
Helping Families
Typically, domestic charities have focused their work on helping families in the United States adopt children born in other countries. But today, among the more than 200 charities that deal with international adoption issues, new organizations have emerged to serve the needs of orphans, adoptive parents, and adopted children. Some focus on helping children who remain in orphanages overseas, while others help adoptive families give their children a better understanding of the culture of the land where they were born, and assist adults who were brought to the United States from elsewhere learn more about their backgrounds.
Charities with long track records in international adoption have expanded their programs as well. For example, Children's Hope International, a St. Louis charity that helps Americans adopt children from abroad, runs a program that promotes domestic adoption in Russia as well as a program that provides funds and services for orphans who require heart surgery in China.
World Association for Children and Parents, a Seattle charity that arranges overseas adoptions, has started the Peony Project, which provides literacy training to orphans with physical disabilities.
This trend is a result of exponentially growing need, says Adam Pertman, executive director of the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, an adoption research and policy think tank in New York City.
Until the 1980s, very few children were adopted from other countries. Since then, political changes abroad, particularly the end of the cold war, and increasing world poverty have led a succession of countries to open up their orphanages to international adoption. At the same time, attitudes toward adoption changed in the United States, from something considered very private, to something that many people feel quite comfortable talking about openly, says Mr. Pertman.
Combine a change in attitude with the increase in the number of couples in the United States struggling with infertility, and the result has been an international adoption boom. In fact, in recent years, the annual number of international adoptions has more than tripled, from just 6,000 adoptions in 1991 to nearly 23,000 in 2004.
While many Americans continue to adopt children born in the United States, more and more parents look abroad as they hear about the needs of children overseas. What's more, the number of children available in the United States has become limited as a growing number of mothers decide to keep their children and contraception is more widely available.
Over the past few years, the countries from which Americans adopt children have changed significantly as well, says Victor Groza, a professor of social work at Case Western Reserve University, in Cleveland, who studies international adoption. That has created an ever-changing range of needs for charities to fulfill -- which in turns means that charities often find themselves in a state of flux, creating new programs, wrangling with political and diplomatic issues, and raising the money to pay for it all.
Starting a Program
For charities that are starting from scratch, like the Half the Sky Foundation, the learning curve can be very steep. After hatching the idea of providing programs to orphans in China -- the country that now provides more children to Americans than any other in the world -- Ms. Bowen had to figure out what to do next.
"We were doing something that was very delicate, that had never been done before or since," she says. "We were creating programs that would operate within state-run institutions in China. That's very different than creating an organization that makes donations of goods or money."
The challenge, says Ms. Bowen, is that "not only were we learning how to structure a nonprofit organization, we were trying to learn more about the Chinese culture and how we might set something up that wouldn't appear to be threatening to them. We had to make it clear that we weren't going in to criticize or create problems, and that we had no interest in being a foreign invasion. We had to create a program that the Chinese government would be comfortable with, and that would be right for the children."
It seemed an impossible task, and in fact, many of the people that Ms. Bowen approached told her "you might raise the funds, but you won't get permission to work inside a Chinese state institution," she recalls. "And indeed when we first went to Beijing, and were able to meet with some officials, we were met with a lot of blank smiles."
Those officials, she says, told her, "Oh, yes, this was interesting, but there's no way, it's just not going to happen," she remembers. "I don't know whether it's a Hollywood thing or a Chinese thing, but my motto from the beginning was patience and perseverance. Every time someone said 'no way,' we would just smile back, continue on, and find another way."
Ultimately, Ms. Bowen found two nonprofit organizations in China that were willing to help persuade the Chinese government to test Half the Sky's efforts to provide education and personalized care to youngsters for one year in two orphanages.
The test was a success, says Ms. Bowen.
"We saw major, major changes in the kids," she says. "They no longer had institutional behaviors -- they were engaged preschoolers, were very involved in their schoolwork, and they didn't go indiscriminately to strangers as institutionalized children often would." she says. "Now, six years later, we pretty much have an open invitation to go wherever our resources will allow us to go."
To expand the program, Ms. Bowen knows she must focus on raising money. In the 2003 fiscal year, the organization raised nearly all of its funds from individuals. A small amount of money came from merchandise sales -- the foundation sells greeting cards, books, apparel, and accessories -- that netted just under $20,000.
Contributions and merchandise sales still mostly come from families of adopted children, and those donations have their limits. "As we grow larger, and we try to reach more children, there's only so much that adoptive families can do," Ms. Bowen says. "China is a big country, and there are a lot of kids living in welfare institutions, and there's going to be a point where they can't be supported by individuals."
Ms. Bowen says she is heartened by the number of donations that are coming from Chinese immigrants to the United States.
"They have seen our efforts as a way to stay connected with China and do something positive for the children," she says.
Foundations are starting to show some interest in supporting the organization, she says, as are corporations that do business in China.
Ms. Bowen says she is confident she will have the same kind of success she had when she was working in the movie business.
"You start with a blank page, and you get an idea, and you try to structure that into a story that makes sense, that's going to have a happy ending, and you bring together a crew of people that make it happen," she says.
Even people with plenty of experience working for charities find unexpected challenges when they go abroad to deliver programs directly to children without parents or other relatives to care for them. Indeed, the job requires people who can act as much like diplomats as social workers.
Alissa Stemple found that out when she left her job directing the YWCA in Tulsa, Okla., eight years ago to go to work for Rick Renner Ministries, an evangelical Christian charity in Tulsa that runs programs in the former Soviet Union. She was asked to start a new organization that would care for orphans in Latvia.
Although reliable numbers are not easy to come by, Latvia, like many of the other former Soviet republics, has many orphans, as a result of economic turmoil, poor health care, AIDS, and other social ills. The idea was to create a small, homelike environment to care for children. The program would be supported by money raised in the United States.
In 1997, with money from the Renner group and Joyce Meyer Ministries in Fenton, Mo., she created the Sparrow's Nest, a charity in Tulsa, so she could raise funds in the United States for her charity's operation in Latvia, without any undue fuss.
But receiving permission to operate in Latvia proved to be another matter entirely.
"There were a lot of people that were skeptical of what they called 'the American smile,'" says Ms. Stemple -- an expression that suggested that the promises made by Americans were not entirely genuine.
During hearings held by the Latvian government, "there were very serious protests that we were going to indoctrinate the children against the Republic of Latvia, that we were going to use mind-altering drugs to change their attitudes, or perhaps that they would come one day and all the children would be gone, stolen away in the night, or sold," she says.
It is not an altogether irrational fear: As many as 1.5 million children are sold each year worldwide, according to Unicef. As a result of the concerns raised by such activities, charities like the Sparrow's Nest must spend a lot of their time proving their legitimacy.
Getting a License
Ultimately, the Sparrow's Nest was granted a license by the Latvian government to run an orphanage, which Ms. Stemple says is the only such institution in Latvia run by an American charity.
The orphanage is small, providing a homelike setting to no more than 15 children at a time.
In the past eight years, 56 children have lived there, and many have found new families in the United States. Indeed, half of the 37 children from Latvia adopted by American parents in 2001 came through the Sparrow's Nest.
In a move that speaks to the delicate diplomatic situation for American organizations that help Americans adopt children from Latvia, however, Ms. Stemple does not promote her charity as an adoption agency. The adoptions take place when donors and volunteers from the United States come to the orphanage to help out.
If a connection is made, Ms. Stemple helps the parents learn how to maneuver through Latvia's adoption policies, but her group does not charge a fee for these services. She considers that distinction key to establishing her reputation in Latvia as an organization that cares for children and works in the best interests of the children, and is not about simply getting them placed into homes in the United States.
Of course, the process is time-consuming and fees would be helpful, as Ms. Stemple looks to expand her services to serve more children -- and also to upgrade her facilities to conform with European Union rules.
Like other international adoption groups, the Sparrow's Nest is highly dependent on individuals for its annual budget of $235,000. She is starting to consider the possibility of becoming registered as an adoption agency, she says, though she worries that doing so could set off alarm bells for Latvian officials who continue to be concerned about the possibility of child theft.
While charities are expanding their operations abroad, many groups are also being formed in the United States to serve adoptive parents and their children. Such organizations usually start informally, often as social groups, says Mr. Groza of Case Western Reserve University.
Families for Russian and Ukrainian Adoption, for example, began in 1994 as a small group of adoptive mothers in Washington, D.C., says Karen Klein Berman, the organization's executive director. Over the past 12 years, the organization has grown to 2,000 members, with 30 chapters.
The group provides information to families who want to adopt youngsters from the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and tells them about medical conditions that are sometimes found in children adopted from these countries, such as fetal alcohol syndrome and hepatitis C. It also holds social and cultural events, and provides a way for families to get to know one another, through an annual conference.
Families for Russian and Ukrainian Adoption is still entirely operated by volunteers, says Ms. Berman, and while the organization would like to do more -- create programs for teenagers, for example -- the lack of professionals experienced in the nonprofit world has created frustrating limits. "Volunteers burn out, and people come and go," she says.
That is most problematic when it comes to fund raising, she says. The organization took in just under $105,000 in the 2003 fiscal year, 60 percent of which came from dues paid by members.
The charity did receive its first grant in 2003, $11,514 from the Dorothea Haus Ross Foundation, in Rochester, N.Y., to support the building of a program in Romania. To seek more grants, the group is considering hiring a fund raiser instead of relying on volunteers.
"I'm sure there are grants out there that we can get," says Ms. Berman, "but I've not been able to find someone to find the time to help us with that."
Children Start Groups
It is not just parents, but children in adopted families who are starting new programs.
Hollee McGinnis founded Also-Known-As, a New York City charity to help adults who were adopted as children from other countries, primarily from South Korea.
Ms. McGinnis, who was born in South Korea and adopted by an American family in Briarcliff Manor, N.Y., started the charity in 1996, two years after she graduated from Mount Holyoke College. Her goal was to create programs that would allow adopted children to explore their dual cultural identities, to create mentorship programs between adults and children who have been adopted, and to sponsor "home tours," or cultural trips to South Korea.
As an entirely volunteer-run organization, "we still struggle with the revolving door," says Ms. McGinnis.
It is a challenge to get a new kind of charity, serving a growing population, off the ground -- and an even greater challenge to keep it there.
But an appetite for tackling challenges is part of the territory in the growing field of international adoption. The energy comes from concern about children, whether they are waiting for families in orphanages or adjusting to life in the United States as children or as adults. "I work seven days a week, sometimes 17 hours day, and it is never tiring," says Ms. Bowen, of Half the Sky. "There's a need, a clear need," she says, "and it's something that I know how to do something about. What a wonderful feeling."
Copyright © 2005 The Chronicle of Philanthropy