1555 Sherman Ave, #173
Evanston, Illinois 60201
Contact
Privacy Policy

Privacy Policy

  1. What Information Do We Collect? When you visit our website you may provide us with two types of information: personal information you knowingly choose to disclose that is collected on an individual basis and website use information collected on an aggregate basis as you and others browse our website.
  2. Personal Information You Choose to Provide We may request that you voluntarily supply us with personal information, including your email address, postal address, home or work telephone number and other personal information for such purposes as correspondence, placing an order, requesting an estimate, or participating in online surveys. If you choose to correspond with us through email, we may retain the content of your email messages together with your email address and our responses. We provide the same protections for these electronic communications that we employ in the maintenance of information received by mail and telephone.
  3. Website Use Information Similar to other websites, our site may utilize a standard technology called "cookies" (see explanation below, "What Are Cookies?") and web server logs to collect information about how our website is used. Information gathered through cookies and server logs may include the date and time of visits, the pages viewed, time spent at our website, and the sites visited just before and just after ours. This information is collected on an aggregate basis. None of this information is associated with you as an individual.
  4. How Do We Use the Information That You Provide to Us? Broadly speaking, we use personal information for purposes of administering our business activities, providing service and support and making available other products and services to our customers and prospective customers. Occasionally, we may also use the information we collect to notify you about important changes to our website, new services and special offers we think you will find valuable. The lists used to send you product and service offers are developed and managed under our traditional standards designed to safeguard the security and privacy of all personal information provided by our users. You may at any time to notify us of your desire not to receive these offers.
  5. What Are Cookies? Cookies are a feature of web browser software that allows web servers to recognize the computer used to access a website. Cookies are small pieces of data that are stored by a user's web browser on the user's hard drive. Cookies can remember what information a user accesses on one web page to simplify subsequent interactions with that website by the same user or to use the information to streamline the user's transactions on related web pages. This makes it easier for a user to move from web page to web page and to complete commercial transactions over the Internet. Cookies should make your online experience easier and more personalized.
  6. How Do We Use Information Collected From Cookies? We use website browser software tools such as cookies and web server logs to gather information about our website users' browsing activities, in order to constantly improve our website and better serve our users. This information assists us to design and arrange our web pages in the most user-friendly manner and to continually improve our website to better meet the needs of our users and prospective users. Cookies help us collect important business and technical statistics. The information in the cookies lets us trace the paths followed by users to our website as they move from one page to another. Web server logs allow us to count how many people visit our website and evaluate our website's visitor capacity. We do not use these technologies to capture your individual email address or any personally identifying information about you.
  7. Notice of New Services and Changes Occasionally, we may use the information we collect to notify you about important changes to our website, new services and special offers we think you will find valuable. As a user of our website, you will be given the opportunity to notify us of your desire not to receive these offers by clicking on a response box when you receive such an offer or by sending us an email request.
  8. How Do We Secure Information Transmissions? When you send confidential personal information to us on our website, a secure server software which we have licensed encrypts all information you input before it is sent to us. The information is scrambled en route and decoded once it reaches our website. Other email that you may send to us may not be secure unless we advise you that security measures will be in place prior to your transmitting the information. For that reason, we ask that you do not send confidential information such as Social Security, credit card, or account numbers to us through an unsecured email.
  9. How Do We Protect Your Information? Information Security -- We utilize encryption/security software to safeguard the confidentiality of personal information we collect from unauthorized access or disclosure and accidental loss, alteration or destruction. Evaluation of Information Protection Practices -- Periodically, our operations and business practices are reviewed for compliance with organization policies and procedures governing the security, confidentiality and quality of our information. Employee Access, Training and Expectations -- Our organization values, ethical standards, policies and practices are committed to the protection of user information. In general, our business practices limit employee access to confidential information, and limit the use and disclosure of such information to authorized persons, processes and transactions.
  10. How Can You Access and Correct Your Information? You may request access to all your personally identifiable information that we collect online and maintain in our database by emailing us using the contact form provided to you within the site structure of our website.
  11. Do We Disclose Information to Outside Parties? We may provide aggregate information about our customers, sales, website traffic patterns and related website information to our affiliates or reputable third parties, but this information will not include personally identifying data, except as otherwise provided in this privacy policy.
  12. What About Legally Compelled Disclosure of Information? We may disclose information when legally compelled to do so, in other words, when we, in good faith, believe that the law requires it or for the protection of our legal rights.
  13. Permission to Use of Materials The right to download and store or output the materials in our website is granted for the user's personal use only, and materials may not be reproduced in any edited form. Any other reproduction, transmission, performance, display or editing of these materials by any means mechanical or electronic without our express written permission is strictly prohibited. Users wishing to obtain permission to reprint or reproduce any materials appearing on this site may contact us directly.
Terms & Conditions

Terms & Conditions

Donation Refund Policy

We are grateful for your donation and support of our organization. If you have made an error in making your donation or change your mind about contributing to our organization please contact us. Refunds are returned using the original method of payment. If you made your donation by credit card, your refund will be credited to that same credit card.

Automated Recurring Donation Cancellation

Ongoing support is important to enabling projects to continue their work, so we encourage donors to continue to contribute to projects over time. But if you must cancel your recurring donation, please notify us.
© Activism in Adoption

The Importance of Adoption Education: Why Who You Learn From Matters

byKristin Thomas

The texts from my adoption agency started out encouraging, and then became increasingly impatient. "We can't move forward with your paperwork until you complete your adoption education credits," they'd text me. "Why is it taking you so long? Most of our clients get it done in a week." Frustrated, I called my adoption social worker, who told me she was running a clinic on parenting and race the next weekend, and said she could make space for me.

The next Saturday I arrived to find a large room of hopeful adoptive parents, all white, and after we had  gotten coffee and settled into our chairs, my (also white) Social Worker stood up and congratulated us on being open to adopting non-white children, and that our willingness to do so was a testament to our commitment to being against racism. Being in a room like this, she told us, gave her hope for the future, a utopian place she described as being "beyond race." It sounded wonderful, and the morning was clearly designed to have us feeling good about ourselves, but I left that room feeling uncomfortable and not having the language to explain why. None of you really need diversity training, she had told us. It's just a formality in the adoption process.

And then I became the mother of Ethiopian twins. By the time they were in second grade, I'd sat in countless classrooms as a parent volunteer, watching teachers call on white students in disproportionate amounts while ignoring Black students completely, and I'd had other moms on the playground, unaware of which two kids were mine, make disparaging comments about what kind of parents they must have. Neglectful parents, who didn't bother to show up, apparently, something, I was told, was common with those people. I listened to my kids when they came home and told me about the microaggressions they had experienced, and how sad it made them feel. And I struggled to help them, because I don't have the shared experience of being Black to draw from, and increasingly, I realized I didn't have the language to talk about what I was seeing and hearing.

The first book I read on race after adopting my children was Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum's Why Are All The Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria. It was revelatory, and the foundation of my self-education. It gave me both the language and the tools I needed to figure out what I needed to learn, and it taught me why it was so important that I educate myself. And it opened my eyes up to something else, too: how to recognize whose voices are missing in the conversations I needed to have. Learning to see structural racism and implicit bias brought me back to my adoption education experiences. Not only did we not cover race adequately, but there was also never any mention of birthparents, or adult adoptees. There was no triad in my education. No recognition of the important voices missing from the conversation.

I had never wanted my adoption education experience to be about checking off a box on a list of things to do. I went into it enthusiastic to learn, and grateful for the opportunity, and it saddens me that my agency didn't take it as seriously as I did. But at the same time, I understand how that can happen. Conversations around adoption are hard. They require us to be humble, to learn how to hear each other, and  to hear things that make us question what we believe. They show us where our assumptions are flawed, and remind us that each side of the adoption triad has a different point of view, and that we have to honor that, and learn from it.

It's why I am excited about the Activism in Adoption speaker series. Not only because one of the speakers is Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum, who is one of the foremost experts on race in America, but because the speakers in this series are, overwhelmingly, either birthparents, adult adoptees, or experts like Dr. Tatum in a field that directly relates to adoption, race, and trauma. I am equally excited to see the composition of our panelists; each side of the triad represented, each side with an equal seat at the table, and all of us - speakers, and panelists, and attendees -  committed to having the hard conversations, and learning from them. If I have learned anything in my years of parenting, it is that adoption education isn't a few hours you do to finish your paperwork, and then it's done. Rather, it is something adoptive parents should consider a lifetime commitment, and an investment in giving our children the strongest foundation we can. My investment this month is in watching a few of our videos on race in adoption, particularly with a focus on parenting teenagers, which is when the stakes get higher.

Until December 31st, 2022, you can join me in signing up for a month of education. Use the code Fall22AiA to get $100 off - it's an incredible deal, and for adoptive parents, an excellent commitment to ensuring that your education continues as your child grows.