Keynote + Amplifying Adoptee & Foster Youth Voices (Ages 12-19)

We invite foster, adoptive, kinship and potential foster parents to join us for a keynote address from Angela Tucker on Saturday, June 1st at 9:00AM. Angela provides a unique perspective from her own personal journey through foster care and adoption and shares incredible insights in a meaningful way.

After the keynote, parents and teens will diverge into separate workshops.

Angela will facilitate conversations with youth by using segments from The Adopted Life episode series to kickstart small group discussions. Angela’s primary goal is to create a safe space for adopted & foster youth to grapple with their identity through structured prompts.

Learning Objectives:

• Encourage youth to decide which aspects of their story they’d like to share with strangers and which aspects they’d like to keep private.

• Learn about adoptee & foster care related phenomenons, such as code-switching, micro-aggressions, identity formation, searching for biological families, reconnecting with foster or first families and open relationships.

• Normalize the unique experience of being an adoptee or in foster care.

Adult session: Kelly Hughes, founder of Foster Love Project, will be leading discussions based around videos of Angela's work and the importance of understanding this important narrative.

PLEASE REGISTER BY MAY 25, 2019!

Lunch will be provided.

This workshop will be a great a benefit to foster & adoptive parents of kids of all ages. We do request only kids 12 and older attend. No childcare will be available.

Angela Tucker is a nationally-recognized thought leader on transracial adoption and is an advocate for adoptee rights. In 2013, at the age of 26, Angela’s own story of adoption and search for her birth parents was featured in the groundbreaking documentary, CLOSURE.

The Adopted Life (www.theadoptedlife.com) began as a personal blog that allowed Angela to process publicly her emotions and experience as a transracial adoptee; a means by which she hoped to build a community of other adoptees growing up in closed adoptions. Since its launch in 2009, The Adopted Life has grown in readership and purview, and is now the name and platform for The Adopted Life miniseries. Angela’s work has catapulted her into her becoming a sought-after keynote speaker for adoption and child welfare-based organizations. Elements of her story have also been featured on CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360, Huffington Post and NPR. Angela works as the Director of Post-Adoption Services at Amara, where she is piloting an adoptee mentorship program.