Adoptions From The Heart celebrates 40 years of serving our community through personalized adoption processes. We are so grateful for each birth and adoptive parent who has trusted our private agency to be a part of their story. We look forward to another lifetime offering a helping hand to expecting and adoptive parents. Our community of parents has so much to be proud of and we want to take this moment to celebrate you.
In 1985, adoptee — Maxine Chalker — founded Adoptions From The Heart. Maxine’s vision to propel open adoption has blossomed into the agency we know and love today. Adoptions From The Heart (AFTH) has placed over 7,420 infants and toddlers into loving homes regardless of race, gender, gender identity, disability, religion, age, language, or parental marital status. Our top priority is and will always be to support our community through the adoption process. Expecting and birth parents should know they have options and AFTH is here to walk them through all their options even if they decide adoption isn’t the right path for them.
Reflecting On Our Journey Together
Our Adoption & Beyond Podcast this month is a virtual celebration with all of the AFTH community. The podcast is hosted by Alyse White, the social service program manager at our Connecticut location, and Nicole Fowler, adoptive mother and the director of social services in Virginia. Founder, Maxine Chalker, kicks off the podcast by discussing her story as an adoptee through closed adoption. She also discusses the organization’s beginnings after her work in public adoption welfare. As someone involved in closed adoption both personally and professionally, Maxine saw a gap in the process where she knew she could build a bridge between families. Upstarting in Maxine’s home, AFTH became that bridge.
“Maxine has 2 facets that I think make her uniquely well-qualified to have started this agency and to be a pioneer as she has in the field of open adoption. Not only is she an adoptee herself but she worked in the child-protective system and really got to experience from first-hand observation what was going wrong and how it was failing children. And [so, she] developed Adoptions From The Heart to do things a different way and to have a better outcome for children.”
– Debbie Spivack, Adoption Attorney, on the Adoption & Beyond Podcast
Additional podcast guests include Heidi Gonzalez, AFTH’s current Executive Director, who discusses AFTH’s impact and our future goals in the adoption world. Stephanie Capriotti, AFTH’s current longest-serving social worker joins us to provide insight into AFTH after 24 years of calling our organization her home. Adoption Attorney Debbie Spivack, who provides legal support to AFTH’s clients, dives into the legal aspects of adoption and what sets AFTH apart from other agencies. Spivack highlights how beneficial AFTH’s resources, knowledge, and individual social workers are to families — services that are not always a reality with other adoption paths. Finally, Kristy Hartley-Galbraith — an adoptive mother and our Director of Marketing and Communications — discusses how crucial the voices of expecting and birth parents are to the adoption process.
This podcast is full of stories from the heart and commemorates the lives our mission has touched as well as the staff who have made it possible. If you are considering adoption with us, we welcome you to tune into the Adoption & Beyond Podcast to learn more about our journey of growth and evolution.
What Makes Adoptions From The Heart Special
Led by our founder’s perspective as an adoptee, AFTH works diligently to understand and account for every factor in the adoption process. With this, we maintain open discussions with parents on topics such as navigating transracial adoption. In addition to leading conversations before and after adoption, AFTH offers on-demand courses, in-person courses, educational blogs, seminars, and workshops. We are also proud to be significantly staffed by adoptive parents and adoptees. Their individual experiences translate into knowledge that further educates our efforts.
Unlike the closed adoption process, AFTH prioritizes birth parents’ opinions throughout the placement process of the child. Communication between a child’s team of parents is crucial at many levels and we hold pride in the steps we take to facilitate this connection. AFTH is constantly evolving for the better while never losing sight of Maxine’s original vision to bring the world of open adoption to the East Coast.
Check out our blog on open adoption to learn more. If you’re considering taking the next step, find your nearest office at afth.org. You can text, call, or submit a form. We’ll connect you with a social worker to answer questions and guide you through the process.
