Introducing The First Graduating Mentor Class!

Our Founder, Angela Tucker states:

“The Adoptee Mentoring Society exists so that all 7 million adoptees in the world can experience a genuine sense of belonging.”

The mentor training program was created by Maya Holmes, AMS’ Mentor Training Manager (bottom middle). Maya created an outline for training that included topics from helping mentees to open up to emotional intelligence.

Along with these topics, Angela Tucker, our Founder, trained mentors on best practices based on her experience as a mentor over the last 5 years and Dr. Chaitra Wirta-Leiker provided training on active listening. Training modules on emotional intelligence, mentoring best practices, and active listening are just a few of the topics AMS mentors learned about in the 2-day training program.

In addition to those subjects, prospective mentors were also assigned a reading list that included The Primal Wound and Journey of The Adopted Self, encouraging mentors to be both well-trained and well-read on adoption topics.

AMS is working hard to offer more lounges as a way to meet our mission, with this goal in mind, we are so excited to introduce you to our inaugural class of newly trained AMS Mentors!

Read below to find out more details about each mentor in this class and insights into the training program.

Meet Our Mentors

Meet Renecia:

Renecia lives in Seattle, Washington. She is a late discovery adoptee (LDA) of closed adoption. She connected to AMS through Angela Tucker’s documentary “Closure’” about her search for her biological parents and later met her. These moments led to her connection deep within the adoptee community. So when she began searching for adoptee-centered virtual groups, she attended the Adoptee Lounge.

“It was the first time I was in an interactive space with fellow adoptees.”

The most meaningful part of the Mentor Training Program for her was due to a quote by Maya Angelou: “I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

“After I began to unravel my own adoption story through adoptee lounges, other small groups, therapy, and my faith, I realized my healing journey would not only be for me but for other adoptees.”

She is looking forward to a space to see mentees build confidence in the community and a sense of belonging through sharing collective experiences.

Meet Anna

Anna lives in Brooklyn, New York. She was adopted in England by English parents before they moved to the United States. A retired principal of a top-ranked elementary school who has worked with young people for over 40 years Anna finds meaning in becoming a mentor.

“ I deeply believe that adoptees need each other.  Adoption always starts with a loss and it is that loss, which is at the core of an adoptee’s identity.  Whatever else comes our way, this common experience is one that can only truly be understood by other adoptees. “

Even with her years of experience, participating in the Mentor Training Program’s role-playing activity was enlightening.

“Angela makes it look easy, but as we each tried our hand at doing this, we saw how difficult this process is and at the same time, how essential the words of the Adoptee Lounge leader are.”

Building relationships with fellow adoptees and helping them feel less alone is just one aspect Anna looks forward to as an AMS mentor.

Meet Patricia Ha-Ram

Patricia Ha-Ram is a TRIA - Transracial International Adoptee who had a closed adoption and lives in Canada. She arrived there flying from Korea on the first Korean Air flight to Canada.

She found AMS through a Google search when she was looking for adoptee communities. She’s since had several one on ones with Angela and is part of a smaller group of adoptees from AMS who meet monthly. It was a natural progression for her to become a mentor.

“I wanted to be a Mentor to give back to the Adoptee Community. I never had anything like AMS when I was younger, so it is really powerful and impactful for me to be able to mentor others.”

A meaningful part of the training for her was the module on Adoptee Consciousness, an in-depth look at how adoptees process their adoption written by Grace Newton, JaeRan Kim, Susan Branco, Stephanie Kripa Cooper-Lewter & Paula O’Loughlin.

She continues seeking community and is excited about this new opportunity.

“I am looking forward to making genuine connections with other adoptees. I am excited to further build our community and support those within it.”

Meet Sheila

Sheila lives on the Pacific coast in Washington state and had a closed domestic adoption. She gathered from her adoptive family a love of gardening and a curiosity for international travel. From her birth family, she inherited the strange coincidence of a tech career and an artist’s painting practice.

Like Renecia and others, Sheila connected with AMS through Angela’s documentary “Closure”. She then found Angela’s The Adopted Life blog and attended Adoptee lounges. Since then, she was also a panelist for Adoptee Mentoring Society’s A Fireside Chat earlier this year, which was a meaningful experience for her.
She says she’s been coming out of the fog since 1996 and understands that feeling of uncovering the unconscious.

“Keeping things unconscious weighs on a person, creating a heavier weight than if we let ourselves talk about it, whether to find peace in our inner self talk or to an empathetic ear.”

Learning more about AMS’ vision gave even deeper meaning to being a mentor, especially AMS’ focus on ethical storytelling, allowing adoptees to have agency over their own adoption stories, and to create a sense of belonging for adoptees amongst one another.

As she begins mentoring, she is excited to help adoptees grow into who they are, without pressure to be anyone else.

“I really want to support adoptees in being their strong selves through mentoring … To become conscious in a way that you could stay with the consciousness, to have stamina and growth through consciousness.”

ADOPTEE LOUNGES

The Adoptee Lounges create environments where adoptees get to connect with other adoptees, sharing the areas of adoption that are much harder to share more broadly.  Many adoptees receive unhelpful and sometimes damaging responses when sharing these thoughts and feelings outside the adoptee community and that is exactly why the Adoptee Lounges are so important. 

Please join us as we congratulate our new mentors and stick around as we continue to support our adoptee community!