Monday Evening Speaker Series
Adoption Network Cleveland is pleased to offer a VIRTUAL Monday Evening Speaker Series full of topics that are of interest to a broad audience impacted by adoption, kinship, and foster care. These programs are made possible by donors and presenters volunteering their time and they thrive thanks to the active participation of attendees.
Upcoming Presentations
Monday, December 16, 2024
8:00 PM - 9:00 PM ET
An International Adoptee's Perspective: Navigating Adoptee and Immigrant Identity with Svetlana Sandoval
Svetlana Sandoval is an International Adoptee from Russia. She was adopted to the U.S. during the peak wave of international adoptions in the late 90s. Svetlana will share her experience of growing up as an international adoptee, and how her understanding of adoption evolved throughout her teens and young adulthood. Svetlana is in reunion with her birthmother and family in Russia, and will share the complexities of navigating a virtual reunion across language and cultural barriers. She will also share how misinformation from her adoption agency left her unaware of her native citizenship status and how dual citizenship has brought additional complexities to traveling to meet her family in person. Svetlana has spent the last two years reclaiming her immigrant identity and will share about her immigrant community experiences and choice to reclaim her original name. Svetlana is currently pursuing a Bachelor of Social Work and will share how her adoptee and immigrant identities have informed her academic path to support international adoptees on their journeys.
Monday, January 13, 2025
8:00 PM ET - 9:00 PM ET
Reclaiming the Narrative: A 7-Step Approach to Trauma Healing and Adoptee Wholeness with Dr. Liz DeBetta
Being able to question, reject, and rewrite the dominant narratives that make adoptees the object rather than the subject of their stories is essential to finding healing and wholeness. Permission to explore origin (and other adoption) stories and rewrite them as teens and adults helps adoptees to become more integrated by allowing them to connect to the parts of themselves that have been denied by the stories that were given to them as children, and the stories that the media would like the public to believe about adoption. Using Howard Bath’s 3-pillars of Trauma-informed Care (2008) and the 7-step trauma-healing framework embedded in the Migrating Toward Wholeness© method of expressive writing to heal attendees will learn how the process of re-narrativizing for adoptees can be used to find clarity, understand the effects of trauma, promote personal growth that helps to shift internal narratives, and create healthy dialogue among families.
About Liz
Dr. Liz DeBetta earned a Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Studies (Humanities & Culture) from Union Institute & University (certificates in Womens’ and Gender Studies/Creative Writing), an MA in English from the City University of NY (College of Staten Island), and a BA in Theatre/Speech from Wagner College. As an interdisciplinary scholar-artist-activist she’s committed to changing systems and helping people navigate trauma through creative processes. She believes that stories are powerful change agents and when we can write them and share them we connect and heal.
Dr. DeBetta uses storytelling, performance, and narrative techniques to invite others to create space for empathy and begin healing individual and collective trauma connected to race, gender, sexuality, disability, ethnicity, and other intersections of identity that are misunderstood or misrepresented in dominant culture. This stems directly from her lived experience as an adoptee, survivor of gender based violence, and advocate for change by speaking truth to power using my own story. She is a proud member of Actor's Equity, SAG-AFTRA, Affiliate Faculty at the Institute for Research on Women and Gender and part of the Diversity Scholars Network at the National Center for Institutional Diversity at the University of Michigan.
Monday, January 27, 2025
8:00 PM - 9:00 PM
Memoir Monday: Growing Up Adopted, Adored, and Afraid with author and adoptee, Janice Jones
Janice Jones reads vignettes from her memoir, Dr. Beare’s Daughter, that illustrate how being adopted caused her to silence her own voice in her struggle to be that elusive, golden child she believed her parents really wanted—their own. She shares insights into life as an adoptee, that she gained from writing her story, and how publishing it finally gave her real self a voice in the world and helped her become whole. She invites questions and offers encouragement for participants to share their own stories as part of a healing journey.
About Janice
Janice Jones was adopted in 1947 at age four-and-a-half months by charismatic doctor and surgeon, Ralph Beare and his socialite wife, Lou, of Celina, Ohio. Jones grew up as a lonely, only, privileged child who found herself an outlier in her family and at school. While her adoption was no secret, discussing it was taboo. To be curious was to be ungrateful. When she was often reminded by those who admired her parents, that she was a lucky girl to been adopted by such wonderful parents, she could only smile while thinking, You don’t know what it is like to live with them.
As an adult, Jones has had a long career as a freelance writer and editor. She has also been a dog-obedience instructor, children’s book buyer for a large, independent bookstore, and inventor of jigsaw puzzles that teach reading skills to children. The two things she values most in life are truth and connection to others. She considers the world at large to be her big, human family. Dr. Beare’s Daughter: Growing Up Adopted, Adored, and Afraid is her fourth published book.
Monday, February 10, 2025
8:00 PM - 9:00 PM ET
Trauma of Separation and How It Manifests in Developmental Stages with Astrid Castro
This discussion will explore how being separated from birth parents affects adoptees at different stages of their lives. The facilitator will discuss how this early trauma manifests in various ways as adoptees grow from infants to adults; including forming relationships and understanding their identity. Through expert insights and personal stories, this discussion will reveal the long-term effects of early family separation and how adoptees cope with these complex experiences over time.
About Astrid
Astrid Castro (she/her/hers) is the founder and CEO of Adoption Mosaic. Adoption Mosaic is an adoptee-led, BIPOC woman-owned business that seeks to build an inviting adoption conscious community by providing innovative adoptee-centered programs and support. Astrid has a degree in sociology with an emphasis in adoption. Since 1992, she has traveled the country to present workshops on transracial parenting and talking with children about adoption, to lead adoptee youth groups, and various other workshops focusing on adoption. Astrid has also worked in both the private and public sectors of various adoption organizations. Astrid’s life-long interest in adoption is rooted in her own adoption at the age of four from Colombia (along with her older sister). She has been in reunion with her birth family in Colombia since December 2011.
Monday, March 3, 2025
8:00 PM - 9:00 PM
Becoming Enough with JJ Rett
How do we get to the place where we believe we are enough? Amidst a childhood filled with abuse, lies, and shame JJ Rett developed a powerful sense of intuition and inner drive. She will discuss the ways in which she coped with being raised by an abusive parent, navigated her “late-discovery adoptee” identity, and repaired connections with her biological and adoptive families.
Her journey through the many traumas and breakthroughs she has experienced, from the circumstances that led to her relinquishment, to the day she learned that she was adopted twenty years prior, to living in reunion with both sides of her biological family, has brought her to a place where she now shares her insights and various healing modalities with others. She hopes that by sharing her story, others may be empowered on their own paths and, along the way, uncover their present and future selves.
About JJ
JJ Rett is a certified life coach who finds much of her joy in working with other members of the adoption constellation as they navigate their own experiences. She is a volunteer with Adoption Network Cleveland and has been a member since 2015, when she and over 400,000 other Ohio adoptees were granted access to their original birth records.
Prior to her work as a coach, JJ was the Assistant Director of Admissions at The Juilliard School. She holds a B.F.A in Stage Management from Wright State University and earned her coaching certification from Upbuild in 2024. JJ is living in reunion with both sides of her biological family and currently lives in Dayton, OH with her husband and three young children.
