While I was working with the International Korean Adoptee Association (IKAA) this summer, I conducted some internal research on search and reunion and reconnection with cultural heritage among Korean American adoptees. Below I share a few points I came to...
Three questions we MUST ASK, in order to change the way we help children stay connected with their cultural identity and their families? 1) Shouldn’t ALL of our child protection laws be like the Indian Child Welfare Act? This is ...
Preserving cultural identity across borders can be difficult. Jim and Monica Frye experienced this struggle first hand as they expanded their family by means of intercountry adoption. The Frye’s live in Queen Creek, Arizona with their 3 children Dylan (24),...
The Social Welfare History Archives at the University of Minnesota Libraries (SWHA) documents the complex history and legacy of child welfare policies and programs. The historical records at SWHA are a resource for understanding adoption and foster care systems, public...
Ten years ago, baby Joshua was in a precarious situation. Removed from his mother’s care and with no other family placement options in Australia, Joshua was placed in foster care. Being raised in foster care was the likely trajectory of...
A condensed history of ISS-USA For almost 100 years, ISS-USA has helped to reunite families separated by borders. Our early history addressed the needs of women traveling alone or with children from Europe to the Americas following World War I....
Jena Martin's preface to her own article: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly - A New Way of Looking at the Intercountry Adoption Debate It’s funny how things work out. Seventeen years ago, I wrote an article. My original ...
Allison Blake, ISS-USA Board member, former Commissioner for the New Jersey Department of Children and Families and currently CEO of Child and Family Agency of SE CT sat down to lunch at a local community organization in Madison, Connecticut and started chatting with the woman on her left. To her surprise, she too was also a social worker, an alum of the very same place where Allison had earned her PhD in social work, and most intriguing of all, Joan talked about the “best social work job she had ever had.”
The ISS has been hiding in plain sight in the history of private international law since the 1920s. Anyone lucky enough to visit ISS-USA’s archives at the University of Minnesota would be astonished by ISS’s extensive engagement with virtually every aspect of transnational family law. During the first half of the 20th century the ISS left no stone untouched in an effort to devise an international socio-legal framework for cross-border family maintenance claims.