What is the Adoption Project?
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Who We Are
Adoption: An American Revolution will be created by award-winning producers from WGBH Boston for the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). The production team will work closely with an unparalleled group of expert advisors, all leaders in adoption history and practice, and many of them part of the adoption community themselves.
WGBH Boston is America's preeminent public broadcasting producer, the source of fully one-third of PBS's prime-time lineup, along with some of public television's best-known lifestyle shows and children's programs and many public radio favorites. Its production menu is diverse, including Nova, Frontline, American Experience, Antiques Roadshow, Masterpiece Theatre, Arthur, and Zoom on PBS and The World and Sound & Spirit on public radio. WGBH has been recognized with hundreds of honors: Emmys, Peabodys, duPont-Columbia Awards... even two Oscars.
Production personnel includes Executive Producer Judith Vecchione, a documentary filmmaker for over twenty-five years and a staff member on many of WGBH's major documentary series including Nova, World, Vietnam: A Television History, and Frontline. She won an Emmy and a Red Ribbon at the American Film Festival for her work on Vietnam and was Series Senior Producer on the documentary series Eyes on the Prize. More recently, she was Executive Producer for a number of award-winning documentaries, including a biography of Mary Pickford for American Experience and China in the Red, a two-hour special for Frontline.
Eric Stange, Senior Producer, has produced many critically acclaimed programs for PBS, The Discovery Channel and National Geographic Television. His most recent film, Murder at Harvard, which aired in 2003 on American Experience, used documentary and drama to explore a famous 1849 Boston murder, as examined by historian Simon Schama. Stange is currently producing, directing, and writing two hours for the upcoming public television series The War That Made America.
Did you know...?
Americans adopt around 120,000 children each year.
Our Board of Advisors
Adam Pertman, author of the groundbreaking book Adoption Nation: How the Adoption Revolution is Transforming America, will be senior advisor to the Adoption: An American Revolution project. Pertman is the Executive Director of the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute in New York, a non-partisan policy and education organization, and an adoptive parent.
Julie Jarrell Bailey is the primary co-author of the highly acclaimed book, The Adoption Reunion Survival Guide: Preparing Yourself for the Search, Reunion and Beyond. She is also a reunited birth mother and the adoptive mother of three special-needs children.
David Brodzinsky is Associate Professor of Developmental and Clinical Psychology and Director of the Foster Care Counseling Project at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ, and author of The Psychology of Adoption.
E. Wayne Carp holds the Benson Family Chair in History and is Professor of History at Pacific Lutheran University, Tacoma, Washington. He is a nationally recognized expert on adoption and the author of Adoption Politics: Bastard Nation and Ballot Initiative 58.
Susan Soon Keum Cox is Vice President for Public Policy & External Affairs at Holt International Children's Services. Adopted from Korea, she is a member of The Hague Special Commission on Intercountry Adoption and the State Department Advisory Committee on Voluntary Foreign Aid.
Madelyn Freundlich is Policy Director for Children's Rights, Inc. in New York. Ms. Freundlich has authored a number of publications on child welfare law and policy, and on foster care and adoption. She has also written extensively on the roles of race, culture, national origin, and market forces in adoption.
Harold Grotevant is Distinguished University Teaching Professor of Family Social Science at the University of Minnesota. He is a former Board President of Adoptive Families of America, and recipient of the College of Human Ecology's Educational Leadership Award and Excellence in Research Award.
Jerri Ann Jenista is a doctor and pediatric infectious diseases expert specializing in the care of adopted and immigrant children. She is on the executive committee of the American Academy of Pediatrics' Section on Adoption and Foster Care and is the adoptive mother of five children from India.
Mark McDermott is a past president of the American Academy of Adoption Attorneys and helped to design lawyers' standards under the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption. He is an adoptive parent and currently serves on the Academy's Legislative Committee.
Ruth McRoy is Director of the Center for Social Work Research and Associate Dean for Research at the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. McRoy's many books on adoption include Special Needs Adoptions: Practice Issues and Openness in Adoption (with H. Grotevant). She is currently conducting research on racial disparities in foster care as well as barriers to adoptions.
Zena Oglesby, Jr. is the founder and Executive Director of the Institute for Black Parenting (IBP) Licensed Direct Service Programs in Los Angeles, California, and author of Achieving Same-Race Adoptive Placements for African American Children.
Joyce Maguire Pavao is the founder and CEO of the Center for Family Connections, Adoption Resource Center, and Family Connections Training Institute, all in Cambridge, Massachusetts. An adopted person and family therapist, Pavao is the author of the book, The Family of Adoption.
Sharon Kaplan Roszia directs a program at the Kinship Center of California that focuses on families who foster or adopt the children who have waited the longest in the foster care system. Roszia, who is a parent by birth, fostering, and adoption, is an advocate for preserving connections for children.