Name: Creating & Losing Family – BIPOC Adult Adoptees
Start: 2024-06-22T14:00:00-0500
End: 2024-06-22T15:15:00-0500

Join KAAN from June 21 – 23 for three days of keynotes, films, presentations, roundtables, performers, exhibits, support forums, and life-changing community. KAAN offers an Adoptee-Only track, as well as sessions for a general audience that are open to all. There are programs for adults aged 18+ and youth aged 8-17. Everyone is welcome, including adoptees, birth families, family members (adoptive parents, spouses/partners, siblings, and children of adoptees), service providers, and Korean Americans. If you have any questions, please feel free to email us at tech@wearekaan.org.

Register now at tfec.org/kaan2024

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KAAN is a Project of The Foundation for Enhancing Communities, fiscal sponsor. This permits KAAN to operate as a nonprofit under TFEC’s 501(c)(3) designation. The official registration and financial information of The Foundation for Enhancing Communities may be obtained from the Pennsylvania Department of State by calling toll-free, within Pennsylvania, at 1-800-732-0999. Registration does not imply endorsement. The Foundation for Enhancing Communities is registered in each state requiring such registration for charitable solicitation. Your donation is tax-deductible to the fullest extent allowable by law. Thank you!

Creating & Losing Family – BIPOC Adult Adoptees

In Creating & Losing Family as BIPOC Adult Adoptees, a group of Black, Native, and POC adoptees will share a story about losing, defining, or creating family as adults. Adoptee community members will get a window into five adoptees’ experience of family as they navigate marriage, divorce, queerness, parenting, reunion, and more. There will be a group discussion following storytelling. This session intends to continue building BIPOC adoptee community and expanding our intersectional exposure and understanding within it. We believe storytelling is a powerful tool for healing, self-expression, and understanding. We want folks to feel safe, seen, and heard.

Speakers

Liana Soifer

Transracial Adoptee born in South Korea and raised in Oregon, Founder of BIPOC Adoptees, and mother to three. She earned her BA in Human Services. Liana has worked as a Project Manager supervising online software programs and web applications to improve the lives of people. In 2020... Read More →

Mai Li O'Keefe

Mai Li O’Keefe (they/them) is a transracial Korean adoptee. They are currently based in Portland, OR where they balance their time between their work-for-a-living job, community organizing, and playing outside with their pals. They actively organize for VOICES, a BIPOC Adoptee Community... Read More →

Alisha Bennett

Alisha Bennett (she|her) aka 션영 is a South Korean Adoptee with citizenship. Alisha lives in love in Brooklyn, NY with her husband and 3 year old daughter. She works in NYC as a social worker, therapist and small business owner. Becoming a mother as an adoptee is what inspired... Read More →

Danni Mar

I am a Colombian-born adoptee from Bogotá who was domestically adopted and then immigrated to the United States at the age of four to be closer to my adopted American father's family. Over the past six years, I have been in reunion with my biological family, and within the last five... Read More →

Lisa MacLellan

Lisa MacLellan is a transracial domestic adoptee that was born and raised in Wyoming, USA. She was relinquished at birth, due to her race - she is biracial - and was adopted out of foster care just before she turned a year old. Lisa currently reside in the Pacific Northwest with her... Read More →

Maze Felix

Hi there, I'm Maze Felix and my pronouns are they/them. I am a polyamorous queer trans nonbinary AAPI Chinese transracial adoptee. I am a full time actor based in Los Angeles, CA and I also carry a degree in American Sign Language Interpreting. As an actor, my intersectional identities... Read More →

Matthew Fetzer

Matt is an adopted Korean. He was born in 1975 in Gongju, South Korea. He is active in the BIPOC adoptee community, and has volunteered for several domestic adoptee organizations. Matt is passionate about many issues facing the adoptee community, including race, sexuality, and mental... Read More →

Stef Henning

Stef Henning AKA 배양숙 (Bae Yang Sook) was taken to America at 3 months to a white family in Iowa in 1983. The erasure of Korean culture and heritage wasn't apparent until much later in life when she moved to Portland, OR, and realized her identity was no longer tied to her white... Read More →

Saturday June 22, 2024 2:00pm - 3:15pm CDT
Rosemont 4: 3rd Floor

Adoptee-Only Session

KAAN 2024 Conference