2023 Adoption Vanguard Award Recipient
About Angela Tucker
Adoption Knowledge Affiliates (AKA) is honored to announce Angela Tucker as the recipient of our Adoption Vanguard Award for 2023. Angela Tucker is a Black woman adopted from foster care to white parents. She is the author of YOU SHOULD BE GRATEFUL: Stories of Race Identity, and Transracial Adoption, the Founder of the Adoptee Mentoring Society, the subject of Closure, a documentary that chronicles her search for her biological parents, and has over 15 years of experience working within adoption and foster care agencies. Her mission to center adoptees is evident in her podcast, The Adoptee Next Door, the five short films that she has produced and her work consulting with media outlets like NBC’s This Is Us.
The award will be presented on Saturday November 4, 2023, 9:00 am at AKA’s “Honoring the Past, Treasuring the Present, Shaping the Future” virtual conference, during National Adoption Awareness Month. The virtual event delivers two full days of content with two powerful conference keynotes, Susan Ito and Andie Coston. Surrounding the two keynotes are dynamic, afternoon presentations and workshops from local, state and national professionals, advocates, experts, and creatives - all connected to adoption and foster care. Evening programming includes a screening and Q&A with Jenni Alpert (aka Cami). This event offers professionals CEU earning opportunities. The target audience for the conference is the adoption and foster care community, adjacent communities of donor conceived individuals and people with DNA discoveries, therapeutic practitioners, social work professionals, and reform advocates. Attendees receive knowledge, skills, support, and networking opportunities.
The award will be presented on Saturday November 4, 2023, 9:00 am at AKA’s “Honoring the Past, Treasuring the Present, Shaping the Future” virtual conference, during National Adoption Awareness Month. The virtual event delivers two full days of content with two powerful conference keynotes, Susan Ito and Andie Coston. Surrounding the two keynotes are dynamic, afternoon presentations and workshops from local, state and national professionals, advocates, experts, and creatives - all connected to adoption and foster care. Evening programming includes a screening and Q&A with Jenni Alpert (aka Cami). This event offers professionals CEU earning opportunities. The target audience for the conference is the adoption and foster care community, adjacent communities of donor conceived individuals and people with DNA discoveries, therapeutic practitioners, social work professionals, and reform advocates. Attendees receive knowledge, skills, support, and networking opportunities.
About the Adoption Vanguard Award (AVA)
Adoption Knowledge Affiliates (AKA) is a non-profit organization that has served the adoption community in Texas for 30 years. During the past several years, our impact has grown in reach, now serving the community nationwide and even worldwide. We provide education, connection, and support to the adoption, foster care, and adjacent communities. These include, but are not limited to, adoptees, foster care alumni, birth families, adoptive, foster, and prospective adoptive parents, donor conceived individuals, and individuals with DNA discoveries.
With a goal to create healing and empathetic dialogues, where mutual respect is encouraged, AKA is a leader among educational adoption organizations. AKA has a long history of advocacy that was founded by adoptees and others connected to adoption. At the heart of AKA is respect for the unique needs of all those separated by adoption and a desire to forge from shared loss a more dignified path to wholeness. Our model of bringing together all members in this community in order to encourage empathy and sensitivity around differing perspectives makes our organization unique. Our services extend to the entire evolving adoption continuum and beyond, whether domestic or international, reunited or searching, closed or open, fostered or adopted. We also work to educate adoption professionals, social workers and attorneys, as well as legislators, to promote honesty, transparency, and reform in practices and policy relating to adoption, foster care, and adjacent experiences such as donor conception.
As such, we affirm and appreciate those in the community who embody this vision we uphold.
Honorees include:
With a goal to create healing and empathetic dialogues, where mutual respect is encouraged, AKA is a leader among educational adoption organizations. AKA has a long history of advocacy that was founded by adoptees and others connected to adoption. At the heart of AKA is respect for the unique needs of all those separated by adoption and a desire to forge from shared loss a more dignified path to wholeness. Our model of bringing together all members in this community in order to encourage empathy and sensitivity around differing perspectives makes our organization unique. Our services extend to the entire evolving adoption continuum and beyond, whether domestic or international, reunited or searching, closed or open, fostered or adopted. We also work to educate adoption professionals, social workers and attorneys, as well as legislators, to promote honesty, transparency, and reform in practices and policy relating to adoption, foster care, and adjacent experiences such as donor conception.
As such, we affirm and appreciate those in the community who embody this vision we uphold.
Honorees include:
- Damon L. Davis, adoptee, author, and host of the podcast, Who Am I Really?, honored in 2022.
- Dawn M. Scott, adoptive parent, who has served on the AKA board in numerous roles, including AKA President, and was a founding and integral member of the Texas Adoptee Rights (STAR), serving as its Vice President and advisory board member, honored in 2021.
- Texas State Representative Gina Calanni, adoptee who carried Texas House Bill 2725 for a 144-1 House passage, honored in 2020.
- Patricia Dorner, adoptive parent, author, therapist, and veteran advocate with a long history of devotion to aiding families in bridging separation by closed adoption, honored in 2017.
- Evy Ramos, birth mother and broadcast journalist who brought a spotlight to the legislative effort in 2015.
- Courtney Jones, Foster care alum, adoptive parent and Founder of change1.org, honored in 2016.