Adoptee Research Collective
Where lived experience meets research.
A Collective for Change
Adoption research has been missing its most important source. Adoptees!
Why an ARC? An arc is defined as a line with three points. The Adoptee Research Collective encompasses the adoption constellation while centering the lived experiences of adoptees. Foundations study outcomes. Institutions write policy. Communities hold the stories. The Adoptee Research Collective is the first adoptee-centered body built to hold it all together - lived experience, research, advocacy, policy, and community, treated as one record.
Why a collective?
And yet, adoption trauma is still not recognized clinically, there is no known and validated clinical assessment, treatment modalities, or skilled training for those who adopt because the focus has always been on securing the adoption. Placement = success.
But then what?
What of the birth mothers who are forced to go on as if nothing happened? What of the children who experience relinquishment trauma, no matter how sound the placement. What of the birth fathers, many of whom had no say in the matter. And what of adoptive parents who are unprepared, who are told they can love the trauma out of a child, that race doesn’t matter, that they’re doing a good thing?
And what of the child - the adoptee - at the center of it all?
Every perspective matters. Finding common ground matters. We cannot divide and conquer our way to real change.
Adoption has been examined in fragments — a clinical study here, a memoir there, a records-access bill in one legislature, a support group in another city. The people at the center of adoption are asked to carry the work of connecting it all. We exist so they don’t have to. The Collective gathers the evidence, centers the people who lived it, and moves both toward change.
Six strands, one purpose
Change this big takes more than one kind of work.
We hold these strands together — each one strengthening the others.
Lived experience — First-person accounts from adoptees, birth/first parents, and adoptive families, gathered with consent and care and treated as primary evidence, not anecdote.
Research— A central, open library of peer-reviewed work on relinquishment, identity, attachment, and long-term outcomes, organized so anyone can find and use it.
Advocacy — Translating what the evidence shows into public understanding, and standing beside the people it describes when institutions won't.
Policy & legislation — Briefings, testimony, and model legislation on records access, post-adoption support, and ethical practice — written from the evidence and the experience together.
Clinical intervention development — Building and testing therapeutic approaches for relinquishment, attachment, and identity — designed with adoptees and clinicians, grounded in the evidence, and made usable by practitioners.
Education & curriculum — Training, teaching materials, and coursework that put the evidence and lived experience in front of the people who shape adoption practice — clinicians, social workers, educators, and students.