Sharing Our Voices — Watch Nine Adoptee Speakers from BPAR’s 2023 Voices Unheard Series
BPAR is proud to invite you to watch our new Voices Unheard: Real Adoptee Stories 2023 video!
The mission of Voices Unheard is to empower adoptees' varied expressions of their personal stories and to expand public knowledge and awareness around adoptee experiences. At BPAR, we do this through writing workshops, adoptee online blogs and interviews, the creation of our Voices Unheard Journal, and through our annual November Voices Unheard: Real Adoptee Stories speakers' event.
As the program director of Voices Unheard, it has been the highlight of my year, four times going, to organize and host this event. I feel endless gratitude to all the adoptee speakers, staff, volunteers, and donors who make this possible. Storytelling gatherings like this one are educational, and create empathy and understanding in communities where an honest discussion of the adoptee experience is desperately needed.
In this video you will hear nine different pieces read by their adoptee authors. These pieces are personal, heart-opening, and raw. We ask that you listen and watch with empathy and grace and honor each adoptee’s experience as their own.
This is the first time we have made this incredibly vulnerable work available to the community for free. We encourage you to continue to help spread our mission of building awareness of adoptee experiences by sharing this video with adoptees, adoptive parents, birth parents, partners of an adoptee, siblings of an adoptee, therapists, counseling students or counseling educators!
Voices Unheard is organized and run by our clinical staff with limited resources. We guide each speaker during their creative process and prepare them for the experience of sharing their deeply personal work in front of an audience.
Our goal for 2024 is to record better quality video and sound and offer a larger venue so that we can honor the professionalism and skills of our speakers. You can help us with this by donating funding, resources, or skills. Your donation will help us spread education, expand community empathy, and contribute positive change for the adoptee journey!
We need donors like you to help us out! Donate here:
WIth your help, we can keep Voices Unheard going and growing.
With so much love,
LC Coppola
Voices Unheard Program Director
More About the Voices Unheard: Real Adoptee Stories Forum
The annual Voices Unheard: Real Adoptee Stories event is a public forum of expression through storytelling by adult adoptees and those relinquished or removed from their biological families. Voices Unheard offers opportunities through workshops, online blogs, and speaking events for survivors to share their voices, be seen, and be heard—a healing experience for both artist and viewer. All speakers at this event participate because they have made a brave decision to share their experiences with us. While our speakers consist of those raised outside of original home placement, our event is an inclusive one, as it is our hope for those who are not adopted themselves to listen open-heartedly and with curiosity to others who have walked a different path than themselves. Education on this complex experience is badly needed for anyone who loves an adoptee or who plans on adopting, as so often the adoption narratives we hear are created by those who have not experienced relinquishment and the resulting stories are simplified, and our adoptee losses are often minimized.