Group Encourages More Adoptions
At the time Michelle Madrid-Branch’s American family brought their little half-English, half-Spanish daughter home in the 1970s, adoption wasn’t talked about very much. If it was discussed, it was done quietly, almost as if it were something slightly shameful. However, Michelle’s parents, Lee and Rose Boles, were different.
“Other kids always had questions or made insinuations. My parents armed me with the knowledge that ‘adoption means love.’ That’s what they told me, and what I told my classmates. My parents taught me that a true family has very little to do with whether everyone looks alike; it has to do with love,” Madrid-Branch said.
The little girl had kept her birth-father’s name in the international adoption, in part because she looked so Spanish in a sea of little Anglo kids. After a childhood on Air Force bases, she grew up to become an Emmy-nominated television journalist. Then she met Jeff Branch, a wellknown Santa Fe real estate developer.
“I knew when I met him, my life was going to change,” Madrid-Branch said. The couple married, settled in Santa Fe and started a family. Their oldest son, Christian, is 6.
But Madrid-Branch never stopped lobbying for adoption, as well. She repeated her parents’ phrase, “adoption means love,” at every possible chance, because she wanted to get that phrase into people’s minds — and hearts. She introduced Branch to the needs of foster children domestically and around the world. One day, they saw a 5-month-old Russian baby boy on an adoption site on the Internet and fell in love. Six months later, Ian Viktor was their son. The experience only deepened Madrid-Branch’s conviction that adoption means love.
“Adoption is another form of delivery. It is not a secondbest option,” she said firmly. “The love is just the same as if I’d given biological birth to him, as I did Christian. He was meant to be with us.”
Pushing adoption
Her redoubled convictions made Madrid-Branch ever more intent on encouraging adoption within local, regional, nationwide and international society.
She began advocating for adoption and writing for adoption support publications, trying to help other people express what she considers the essence of the process, “the transformation and triumph of the experience.”
Nominated by U.S. Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., in 2004, Madrid-Branch was presented with the Congressional Angels in Adoption Award. Adoption Australian Magazine called her “a world voice for adoption.”
Having resumed a relationship with her English birth mother, she had original sources in her two mothers to draw upon when she wrote a children’s book, “The Tummy Mummy” (Adoption Tribe Publishing, 2004), which tells the story of a young birth mother who gives her baby up for adoption, and the love and sacrifice that requires.
The same year, Michelle Madrid-Branch and Jeff Branch established The AML Foundation (Adoption Means Love) with a $350,000 seed grant from the Lowe Foundation.
The AML Foundation was formed with the vision statement that “all adoptable children will find the loving families destined to be theirs, and the world will celebrate on every continent.” It is a very broad vision, Madrid-Branch admitted, which the are trying to fulfill in a very pragmatic way.
“We have started very slowly. It is my belief that the first 15 percent of any process is crucial — it drives the next 85 percent. So we’ve been setting up our two main programs and putting together a dynamic team, Executive Director Dennis Hudson and now Development Director Carol Kessler. Our aim is to work in concentric circles: first make changes in New Mexico, then across the country and then around the world.”
Educating others
The most important change is social change, she said, changing the minds of society and the potential adoptive parents and families in that society.
“We have been trying, through education, to change the way people view children in foster care,” she said. “At any given moment, there are approximately 2,200 children in foster care in New Mexico. There are approximately half a million children in foster care in the U.S. There are 132 million orphans around the world.”
The AML Foundation undertook two initiatives. The smaller was to set aside some money in two funds, the Family Building Fund and the Feeding Futures Fund, both of which make grants restricted to cases in northern New Mexico. The foundation works closely with the state Children, Youth and Families Department in finding these cases, Kessler said.
The Family Building Fund makes grants to assist parents with the adoption process, especially post-adoption, when lack of therapies and services can potentially disrupt otherwise good adoptive families. This fund also provides grants in special cases that will encourage adoption. Kessler gave an example: 15-year-old Margaret (not her real name) is only three years from “aging out” of the foster care system. She had a chance of being adopted by a couple in North Carolina, but neither the prospective parents nor Margaret had the money to make a home visit possible. The AML Foundation paid for Margaret’s visit to North Carolina and it looks like she will find a family at last.
Aging out
The Funding Futures Fund makes grants to assist young people who are aging out or have aged out of the foster care system without being adopted. The young person must have been officially in the foster care for a minimum of two years, must be at least 16 years old and must be officially removed from the adoption eligibility list. Grants are made for specific function or goods that help the young person make the transition from foster care to independence.
The initiative that takes most of the foundation’s time is “Isn’t It Time to GROW Your Family?” — an educational and public awareness effort to help families become aware that adoption should be given serious consideration as a means of increasing their families. After efforts in New Mexico this year, there are plans to make this a national campaign. First Lady Barbara Richardson has agreed to make a series of public service announcements to run during November, National Adoption Month.
Partly to increase public awareness, The AML Foundation established the Adoption Means Love award three years ago recognizing state legislators each year who have made efforts to increase adoption in New Mexico and to help youth aging out of the foster care system.
At Kessler’s urging, the foundation also sponsored a survey done by Research & Polling Inc. earlier this year to establish a database about New Mexico adults’ attitudes and opinions on adoption.
“The Branches are so committed and supportive,” Kessler told the Journal. “They don’t waste money, but they’re not afraid to spend it where it needs to be spent.”
Kessler is preparing a fundraising campaign that will function primarily through Amigos de la Adopción, AML’s main support group. Amigos de la Adopción-Santa Fe is the first affiliate of the Amigos support group.
The Quilt of Life Project has adapted Madrid-Branch’s adult book “Adoption Means Love: Triumph of the Heart” (Adoption Tribe Publishing, 2006) for the stage in a play called “The Quilt of Life” that will premiere in Santa Fe in January 2009.
“All of these efforts are about valuing the children in waiting,” Madrid-Branch said. “We’re doing everything we can to support securing forever-families for these children. Sometimes it takes a powerful social change in opinion to secure sweeping permanent change that’s needed.”
AML (Adoption Means Love) Foundation
ADDRESS: P.O. Drawer Q
Santa Fe, NM 87504
PHONE: 474-5211
WEB SITE: www.adoptionmeanslove.org
