Hey Ties Fam,
We really can’t believe the resonance we’ve felt from this community already. One month in, and total strangers have been forwarding this to people they love, telling us their own stories back, showing up again and again for something that didn’t exist eight weeks ago. We hoped this might matter to a few people. Turns out, it matters to a lot more than we imagined.
This is the first thing we’ve ever sent you, and it comes with a real thank-you: you’re getting this because you showed up for us somehow in our first month — a gift, a follow, a sign-up, a text back. We see every single one. (Truly — Ian checks this list more than may be healthy.)
So, What Do We Actually Do?
We haven’t actually explained what The Ties Foundation is yet — fair enough, we’re one month old. So here it is, quickly, before we get into the cool stuff.
We’re a global foundation that grants directly to intercountry adoptees and the people who support them — funding access to healing after the papers are signed. Three grants, fast:
Heritage Travel
Funding the trip back to a birth country, birth family, or first home — so readiness decides the timing, not money.
Healing & Wholeness
Funding therapy and identity-focused care with practitioners who already understand adoption, whether or not a trip is involved.
Growth & Learning
Funding conferences, language classes, and cultural programs that connect adoptees to each other and to where they’re from.
That’s it. That’s the foundation. Now, the cool stuff.
New Leadership, Amazing Partners
Drum roll, please! We’re launching an Intercountry Adoptee Advisory Council — because Ian doesn’t do anything on his own. (We love him, but he’s only one person.) Somi Monju has graciously accepted the chair position. She traveled with Ian to India more than a decade ago, and they’ve been in touch ever since, building trust the slow way.
Somi is an intercountry adoptee from India, a licensed social worker (MSW, New Mexico State University, 2024), and has worked with foster and adoptive children and families since 2017. She grew up in a multicultural home with siblings of different racial backgrounds and abilities, and she brings that same wide lens — connection, relationships, and community as what actually heals — into everything she does. We’re honored she said yes.
Standing With Us Since Day One
Four organizations who stood with us when we were nothing but a promise. Trust-building, not transaction — exactly what we hope this whole field can move toward together.
A Trust-Raiser, Not a Fundraiser
This month we made a choice: no big dollar ask to the masses, no countdown, no giving goal. We called it a trust-raiser instead — because almost nobody knows we exist yet, and that’s not a fundraising problem, it’s a trust problem. You earn trust the way you earn it with a person: by showing up consistently before you ever ask for anything.
We have one call to action, and it isn’t a one-time thing — it’s the whole model. A groundswell fades; a rally sustains itself. So: connect us with more people. Forward this to someone, introduce us to an organization, tell a friend who’s never heard of us. That’s the ask, today and every time we send one of these.
Where we are, honestly:
1 month
Old, today (almost)
100+
New donors & supporters
4
Launch day endorsers
BIPOC Adoptees, Also Known As, AdaptAdoptees, and ICAV all stood with us as real launch endorsers, not just names on a page. We are immeasurably grateful to you, friends.
Our First Film: The Intercountry Adoption River
Most people think adoption starts with one story. It doesn’t.
For those of us who are intercountry adoptees, there’s a current that runs under all of it — the family that raised us, the country we came from, the names we started with, the years spent explaining ourselves to people who love us but can’t fully understand. Some of us landed somewhere whole. Most of us landed somewhere in between. All of us are still building an answer to a question most people never have to ask: who am I, and where do I belong?
The Intercountry Adoption River is our first short film — made by and for the intercountry adoptee community, to name what so many of us carry alone and rarely have the words for.
If this says something you’ve felt but couldn’t name — send it to someone who needs it, or introduce us to someone who might.
In the Community
BIPOC Adoptees VOICES — New York City
Ian traveled to New York for “Erased Narratives: Reclaiming Story, Identity, and Belonging” — an in-person, community-centered gathering built to hold what more sanitized adoption stories usually leave out.
- Reclaiming Narratives — a dedicated space for racially marginalized adoptees to bring unseen histories into view and take back stories that belong to them.
- Beyond the Sanitized Story — room for the full complexity: grief, sorrow, and confusion alongside gratitude.
- Community, Not Just Company — real connection among people who share intersecting identities and systemic experience.
One Gift, and What It Told Us
$75,000
Board Family Gift
The Bankoski Family
Board member Heather Bankoski and her family gave $75,000 this month — a monumental thing to receive in our very first month. It told us something simple: people believe this is worth building for the long haul.
A Note on Tax Letters
By IRS rule, we’re only required to send a formal tax-acknowledgment letter for gifts of $250 or more — so if your gift was smaller, you may not have gotten one, and that’s not an oversight. Every dollar matters to us the same, and if you’d like a letter for your records regardless of amount, just email us at info@thetiesfoundation.org and we’ll send it right along.
Thank you for being part of this from the start. If one person comes to mind while you’re reading this — someone touched by adoption who might not know we exist — send them our way.
This is not a fundraiser, of course. But how could we not leave the door open? If giving is something you’d like to do, here’s where.
Before we close: real gratitude. To our board — Ben Kaanta, Jana McCarthy, Remy Nshimiyimana, Molly Dee Wells, and Heather Bankoski — thank you for believing in this before there was anything yet to point to. And to everyone reading this letter: thank you, truly. We know the world is not without massive challenges — we see them daily, up close. But we believe in the long arc of justice, and in the power of the human spirit to choose love, again and again. That belief is the whole reason we’re here.
