The Donaldson Adoption Institute is based in New York and promised to offer  “independent and objective adoption research, education, and advocacy that addressed the needs of birth parents, adopted people, adoptive parents, the people who love them, and the professionals that serve them.”

However, the Institute appears to have closed its doors, or at least shut down its adoption reform efforts, though they have kindly left a lot of their research up on their site and some of it is free.

While this is a US based organisation and some of the content may not apply to the UK directly, it may offer some powerful insights where US and UK policies on adoption cross.

While we have not had the chance to look at the publicly available content on the Institute’s site, at first glance it looks very interesting.

Here are some reports we thought our readers would find useful:

• Adoption and birth certificates (access, rights)
• Birth Parents (safeguarding the rights and wellbeing of birth parents, best practice)
• Identity (pioneering research on adoptee identity)
• Openness in Adoption (ongoing relationships between adopters, adoptees and birth parents)
• US Adoption reform (recommendations)
• Opinion Surveys on Adoption (adopters, adoptees and birth parents)

There’s also an archive with the Institute’s newsletters, which offer emerging issues in adoption law, policy, practice, research, news and resources up until 2018.