Pact, An Adoption Alliance - Building Community Across Cultures, A Family Consultation Service

Building Community Across Cultures, A Family Consultation Service

Building Community Across Cultures (BCAC) $350.00

This consultation is designed to help you assess the cultural diversity in your family and community life, and what needs to change. Are you already parenting across racial lines? If so, what is going well? Where are your challenge areas? How has life has changed since the first transracial adoption? Do you have concerns about your child's and family's connection to people who share his or her race? Are you planning to complete a transracial adoption? What to do you need to consider in deciding what race child to adopt? What connections do you already have with communities of color, and what connections do you need to create? What type of adoption should you pursue and how should you decide which agency or service to work with? Does it make sense for you to work with Pact to complete your placement or should you just use Pact as an educational resource and family membership/support organization?

This individualized program is tailored give both parents and pre-adopters the opportunity to complete a detailed assessment of the existing racial diversity in their lives as they become (or continue their growth as) a family of color built through adoption. Following this assessment, Pact staff will work with you to come up with concrete steps you can take to build a true cross-cultural community for your family.

We particularly urge families to complete the full BCAC program early in their adoption process because we have learned from experience that once a family adopts a baby or child, they tend to turn inward to "nest" for several years while they adjust to parenthood and their new family life. Later, when they feel ready to make connections and address their transracially adopted child's racial and cultural needs, they often find that they have already put into place many of the "building blocks" of community -- where they live, schools available to them, doctors, dentists and child care. These are the social structures that create community and are difficult to change once they're in place. Having the opportunity to chose them based, in part, on how they will help you find cultural connections, rather than becoming barriers your family must work around, will be a huge help to your family.

How Building Community Across Cultures (BCAC) Works

The BCAC program is divided into three stages. They involve written assignments done at home by the participant(s). The first is as self-assessment called Building Your Foundation. The second, titled What If..., is an exercise involving real-life scenarios for transracial families. The third, Creating A Plan, involves writing down the actual tasks you will accomplish. Each stage involves meetings (in person or by phone) with Pact staff. BCAC also includes check-ins with Pact staff as needed to help you as you create your individualized plan for increasing your connections to adults and families of color. The goal of this program is for you to create a larger circle of friendship and support for you and your child that will help you parent your child(ren) of color and help your child become a strong, proud and culturally competent adult of color.

Building Your Foundation: Each client will receive a package of information about the program including the first at home tasks to be completed and returned before speaking with Pact staff.

Below the Surface: A self-assessment tool for families who are considering (or who already have) adoption across racial lines.
Below the Surface Diversity Inventory: A self-inventory designed to help families understand areas of their lives that they may want to evaluate in terms of connection and access to
More Than Skin Deep: A follow-up survey to help you process the Below The Surface exercises which will be used to determine areas of strength, new information, challenge areas and differences between you and your partner (if applicable.)

Using the results of your self-assessment and diversity inventory, Pact staff will work with you to discuss provocative components of the exercises and determine areas within your current life and community that can change or expand to increase cross-cultural connections. The current developmental stages of your parenting journey and ages of any current children will help shape the areas and focus of your individualized consultation and resulting plan. A tentative task list will be created for your personal cross-cultural connection goals.

What If...: Using real life scenarios that have come from the many hundreds of Pact members and clients (and the co-founders Beth Hall and Gail Steinberg themselves); BCAC clients will be given materials that will give you the opportunity to explore at least five scenarios that are suited to your particular family stage, the ages and races of your adopted children, the type of adoption you completed or plan to pursue and the specifics of your current lifestyle, geographic location or child's issues and challenges. Clients will complete some discussions and written questions after each scenario with your parenting partner (or by yourself or with a friend or family member if you are single), to be submitted to Pact prior to the second BCAC individualized consultation. You will also modify the tentative task list created in the Building a Foundation consultation and submit it in writing before the second meeting as well.

Creating a Plan: After you have explored the results of the What If... scenarios, you will work with Pact staff to determine how to move forward in creating action plan for finding new or enhancing existing cross-cultural connections in your life and world. Pact will provide each BCAC client with a detailed task list of 3-5 suggestions to jumpstart the family's exploration of new (or enhanced) connections for their family. This analysis will be extremely detailed and result in helping the client to identify the areas of change they will focus on as they move forward.

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