Episode 40: Reimagining Adoption: What Adoptees Seek from Families and Faith

The Essentials for Adoption Attuned Parenting

Join hosts, adoption coaches and adoptive parents, Susan David and Gayle Swift, as they discuss Gayle's recent book, co-authored with adoptive parent and adoption coach, Sally Ankerfelt, Reimagining Adoption: What Adoptees Seek from Families and Faith. Their book has been well received by both faith communities and those in the adoption constellation and blends personal experience, expert insights, adoptee interviews, trauma research, and scriptural interpretation so The Church and the Christian community can re-envision adoption to better serve adoptees and their families. Gayle and Sally's book has recently won the prestigious Illuminations Award, given to “honor the year’s best new titles written and published with a Christian worldview.”

Sally Ankerfelt has worked with individuals and families for over 26 years as an ordained Lutheran pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. She also holds a Certificate in Trauma Studies from the University of Minnesota. Serving South Minneapolis congregants for 14 years, she guided them in their vision to become "a trauma-informed" congregation.

Sally is also an Adoption Coach with Growing Intentional Families Together, LLC. And as author, Sally’s writing on ambiguous loss can be seen in the March/April 2019 Fostering Families Today national magazine.

Being a white adoptive parent of three children of color, she is committed to upholding conversations about adoption, race, and white privilege. She and her husband, Dan, are adoptive parents to three children: one child adopted internationally, one through an open adoption, and one through the foster care system.

Like Sally Ankerfelt, Gayle Swift is a co-founder of Growing Intentional Families Together, an adoption coach, and an adoptive parent. She writes both the GIFT blog and a children’s book blog that reviews books through an Adoption Attuned lens. Gayle’s articles have been featured on Adoption.com, AmericaAdopts.com, Portrait of Adoption and more. She writes about adoption for adults and children. Her books have all won awards.

Gayle is also the new co-host of this podcast, Essentials for Adoption Attuned Parenting.