Dr. Pavao, Ed.D., LCSW, LMFT, is the Founder and CEO of Center For Family Connections, Inc. (CFFC - est. 1995) in Cambridge and New York, Adoption Resource Center (ARC - est. 1973) in Cambridge, Pre/Post Adoption Consulting Team (PACT - est. 1978) in Cambridge, and Family Connections Training Institute (FaCT - est. 1995) in Cambridge. She is a Clinical Member and Approved Supervisor of the American Association of Marriage and Family Therapy, Clinical Member of the American Orthopsychiatric Association (Ortho), and Clinical Member of the American Family Therapy Association. She is a member and past Director of the American Adoption Congress, former Board member of the Open Door Society of Massachusetts, Kinship Alliance in Monterey, California, and Education and Policy Board of Adoptive Families of America in Minneapolis. She is currently on the Practice Board of the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute in New York, the Editorial Boards of Adoptive Families magazine and Foster Families Today magazine, the Adoption Advisory Board of the Child Welfare League of America, and the Library Board of the Oregon Post Adoption Resource Center. Dr. Pavao has received many awards and honors, including the Children's Bureau/U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Adoption Excellence Award for Family Contribution (2003), The Massachusetts Association for Marriage and Family Therapy award for Outstanding Contribution to the Field of Marriage and Family Therapy (2003), the North American Council for Adoptable Children award for Adoption Advocate of the Year (2001) and Child Advocate of the Year (2001), and the Congressional Coalition on Adoption award for Angels in Adoption (2000), as nominated by Senator Edward Kennedy and Congressman Mike Capuano. Dr. Pavao has done extensive training, both nationally and internationally. She is an adjunct faculty member in Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and has lectured at Harvard, Smith, Wellesley, UCLA, USC, and Antioch, among other universities. She has consulted to various public and private child welfare agencies, adoption agencies, schools, and community groups, as well as probate and family court judges, lawyers, and clergy. Additionally, she has worked closely with individuals, couples, and families with adoption-related issues, foster care issues, guardianship and kinship, as well as complex families formed through reproductive technology, single parent families, gay and lesbian families, and families through remarriage. Her constant chant is that adoption is about finding families for children, not about finding children for families and although she is a family therapist with empathy for all parties, she keeps her focus on the best interests of the child. Her other mantra is that it takes a community to hold a family and the wider community needs to understand the Family of Adoption. She has developed models for treatment and for training using her systemic, intergenerational, and developmental framework The Normative Crises in the Development of the Adoptive Family (Family Therapy News, 1982) and her book The Family of Adoption (Beacon Press, 1998 and 2005) has received high acclaim. In addition, she is a contributing writer to Clinical Practice Issues in Adoption: Bridging the Gap Between Adoptees Placed as Infants and as Older Children, Groza and Rosenberg, ed. (Praeger Press, 1998), Creating Kinship, Roszia, Baran and Coleman, ed. (National Child Welfare Resource Center, 1997), Adoption Healing, Sprenger, ed. (New Zealand Adoption Trust, 1997), and Post Adoption Services: Emerging Themes, Issues and Interventions (Casey Family Services, 1995. She states that more than her degrees and honors, her most valuable credential is that she has experienced life as an adopted person and she has love and great respect for both her birth and adoptive families. |
Dr. Gindis received his doctorate in developmental psychology at the Moscow Academic Research Institute of General and Educational Psychology and his post-doctoral training in School Psychology at the City University of New York. He is a licensed psychologist and a nationally certified bilingual (Russian/English) school psychologist. Dr. Gindis specializes in clinical work and research in the field of international adoption. He is the Chief Psychologist and Director of the Center for Cognitive-Developmental Assessment and Remediation located in Nanuet, NY. The Center provides bilingual psycho-educational evaluations and other services for internationally adopted children in cooperation with a network of bilingual mental health and education specialists. Dr. Gindis is the principal instructor at the BGCenter Online School, where he teaches courses for parents of internationally adopted children and school and adoption agency professionals. Dr. Gindis is the author of over 40 scientific articles, and book chapters, has served as a guest-editor for psychology journals, and has been a keynote speaker at national and international conferences. He is a Full Professor (retired) and former Director of Bilingual Program at Touro College Graduate School of Education and Psychology. To learn more about Dr. Gindis and his clinical service and research in the field of international adoption please visit www.bgcenterSchool.org and www.bgcenter.com. |
Hollee McGinnis, Policy and Operations Director at the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, has been a prominent educator, speaker and activist in the adoption community for the past 16 years. She is the founder of Also-Known-As, Inc., a non-profit adult intercountry adoptee organization whose activities include development of post-adoption services and resources for internationally adopted people and their families, a mentorship program for adopted youth, and motherland tour to Korea for adopted adults. The organization was a sponsor of the First Gathering of the First Generation of Korean Adoptees, a groundbreaking conference where McGinnis presented a speech on international search and reunion, "Search: 10 Questions to Ask," that has been widely disseminated in the United States and abroad. McGinnis speaks regularly to adoption groups and at conferences, addressing issues of racial and ethnic identity, birth search and reunion, history of Korean intercountry adoptions, and parenting. She was the founder and editor of Transcultured Magazine, a quarterly periodical chronicling the adoption life journey, and has written for KoreAM Journal. She has been widely interviewed in the media, including by the New York Times, on PBS and on Bloomberg Radio. Her publications include pieces in two anthologies, Parents at Last: Celebrating Adoption and the New Pathways to Parenthood, and Voices from Another Place. She also has chapters in the book Adoption Parenting: Creating a Toolbox, Building Connections and in the Handbook of Adoption: Implications for Researchers, Practitioners, and Families. Her writing has also appeared in national publications including Adoptive Families, Adoption Today, and the Christian Science Monitor, and she has provided testimony on behalf of Asian intercountry adoptees for the White House Initiative on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. Her honors include the Korean World Leaders of Tomorrow award for leadership in the area of social services. McGinnis completed the Post-Masters Clinical Social Work Fellowship program at the Yale Child Study Center, where she provided therapeutic services for families and children, many in foster care, and helped to develop an adoptive parent psycho-educational group at the Yale International Adoption Clinic. McGinnis graduated cum laude from Mount Holyoke College, where she completed an independent study on ethnic and racial identity of college-aged Korean adoptees, and a paper on the history of Vietnamese intercountry adoptions. She received her masters of science at Columbia University School of Social Work, where she concentrated in social welfare policy practice and international social welfare. During her field work at the Council on Accreditation, she authored a white paper on the implications of the Intercountry Adoption Act of 2000 on US adoption practice and provided analysis of various foster care services. McGinnis - who is also known as Lee Hwa Yeong - was adopted from South Korea and has been united with her birth family. |
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