Monday Evening Speaker Series
Adoption Network Cleveland is pleased to offer a VIRTUAL Monday Evening Speaker Series full of topics that are of interest to a broad audience impacted by adoption, kinship, and foster care. These programs are made possible by donors and presenters volunteering their time and they thrive thanks to the active participation of attendees.
Check out past speakers on YouTube.
Upcoming Presentations
Monday, September 14, 2026
8:00 PM - 9:00 PM ET (VIRTUAL)
Big Feeling Days with Zoe Hansen-DiBello
This talk explores the "Big Feeling Days" that often come with being an adoptee and how we can learn to navigate them with greater awareness and self-compassion.
These moments don't always announce themselves. Mother's Day. Birthdays. Doctor's visits. Becoming a parent ourselves. Filling out family medical history. They can surface grief, curiosity, joy, loss, or questions of identity in unexpected ways.
Together, we'll develop a shared language for understanding these everyday moments and milestones, while exploring practical ways to support our own wellbeing and invite our village into the healing process. By naming these experiences, we create space for connection, resilience, and belonging, not only for ourselves, but for the people who walk alongside us.
ABOUT ZOE
Zoë Hansen-DiBello, PhD, is the Founder & CEO of Unfolding, a wellbeing app for adoptees and their village. A TEDx speaker and adoptee herself, she draws on lived experience, storytelling, and research to encourage adoptees and the people who care for them to build a daily practice around identity, belonging, and healing.
Monday, September 21, 2026
8:00 PM - 9:00 PM ET
The Power of Belonging: 39 Years of Adoption Network Cleveland with Betsie Norris
For 39 years, Adoption Network Cleveland has been more than an organization—it has been a lifeline, a refuge, and a place where people discover they are not alone. It is where stories once held in silence are finally spoken, where questions that lingered for decades find understanding, and where connection becomes a pathway to healing.
Founded on the belief that every voice matters, Adoption Network Cleveland honors lived experience, amplifies the perspectives of those most directly impacted, and creates space for the often-unspoken realities of adoption—the grief alongside the joy, the questions alongside the answers, and the lifelong journey of identity, connection, and belonging.
In this special anniversary presentation, Executive Director Betsie Norris shares her personal search and reunion story that inspired her to recognize an unmet need leading her to found Adoption Network Cleveland. She traces the organization's 39-year evolution into a nationally recognized leader in advocacy, support, and education for the populations that it serves.
Through stories of resilience, growth, and impact, attendees will gain a deeper understanding of the complex realities surrounding adoption and the transformative power of community, connection, and belonging.
ABOUT BETSIE:
Betsie Norris is the Founder and Executive Director of Adoption Network Cleveland. An adoptee herself, she searched for and was reunited with her birth parents and siblings in 1986 and emerged from that experience with strong convictions about the lifelong journey of adoption for all involved, and the need for systemic change.
She founded Adoption Network Cleveland in 1988, served as a volunteer for its first seven years, and has led the organization as Executive Director since 1995.
With a wide array of programs and services, Adoption Network Cleveland has been recognized nationally as a successful model for effective service and advocacy for members of the adoption community including adoptees, adoptive, foster and kinship families, birth parents and siblings, people facing DNA discoveries, youth in foster care and related professionals.
Betsie has become a frequent spokesperson in the media and has led the organization to long-term success, building innovative programs and playing a strong advocacy role. Major advocacy achievements include changing laws about access to records resulting in Ohio adoptees gaining access to their original birth certificate, leading successful efforts to decrease barriers to permanency for youth in foster care, and outlawing fertility fraud in Ohio.
Adoption Network Cleveland served as the lead agency of the Adopt Cuyahoga’s Kids Initiative, a public-private-philanthropic partnership which was responsible for reducing the number of youth lingering in foster care in Cuyahoga County from 1,700 in 2004 to approximately 500 in 2018. The organization has supported and assisted in thousands of successful adoptee/birth family and DNA searches and reunions and has been a leader in supporting families to enhance trauma-informed parenting and permanency for children and youth.
Over a 25+ year period, Betsie took the lead on legislation to reform Ohio’s adoption laws, and as a result all Ohio-born adult adoptees adopted have access to their original birth certificates, including 400,000 adoptees adopted in Ohio's formerly "closed" period (1964-1996) starting in March 2015. The story of her involvement is highlighted in the short documentary An Adoptee ROARed in Ohio: The Betsie Norris Story by Jean Strauss, which debuted at the Cleveland International Film Festival in 2014. Betsie is co-author of Journeys After Adoption: Understanding the Lifelong Process (Bergin & Garvey, 2002) and her story is featured in several books. Prior to her work in adoption and child welfare, Betsie worked as an RN in child and adolescent psychiatry.
Monday, October 19, 2026
8:00 PM - 9:00 PM ET
Torn from the Root: a Memoir of a Black Transracial Adoptee with Rhonda Roorda
As a Black child adopted out of the New York foster care system as a toddler and raised by white evangelical parents, Rhonda Roorda had to learn how to walk in two different worlds. She often questioned “whether my skin was too dark” and if she “acted too white.” She recalls being haunted by feelings of shame and not being enough. Torn from the Root is her illuminating story of identity, belonging, and purpose and lays bare the deep pain she felt navigating life as a vulnerable Black girl and how she healed herself.
ABOUT RHONDA:
Rhonda M. Roorda, M.A., is a nationally recognized speaker, author, and consultant on transracial adoption whose insights have been featured on Good Morning America and ABC News, in People magazine, and in the Emmy Award–winning television series This Is Us. A transracial adoptee, she is the author of the acclaimed In Their Voices: Black Americans on Transracial Adoption, recognized as a Choice Outstanding Academic Title, and the coauthor of a groundbreaking trilogy on transracial adoption. Through her writing, research, and speaking, Roorda has become a leading voice exploring identity, belonging, and the lifelong impact of adoption across racial and cultural boundaries. She lives in Michigan with her family.
Monday, December 7, 2026
8:00 PM - 9:00 PM ET
What Does it Mean to Belong with Meaghan Carriere
What does it mean to belong?
“You belong here.” These were the words that I had longed not only to hear, but to feel for as long as I could remember. Perhaps you can relate? These three words reflect the most basic of human desires, that of belonging. As a person of misattributed parentage, this longing never left me. However, just over a decade ago, I learned the context of why this longing ran so deep.
Meaghan Carriere began writing her first book, You Belong Here - An Expressive and Mindful Journey Through Misattributed Parentage, in 2021; and published in September of 2026. In it she shares how the deception and intergenerational trauma of familial separation and misattributed parentage affected her and others in the community. Offering a sense of hope, a path to recovery, new skills, and invitation to community. With an emphasis on embodiment, Meaghan invites people to use art, play, nature, and human connection to express and heal.
In this talk, Meaghan will share a bit about her personal story, the mistakes she made, and what she learned about beginning again after discovery. She explores the meaning of belonging, and the power of establishing a creative practice.
Sadly, the practice of hiding one’s parentage still persists today, with an estimated 1/20 people experiencing this devastating, disorienting discovery. Meaghan hopes that by raising awareness of the harms, people will begin to realize the benefits of openness.
This talk is for anyone who desires to understand the MPE experience more deeply.
ABOUT MEAGHAN:
Meaghan Carriere was born in Saskatchewan, Canada in the 80’s, despite her mom living in BC. She travelled out of province in an effort to hide Meaghan from her birth father. Once born, she filed for her birth certificate using her stepfather’s name in place of his. This secret was kept until Meaghan’s 33rd birthday, when on the cusp of becoming adoptive parents, she and her partner were told the truth. This caused great disorientation and set in motion a decade long journey of recovery.
Since that time Meaghan has become a mental health professional who works with youth, families, and the MPE and adoption community. She is a multi-disciplinary creative who believes deeply in the healing power of art, play, nature, and connection.
In September 2026, Meaghan published her first book titled: You Belong Here - An Expressive and Mindful Journey Through Misattributed Parentage. In it, she details much of her personal and professional experiences related to being an NPE. She aims to lay the foundation for hope, empowerment, and belief in possibility.
You can learn more about her work here: www.linktr.ee/irrota.studio
