 Please join NPA at the Korean American Adoptee Adoptive Family (KAAN) 2018 Conference being held this year in the Twin Cities! We are excited to experience our first KAAN Conference, and look forward to sharing our session, Shifting the Narrative: Advocacy and You.
Recap of 3/16/18 event “All Kinds of Awesome: Untold True Stories from the Korean Adoptee Community”4/3/2018 “It’s incumbent not only on adoptees but upon all of us in this room to help us fill in places in those stories and to allow space for those stories to develop, to be nurtured, and to be created as we move forward.” – Eric Sharp, emcee for the evening March 16, 2018 - Network of Politicized Adoptees (NPA) and curator Eric Sharp presented ALL KINDS of AWESOME: Untold True Stories from the Korean Adoptee Community, an event that highlighted stories from eight Korean adoptees. The event took place at the Loft Literary Center performance hall, a space that offered a beautiful and intimate feel. With over 100 attendees, the evening began with an informal reception, and the program commenced soon after with welcome addresses from NPA and the co-sponsors. Eric Sharp acted as the evening’s emcee and warmed the room up with group participation and storytelling activities intended to encourage empathy and human connection. He introduced each featured storyteller before they shared, held space with them on stage, and offered insightful closing thoughts to conclude the program. Pictured below- Curator and emcee Eric Sharp, and Storytellers Katie B., eunha jeong wood, and Nik Nadeau. Bottom Storytellers: Jennifer Weir, Kim Park Nelson, Ph.D., Kaela Marie HaNah Schweisthal, Julie Jong Koch.  Photo by Nawang B.
 Korean adoptees have long struggled with lack of access to our history, and sometimes minimal understanding of the sociopolitical and cultural influences that shaped the landscape to and from which we were adopted. Join NPA for an exciting opportunity to close the knowledge gap and empower us as a community.
Network of Politicized Adoptees is thrilled to be offering a new discussion course this coming spring. Designed and taught by Kim Park Nelson, Ph.D., "Histories and Cultures of Korean American Transnational Adoption" will be offered as a 4-month Korean-adoptee-ONLY course, starting in Feb 2018 and meeting every other week through May 2018. This will be a closed course, with enrollment starting immediately, and participation maxed at 15. Attendance, commitment and participation at all classes is expected. Hosted in partnership with AK Connection  What image do you see? Which Korea are you from? Are you a "good Korean" or a "bad Korean"?
Join Network of Politicized Adoptees (NPA) and AK Connection on Nov 27 (Monday) for an opportunity to come together to process what it means to be Korean adoptees during this time of heightened negative media and violence toward the Korean peninsula. This event will be a space to learn more about our history and have an open discussion on how that context impacts us today. Join Network of Politicized Adoptees (NPA) for a co-facilitated discussion with Kim Park Nelson on Fri, April 7, 2017. This conversation will explore our immigrant identities as Korean and Asian adoptees living in Minnesota. We hope that the conversation will provide new ways of framing our immigrant experiences, connect people within our community who’ve had a similar experiences, and empower our community to mobilize and get involved. We want folks to walk away with a clear connection between immigration history and adoption history.
Greetings!
We are excited to introduce ourselves to you and the rest of our community. Network of Politicized Adoptees (NPA) has been quietly meeting for several years in the backdrop of much significant movement in the adoptee community. During that time, we focused on who we were, who we want to become, why we value ourselves, and how we can contribute to our community. Our process of politicization was both intentional and organic—through the exploration of established resources, reading about Korea’s divided and complicated history, building a larger self-understanding of Korean diasporic issues, and sharing our most personal stories with each other. As our identity and purpose became more clear, we decided it was time to share ourselves with you in hopes that we can be a more public part of the larger adoptee rights movement. We also believe we have things to contribute, including resources, ideas, alerts, and all around collective, movement-oriented energy. We as adoptees have created our own unique place in this world through our identities that live in the margins, and strengths created from our beginnings. We also have struggled as a community, forging our own paths of adoptee culture and identity, while navigating loss, racism, and invisibility. It is our hope that we can center the rights of ourselves as adoptees, resist the power of those who want to tell our stories for us, and move toward a retelling of our own narratives together. Our website is still a work in progress, but we will continue working on making it a valuable resource. We welcome your constructive input, corrections, and suggestions. Please also find us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Thank you for finding us, and Happy 2017! JJ Koch Co-chair of NPA |
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Margie Andreason Archives
March 2019
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