Pisey comes home

SUCCESS: Cambodian Pisey Paterson has been granted a visa and will be able to join her adopted family in Torquay.

A FAMILY AT LAST: Torquay's Michael and Meagan Paterson with children Millie, 11, Lachlan, 14 and Hamish, 17, eagerly await adopted daughter and sister Pisey's arrival in Australia this month. Photo: PETER RISTEVSKI

November 21st, 2011
Eliza Sum
Geelong Advertiser (Australia)

LITTLE Pisey Paterson will be home for Christmas.

The five-year-old Cambodian girl will be granted an adoption visa this week, ending an agonising two-year bureaucratic battle that saw her languish in a rape crisis centre thousands of kilometres from her loving Torquay family.

Immigration and Citizenship Minister Chris Bowen confirmed the good news yesterday.

"The Government has now received official confirmation from the Cambodian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Co-operation that the Patersons' adoption is lawful under new Cambodian regulations," he said.

"Following the assurances out of Cambodia, I will immediately use my personal ministerial intervention powers for young Pisey to be able to join her family in Australia.

[Australian] Immigration laws tear family apart

Meagan Paterson with her adopted daughter Pisey.

August 23rd, 2011
Geelong Advertiser (Australia)

A TORQUAY family has been torn apart by a heart-breaking legal loophole, with their five-year-old adopted daughter languishing in a Cambodian rape shelter while her parents try desperately to bring her home.

All the girl wants to know is when she can play with her brothers and sister again.

Meagan Paterson said the family regularly Skyped with Pisey and were at a loss how to answer their daughter when she asked when she would see them again.

"It is just devastating," Mrs Paterson said.

US Maintains Ban on Cambodian Adoptions

A young orphaned Cambodian infant girl infected with the HIV virus sits on a mat in the Phnom Penh Nutrition Center. (Photo: AP)

Chun Sakada, VOA Khmer
Phnom Penh Friday, 18 March 2011

“The United States has not set a date for resumption of inter-country adoption with Cambodia.”

A US envoy for children’s issues declined to lift a ban on US adoptions from Cambodia Friday, despite the 2009 passage of an adoption law, officials said.

The US banned adoptions from Cambodia in 2001, after allegations that mothers were being paid to give up their children to adoption agencies.

Susan Jacobs, the US Ambassador for Children’s Issues, told Cambodian officials the country had made improvements in children’s protection.

But after her two-day fact-finding mission, the US Embassy said in a statement, “The United States has not set a date for resumption of inter-country adoption with Cambodia.”

Special Advisor for Children's Issues Ambassador Susan Jacobs' Travel to Cambodia and Vietnam

March 14, 2011
Media Note
Office of the Spokesman
Washington, DC
Source: US Department of State

Special Advisor for Children’s Issues Ambassador Susan Jacobs will visit Cambodia and Vietnam March 16 – 23 for meetings on intercountry adoptions.

In Cambodia, she will meet with government officials and non-governmental adoption stakeholders to discuss how the United States can work together with the Cambodian government to further support Cambodia’s efforts to fully implement a new law on intercountry adoption. Adoption from Cambodia was suspended in 2001.

In Vietnam, Ambassador Jacobs will meet with government officials to discuss Vietnam’s stated goal of acceding to the Hague Convention on the Protection of Children and Co-Operation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption. The United States welcomes Vietnam’s strong efforts to create a child welfare system and an intercountry adoption process that will meet its obligations under the Convention. The processing of adoptions for Vietnam was suspended in 2008.

For more information about intercountry adoption in Cambodia and Vietnam, visit:

http://adoption.state.gov

For updates on Special Advisor Susan Jacobs’ trip, follow her on twitter: http://twitter.com/childrensissues

US envoy to take up Cambodia, Vietnam adoption

Mar 15, 2011
AFP

WASHINGTON - A US ENVOY will head this week to Vietnam and Cambodia to look at ways to resume adoptions, which have been suspended due to concerns over child trafficking, the State Department said on Monday.

Susan Jacobs, the special US adviser on children's issues, will head on Wednesday to the South-east Asian countries for talks with officials and other stakeholders on adoption, the department said.

The United States suspended adoptions from Cambodia in 2001 and from Vietnam in 2008. In Vietnam, a US probe found that some adoption rackets were paying US$10,000 (S$12,660) 'donations' to orphanages to claim falsely that infants were abandoned.

Beth Kanter: One of the Web's First Social Networkers [-Congratulations, Beth! We are proud of you and your work]

Beth Kanter

Beth Kanter is a trainer, blogger, and consultant to nonprofits and individuals in effective use of social media. Her expertise is how to use new web tools (blogging, tagging, wikis, photo sharing, video blogging, screencasting, social networking sites, and virtual worlds, etc) to support nonprofit. She has worked on projects that include: training, curriculum development, research, and evaluation. She is an experienced coach to "digital immigrants" in the personal mastery of these tools.

She is a professional blogger and writes about the use of social media tools in the nonprofit sector for social change.

Beth Kanter has been tapping into the Internet to raise funds for her Cambodian charity, the Sharing Foundation, for more than a decade

February 9, 2009
By Stephen Baker
Business Week

Click here to read Beth's blog

Beth Kanter remembers it as the year that Yahoo ruined the holidays. In was late 2006. The Boston-based Kanter had already notched lots of successes in fundraising for her Cambodian charity, the Sharing Foundation. But when Yahoo (YHOO) offered $50,000 to the do-gooder who could enlist the most contributors, Kanter shifted into overdrive.

"I showed the people on the [charity's] board how to send the e-mails pointing people to the site. I made my husband go to work. I went totally nuts. We were starting to get gifts that were second or third degree out. (That's social networking lingo for friends of friends.) On New Year's Eve, we were watching the ball drop and suddenly donations went up $15,000 from someone we didn't know. We raised $53,000 and won the $50,000. And we doubled our donor list."

A Social Media Pioneer

Ask Kanter about fundraising, and her strategy quickly becomes clear. She reaches for every tool that can connect with people, and she works them tirelessly. Each birthday is a fundraising occasion. ("In lieu of cards or gifts…" she tells her network.) For one fundraiser, she promoted a "naked picture of me." Those who clicked landed on a Flickr site with her baby picture—and a pitch to donate.

Each friend in Kanter's world is a potentially powerful ally. And in her circles, some are prodigious. New media consultant Chris Brogan, to name one, has 38,300 followers on Twitter, and Kanter makes sure they're in the loop. Through her work, Kanter has not only built a supportive community around the Sharing Foundation; she has also become a fount of lessons and connections for charities and nonprofits worldwide.

Kanter, 52, was a pioneer in social media. Trained as a musician and a longtime employee of the Boston Symphony, she plunged into the Internet in the early '90s. She learned how to code. She was active on early social networks like The Well. She remembers helping to organize cyberspace, as a so-called "Gopher mistress," when "you could sit down with a bottle of beer on a Saturday afternoon and go through the whole Internet."

Exponential Growth

In 2000, Kanter was adopting two children from Cambodia and was blogging her experience. "My blog started out just for me. I needed a place to write and to learn," she says. "I was shocked when I got my first comment, and it was from a Cambodian blogger."

At that point she started to catalog the bloggers in Cambodia. That got her started, first helping the bloggers, and then moving to the rest of their country. In 2005, she was raising money to sponsor the college education of a single Cambodian woman. She stared with the "couple hundred readers" she had on her blog. She raised $800. Not bad.

But in Kanter's social networking world, numbers tend to expand exponentially. It was only a year later that she was raising tens of thousands of dollars. And again, she uses every trick. Last August, she found herself speaking at the Gnomedex technology conference, sponsored by Chris Pirillo. "I looked up and I saw that I had 300 hard-wired geeks in there." So she challenged them to a live fundraising experiment. "I put it out there. It lit up Twitter." The result: $2,500 more for her charity in 90 minutes.

Baker is a senior writer for BusinessWeek in New York.

Angelina Jolie Knew She Was Destined To Adopt A Cambodian Boy

10/12/2008
ContactMusic.com

ANGELINA JOLIE knew she was destined to become a mum during her first trip to Cambodia - because she flew out of the country thinking she had left something behind.

The actress insists she still doesn't believe in fate, but there was something that lured her back to Cambodia, where she met and fell for her first adopted child, Maddox.

She tells WENN, "I went to that country and left that country feeling like I'd left something behind. I went back to that country on a humanitarian mission and was playing with blocks with a little kid and felt, 'My son is here.'

"It was the strangest feeling. I woke up one day and they were going to introduce me to a kid and I wondered how I would feel, and the moment I saw him I knew I was his mother.

"I can't explain it and I don't know why I chose that country but it was absolutely meant to be."

Author raising money for Cambodian school

Tue, Mar. 04, 2008
By JENNIFER BHARGAVA
The Kansas City Star (USA)

Kari Grady Grossman is coming to northeast Johnson County to tell her story.

The Wyoming resident, and author of Bones That Float, A Story of Adopting Cambodia, will be giving a presentation at St. Agnes Catholic Parish this weekend about her efforts to help children in the Asian country.

She will read excerpts from her book, answer questions, show a short documentary and offer ways Kansas City area residents can help.

The presentations are part of her small grass-roots campaign, started seven years ago.

When Grady Grossman and her husband adopted their son from Cambodia in 2001, she said, their lives took a drastic turn.

Struck by the poor conditions surrounding children in the Third World country, the couple raised money to build the Grady Grossman School there.

“After we built the school, we thought we would go home with the baby and continue our normal lives,” Grossman said. “But when we took a trip back, we realized that the school wouldn’t be able to function without community support.”

She is trying to raise money for teacher salaries, school supplies and education for the community on how to operate the school. She would like to come up with a business model that could serve as a pilot for other schools in Cambodia.

The experience prompted her to write a book and start an organization with her husband called “Friends of the Grady Grossman School.”

Now she is asked by readers all over the United States to come and tell her story.
----------------------------
Appearance

Kari Grady Grossman will be holding a presentation at 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. Sunday at St. Agnes Catholic Church and School, 5250 Mission Road in Roeland Park. She will be selling books and Cambodian silk and silver crafts after the show. All proceeds will benefit the Grady Grossman School in Cambodia.

For more information, visit www.gradygrossman