University staff members Mario Acquesta and Valerie Beeman began the journey to adopt their nine-year-old daughter, Diana, in 2002. As the second Stanford family to adopt a child through the Adoption Adventure Network, the couple found themselves participating in a program that is changing the nature of the contemporary adoption process.

While researching on the Internet for adoption agencies, Acquesta, the director of Human Resources Information Systems, and Beeman, the Campus Readiness Specialist in ITSS, found themselves inundated with seemingly impersonal online pictures of far-away orphans.

“It was sad, and it was overwhelming,” Beeman said. “We thought, ‘How can we make that sort of life decision when all we have is a tiny little photograph and a one-paragraph description?’”

However, Acquesta and Beeman found Adoption Adventure Network’s program to be a departure from the practices of traditional adoption agencies and decided to adopt a child through them.

Adoption Adventure Network is a Bay Area program that works with adoption agencies in Russia to bring orphaned children to potential adoptive families in the United States. The network organizes a three week “American Culture Camp” in which the children, whose ages range from four to eleven years, stay with American families and participate in day camp activities such as learning English and arts and crafts.

The couple hosted the then eight-year-old Russian orphan for two weeks in the winter of 2002.

“We knew, in the less than twenty-four hours that she was in our home, that we were going to go forward [with the adoption],” Beeman said.

Beeman cited the Adoption Adventure Program, along with a grant from Stanford’s Adoption Assistance Program as two pivotal factors that helped her and her husband bring Diana into their home this past August. The $10,000 grant, which is available through the Stanford WorkLife Office, helped cover a significant portion of what Azilla estimates as the $28,000 average cost of adopting a child.

Because the Adoption Adventure Network deals largely with older children, program founder and coordinator David Azilla feels strongly about the organization’s philosophy of connecting the child to the family in a natural home environment.

“With the older kids, it’s on your own home turf, you don’t have to travel and it costs nothing,” Azilla said. “You get to see them in the context of your own family. You get an extended period of time where you can see some of the child’s temperament and you can see how they interact with their peers.”

Beeman also discussed the merits of the hosting experience, especially as this was her first time having a child in the family.

“It really gives you a good ability to see not only how the child is like but to see how you respond to the child’s needs,” she said. “We really learned about ourselves and we learned about what we wanted to cultivate in a relationship with a child.”

Although there are not many programs such as Adoption Adventure Network in the United States, they are growing in number, and their average success rate in matching host families with children is 93 percent, according to Azilla.

In addition to the hosting program, Adoption Adventure Network has the added security that the Russian birth mothers have a longer period of time to decide whether they truly want to put up their baby for adoption than birth mothers in the United States. Thus, when the birth mother gives her child up for adoption, she effectively terminates her parental rights, leading to fewer instances of families being split from their adopted children after the adoption has occurred, according to press contact Corrie Reynolds.

The Adoption Adventure Network has facilitated nearly 65 adoptions in the two and a half years since it began, a number that surpasses the total number of children adopted through all the other Bay Area organizations combined, said Azilla. Most of the adoptive families are in the Los Altos and Palo Alto areas, with two of those families from the Stanford community.

In fact, Beeman and her husband continue to keep in touch with the other families who adopted Russian children through Adoption Adventure Network, contacting the other parents to share advice as well as to invite each other to social gatherings.

Through these gatherings, the adopted children have the opportunity to reunite and speak to each other in Russian, which Beeman hopes will be a factor contributing to Diana’s successful transition into the United States. Although the couple does not speak Russian, they have found a Russian-speaking therapist to help Diana in her first year of third grade.

“She has so amazingly quickly picked up her English, and yet she is still able to retain her native language,” Beeman said.