Knowing your roots
This story is one of a series written in connection with our 2024 Signature Report, A season of hope: Growing the role of families, which focuses on the importance of kin for children in foster care.
Jessi Ganyard and Samantha Miller had wanted to grow their family for a long time. When they first met, Miller’s daughter, Amaya, was just 10 months old. Now nearly a decade later, they thought their opportunity for Amaya to have a sister or brother had passed.
That’s when their best friend told them her cousin was going to have a baby but couldn’t raise him because of her own life struggles — would they consider caring for him? The Dover, Ohio, couple’s hopes were high, but the baby boy initially went to an unrelated foster family.
That’s where Kinnect came in. The Cleveland-based nonprofit offers services including family search and engagement, kinship and adoption navigation, support for youth in or after foster care, and training to create an affirming culture for LGBTQ+ youth.
Its Kinnect to Family program has helped 3,000 families with an intense family search and engagement service that promises to provide dozens, even hundreds, of family and close kin connections for youth entering foster care. Even if they aren’t a placement option, they might provide transportation or just want to stay connected to help in another way. The average is 150 connections per child.
Before starting Kinnect in the early 2000s, Executive Director Shannon Deinhart was a social worker, placing children in foster care and preparing them for adoptive families. But the number of children adopted was tiny compared to those who were waiting. Additionally, they found that the young people they worked with either had or wanted to have connections to their birth families.
“You can terminate parental rights, but you cannot terminate relationships,” Deinhart says. “And so the idea that we could find their kin and we could reconnect to them and have them have that sense of belonging in that network was the work that we needed to do.”
In Ganyard and Miller’s case, Kinnect to Family staff completed a genogram, or family diagram, that mapped out all the baby’s connections. It included relatives and close family friends. The couple’s names were on it, and with the blessing of other relatives, baby Theo joined their family. Just over a year later, they finalized his adoption.
“He completed our family,” says Ganyard, who runs her own dog training business. She is especially grateful that Theo will grow up knowing his three siblings, who are being cared for by other relatives, and his extended family of cousins and grandparents. “I think knowing the family helps keep that culture of the family,” she says.
“The more people that love him, the better,” adds Miller. “I always think it’s important to know the roots you come from.”