We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Marcy Bursac. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Marcy below.

Alright, Marcy thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Let’s start with the story of your mission. What should we know?

For me it was Olena. For my husband it was Grandpa Sam. We both felt called to adopt. I met Olena in western Europe at an orphanage. She was a teenager who had been dropped off by her family who could not care for her. My husband grew up with Grandpa Sam who was orphaned at age 7 after Sam’s parents both died of illness. While Sam’s two older siblings were adopted, Sam never was.

Once we got married, figuring out how to adopt children in the United States was a difficult research project. We had various reservations and found information really hard to find. 5 years later we began the licensing process to adopt children in foster care after learning about a local organization and finding templates from the Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption that we customized and presented to our employers to receive adoption leave. Our intent was to adopt up to 2 children (potentially a pair of siblings) who were not babies.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

Adoptive mom of a sibling pair, Marcy Bursac here. :waves:

Foster care adoption was my Plan A.

I run a social enterprise – The Forgotten Adoption Option – to help future forever families consider and navigate the foster care adoption process. While remote homeschooling my children during the pandemic, I began to see a gap between adults with the desire to adopt and the 113,000 adoptable children within the U.S. With a heart for those children, and a deep desire to take action, I decided someone should do something and that someone turned out to be me. So I began creating tools to help others with a heart to adopt become a forever family. To date that includes a free app, children’s book, how-to book, book of real life stories, and monthly podcast.

Have any books or other resources had a big impact on you?

I am very fortunate to have a tech career and to work at a company that has paid volunteer time off as an annual benefit. This flexibility and support has given me time to invest in my social enterprise by recording podcast content and working on a research study and even travel for speaking engagements.

Can you open up about how you funded your business?

When I received stimulus payments during the pandemic I felt a deep responsibility to steward the funds well.

After talking with my husband, we agreed I could use one of the payments to scale conversations I had been having with prospective adoptive families in our home multiple times a year and write them down into a book – The Forgotten Adoption Option. My intention was to scale from my living room to the whole country. So I recorded an audiobook and self-published the ebook and paperback book. To date, I have reached 11,555 prospective adoptive families.

Contact Info:

• Website: forgottenadoptionoption.com
• Instagram: @marcybursac @forgottenadoptionoption
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/msbursac & https://www.facebook.com/ForgottenAdoptionOption/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcybursac/

Image Credits
Nathan Cohen, Simply Sweet Photography MO, Kimberly Barnes Photography