It is with great honor that we can announce that Christina Shuma has been awarded the Congressional Angel in Adoption Award for the State of Vermont for 2019. Angels in the Adoption are celebrated for making extraordinary contributions to adoption, permanency, and child welfare. Christina will be honored at a Gala in Washington DC in November.
Christina has worked at Lund since 2000. She started as Permanency Planning Counselor and then after several years she changed her focus to providing post permanency support to families who were joined together by adoption or guardianship. In the last three years Christina has taken on the position of coordinating the Vermont Adoption Registry as well as being the QICAG Site Implementation Manager.
Christina is always up for a challenge and never shies away from learning and growing. She was a pioneer in the development of the Post Permanency Program at Lund and has been leading the Vermont Adoption Consortium to establish best practice standards across all of the member agencies. She is energetic, dependable, and flexible in all aspects of her work. Christina has an expansive grasp of the history of adoption in Vermont through her work for the Vermont Adoption Registry and Lund’s Search and Reunion Program. She is an expert in adoption law and follows it exactly. Christina is an excellent problem solver and decision maker. Christina is a true asset to Lund and we are very lucky to have her on our team. She is an extremely deserving recipient of the Angel in Adoption Award.
Hear from Christina in this recent interview:
Tell us about what you do at Lund:
I have three current job titles- site implementation manager for QIC AG project (stands for Quality Improvement Center for Adoption and Guardian Support), Vermont Adoption Registry Coordinator, and Post Adoption Contact Agreement Worker,
As the QIC-AG site implementation manager, I coordinated the distribution and collection of survey of all Vermont adoptive and guardian families who have an adoption assistance agreement. The purpose was to understand how the families are doing after adoption – what services are being accessed and which ones are not, what’s not going well and what’s going well, figuring out how we can replicate what’s going well, what are those characteristics, how can we support those characteristics in other families.
That project is ending in September, the state is taking the learning and facts from that survey to implement the changes necessary to keep having successful post permanency services.
The Vermont Adoption Registry assists all members of the adoption constellation with the possibility of accessing additional information about each other. This includes adult adoptees reaching out to contact or get information about biological family. The registry is the only agency that can release information about birth parents to adoptees (post adoption contact, adoptive parents) or facilitate that kind of contact.
As the Post Adoption Contact Agreement Worker, I assists in negotiating appropriate and necessary contact between birth parent(s) and intended adopted families.
What does winning the Angel in Adoption award mean to you?
This award is gratifying and validating that the work I’m doing and have done throughout my career, especially in the last three years, is having a positive and real impact on the families I worked with in adoption or guardianship. It’s overwhelming to have the recognition that other people have seen the work I’m doing.
What is the greatest challenge in your work?
The greatest challenge is just trying to keep up with all the new interventions and the information that becomes available through research. Trying to keep up with knowing what the newer treatment programs are and what new thinking and language is coming out. Keeping up with the times, keeping up with the field and what is new out there in the world today, so we in Vermont can keep our eye on progress and practice being better.
What are you most proud of in the course of your work at Lund?
I’m proud of a couple of things. Something that has stuck with me from being a permanency planning counselor was working with an individual who was in a residential treatment facility, helping them find and locate a permanent family for their older child. Being able to see her whole journey, from finalizing the adoption to hearing about her graduating 8th grade, graduating high school, and more recently, getting married. Being able to be a part of that.
Something else is the implementing of this survey. We had a large response rate from the survey (55%), so to actually see the information that is being gleaned and that is pretty representative of adoption in this state and to be able to utilize that date to make those changes in the State.
And to be able to help individuals find information about the birth families, whether it be medical information or about reaching out to contact.
What are you looking forward to during your trip to DC for the gala?
It sounds like a hoot and a half, being able to go to something called a Gala is just fun. I’m looking forward to meeting with represented officials, I think that there will be interesting conversations, especially related to positive policy and family services changes we can make.
Congratulations Christina!
