WCharles Loring Brace was an American philanthropist who contributed to the field of social reform. He is considered a father of the modern foster care movement and was most renowned for starting the Orphan Train movement of the mid-19th century, and for founding Children's Aid Society.
WSister Irene was an American nun who founded the New York Foundling Hospital in 1869, at a time when abandoned infants were routinely sent to almshouses with the sick and insane. The first refuge was in a brownstone on E.12th St. in Manhattan, where babies could be left anonymously in a receiving crib with no questions asked. The practice was an echo of the medieval foundling wheel and an early example of modern "safe haven" practices.
WBernice Gottlieb was an early leader in the trans-racial adoption movement in the United States. In later years, she led a residential real estate firm and authored several books, including one on adoption.
WThe Reverend Peter Lawrence Pond (1933–2000) was a New England clergyman, activist and philanthropist who worked with Cambodian orphans on the Thai-Cambodian border. He was Executive Director of the Providence-based Cambodian Crisis Committee and was a co-founder of the Thai Friends Relief Foundation as well as the Inter-Religious Mission for Peace in Cambodia.
WAnthony Rampton OBE (1915–1993) was a British businessman and philanthropist, and chairman of the clothing retailer Freemans from 1965 to 1984.
WErnestine Jane Geraldine Russell was an American actress, singer, and model. She is known as one of Hollywood's leading sex symbols in the 1940s and 1950s.
WJ. (Julia) Jessie Taft was an early American authority on child placement and therapeutic adoption. Educated at the University of Chicago, she spent the bulk of her professional life at the University of Pennsylvania, where she and Virginia Robinson were the co-founders and innovators of the functional approach to social work. Taft is the author of The Dynamics of Therapy in a Controlled Relationship (1933). She is also remembered for her work as the translator and biographer of Otto Rank, an outcast disciple of Sigmund Freud; in addition, development of the functional approach to social work was greatly inspired by her work with Rank. She and her lifelong companion, Virginia Robinson, adopted and raised two children.
WBeulah George "Georgia" Tann was an American child trafficker who operated the Tennessee Children's Home Society, an adoption agency in Memphis, Tennessee. Tann used the unlicensed home as a front for her black market baby adoption scheme from the 1920s until a state investigation into numerous instances of adoption fraud being perpetrated by her closed the institution in 1950. Tann died of cancer before the investigation made its findings public. Tann's custom of placing children with influential members of society normalized adoption in America, and many of her adoption practices became standard practice.