Your contribution means more than simply helping cover an expense. It helps sustain a growing, year-round effort to remember adoptees who are no longer here, amplify adoptee voices, create space for difficult conversations, support first-person storytelling, and bring greater awareness to realities within adoption that are too often overlooked.
Adoptee Remembrance Day is an independent, founder-led, volunteer initiative. We do not have paid staff, corporate sponsorship, institutional funding, or the financial backing of a nonprofit organization. Much of this work has been personally funded and maintained through countless volunteer hours. Your support helps change that by allowing this work to continue growing without placing the entire financial responsibility on one person.
Your contribution helps support the Adoptee Remembrance Day website and domains, the Wall of Remembrance, adoptee contributor honorariums, our year-round Substack publication, educational resources and research, outreach and awareness campaigns, remembrance projects, technology, printing, promotional materials, and other expenses associated with maintaining this initiative throughout the year.
Every contribution matters.
If You Gave in Memory or Honor of Someone
If your contribution was made in memory or honor of an adoptee, loved one, or someone who has impacted your life, thank you for allowing their memory to become part of the heart behind this work.
If you included a tribute message and gave us permission to share it publicly, your words may be included in future Adoptee Remembrance Day remembrance efforts.
A tribute contribution does not automatically add someone to the Wall of Remembrance. The Wall has specific eligibility guidelines and a separate submission process to protect the integrity of this living memorial.
Visit the Wall of Remembrance
The Wall of Remembrance is a living memorial honoring adoptees who have died by suicide, adoptees murdered by adoptive parents, and adoptees who are missing or whose whereabouts remain unknown.
Behind every name is an entire human life.
We invite you to read their names, remember them, and help ensure they are never forgotten.
Hear Directly From Adoptees
The Adoptee Remembrance Day Substack is our year-round publication dedicated to first-person adoptee stories, remembrance, suicide awareness and prevention, education, resources, and serious experiences affecting adoptee lives.
Adoptee contributors whose stories are selected receive an honorarium. Financial support from people like you helps make those honorariums possible while keeping the publication free and accessible to everyone.
Visit and Subscribe to the Adoptee Remembrance Day Substack
One of the stories currently featured is Sara’s “Life & Death Stuff,” a deeply personal first-person account about her experiences with suicide and being adopted. Please consider checking it out. Sara’s story is the heart of why Adoptee Remembrance Day Exists.
Read Sara’s “Life & Death Stuff”
October 30 Is Adoptee Remembrance Day
Every October 30, people around the world are invited to participate in Adoptee Remembrance Day.
Wear yellow. Learn about adoptee experiences. Read the names on the Wall of Remembrance. Share information about the day with your community. Most importantly, at 12 PM in your local time, join us for four minutes of silence in remembrance of adoptees who are no longer here.
But this work does not begin and end on October 30.
Adoptee lives matter every day of the year. Adoptee stories deserve to be heard every day of the year. And the difficult realities affecting adoptees deserve attention long after October has passed.
Learn More About Adoptee Remembrance Day
Help Spread the Word
Financial support is only one way to help.
Share Adoptee Remembrance Day with someone who has never heard of it. Share the Wall of Remembrance. Send an adoptee story to someone who needs to hear it. Talk about October 30. Wear yellow. Observe the four minutes of silence. Invite an organization, mental health professional, educator, podcast, publication, adoption professional, or community leader to learn about this day.
You can also wear or share Adoptee Remembrance Day merchandise to help bring the message into spaces we may never reach otherwise.
Explore Adoptee Remembrance Day Merchandise
Thank You for Helping Carry This Work Forward
Whether you contributed in memory of someone, in honor of an adoptee you love, because you are an adoptee yourself, because an adoptee’s story moved you, or simply because you believe these lives and experiences deserve greater awareness, thank you.
You are helping sustain work that began with a simple but urgent belief: adoptees who are struggling deserve to be heard while they are here, and adoptees who are no longer here deserve to be remembered.
Thank you for believing that adoptee lives are worth remembering, adoptee voices are worth hearing, and this work is worth continuing.
LISTENING TO ADOPTEES IS SUICIDE PREVENTION.
With gratitude,
Pamela A. Karanova
Founder, Adoptee Remembrance Day
