Advisory Board

ROELIE POST: While working at the European Commission on the DG Enlargement, Romania Team, Roelie dealt with issues of children's rights, particularly adoption, including the monitoring of these issues in the framework of Romania's accession to the European Union. Also the programming of pre-accession assistance, the Phare Programme, on these issues was part of her tasks.

Roelie Post was a civil servant who became a whistle blower with the publication of her book based on the diary she kept over an eight-year period beginning in 1999, while she worked to reform Romanian adoption.

She is author of Romania for Export Only: The untold story of the Romania “orphans” which details her findings.

  Mirah (aka Marsha) Riben has been researching, writing and speaking about the need to reform, humanize, and de-commercialize American adoption practices for  nearly four decades. Excerpts of Riben's first book shedding light on...The Dark Side of Adoption (1988), have appeared in Utne Reader; Social Issue Resources Series, Inc.; and Macrocosm USA.

A former Director-at-Large of the American Adoption Congress, is co-founder of Origins, a New Jersey-based national organization for women who have lost children to adoption, Riben is currently on the Board of Directors of OriginsUSA.
Riben has been keynote speaker at many national adoption conferences, appeared on national television, and has substitute taught at Staten Island College and guest lectured at Rutgers University. Riben is the mother of four, one of whom was lost to adoption shortly after birth and is now deceased.

Ribens' second book, The Stork Market: America's Multi-Billion Dollar Unregulated Adoption Industry was released in 2007.

 EVELYN ROBINSON: Social worker, author, and presenter who has lived and worked in Australia since 1982. She is also a mother who was separated from her son by adoption in her homeland of Scotland in 1970. They were reunited in 1991 and continue to enjoy a close relationship. Since 1994 Evelyn has been speaking at conferences and presenting seminars on the topic of the long term outcomes of adoption separation. She has traveled widely since her first book, Adoption and Loss – The Hidden Grief, was published in 2000 and has met with professionals and members of the adoption community in many countries.

Her second book, Adoption and Recovery – Solving the mystery of reunion, was published in 2004. Evelyn has been involved with post-adoption services since 1989 and has worked since 1999 in a professional capacity as a post-adoption counsellor with adults who have experienced adoption separation. Her work in the post-adoption field has been acknowledged internationally and in 2006 Evelyn was keynote speaker at a conference in Bucharest on The Rights of the Child, at the invitation of the Romanian government. Evelyn’s experience and expertise have also been recognised locally and she has been invited by the new government-funded Post Adoption Support Service in South Australia to provide training for their counsellors.

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