Gladney Blog

Hi everyone! I’m Laura, and I am an intern in the Birth Parent Services department. One of my main roles at Gladney is to research ways to improve birth parent experiences through more readable documents and evaluation surveys. I get excited knowing the work I am doing is reducing barriers birth parents face as they create adoption plans. However, my sweetest times at Gladney have not been behind a computer screen, but have been in hospital rooms and out in the community loving on sweet birth families. Leading up to my internship, I prayed that I would get to hold a precious baby and on my first day here, I was blessed with the opportunity to carry and love on an adorable baby boy. It is amazing how a baby so tiny can hold such a big place in your heart.

Hi, my name is Marissa Hernandez. I am a senior at the University of North Texas and I am gradating with a Bachelor in social work this spring of 2018! Like most people, I did not quite understand what adoption really was before Gladney. All I knew was that I wanted to help those in need to have a forever home. Therefore, my professor at North Texas linked me to Gladney and now I could not imagine doing my internship anywhere else.

Hey, there! I’m Katie, a Communications Intern at Gladney Center for Adoption. During my internship, I have worked with my boss, Noah Rodgers, to help create film and media content for Gladney University and AdoptED. After spending three years working as a Social Media Ambassador for Emory University and one year working as an intern in Emory’s Film and Media Studies Department, I was so excited to use my film and media experience to serve the Gladney community. Luckily, I scored the hands-on film and media internship of my dreams! My boss gave me the opportunity to help build our film sets, film the live-streamed Gladney University events, and create social media content for Gladney University. I also created documents with ideas for social media content and a social media calendar to help us brainstorm seasonal and holiday-related content for Instagram and Facebook posts. While I had a blast making documents about emoji usage and hashtags, my favorite part about my internship was the reminder that everything I did at Gladney was an act of service—for a birthmother, a child, a family, or a member of our community.

As a Gladney intern with the Next Steps program I came in wanting to know about all things Gladney as soon as I could learn. There are so many facets to Gladney that I quickly realized this would take time. I started this process by attending whatever trainings I was allowed. This included Domestic Orientation, Pathway’s, New Hire Orientation, and legal training. After attending these trainings I was able to put a lot more of the pieces together of the puzzle that is Gladney. While still many pieces were missing in the “1000” piece puzzle, I was determined to turn over all the pieces and see where they go.  When I created my learning contract at the beginning of the semester I took risks to make myself branch out, because if it is part of the contract, I have to complete it, right? As a high functioning introvert I knew it would take this to make me try new things and meet new people. Since I had to meet certain criteria on my contract, I began networking with people in different departments to shadow them for a time. This was fantastic. While it was a little anxiety producing, it brought out so much information about so many topics that I didn’t even realize. With Gladney being so large you may wonder how I did this.

Hey Gladney friends and family!

My name is Mikayla Ollie and I have been an intern at Gladney for 3 weeks. I am interning from the University of North Texas while in my last semester of my degree for Human Development and Family Sciences. Before joining Gladney, my idea of my future career was a bit broad. I just wanted to help people. I wasn't sure how; I wasn't sure where; I wasn't sure of much. I spent most of my college career working HR for a cut-throat, dog-eat-dog, 'high-end' retail company. Although I enjoyed my HR job, I really didn't want to continue with that company. As I looked for internships in the HR field, nothing really fed my hunger to give back to the community. Then a miracle happened....