On Your Feet Foundation dba Birthparent Support Alliance

The Birthparent Support Alliance (BSA) is a national nonprofit organization dedicated to providing lifelong, trauma-informed support to birthparents before, during, and after placement. For 25 years, BSA — formerly known as On Your Feet Foundation — has built the country's most comprehensive continuum of care specifically for people who have placed a child for adoption, serving birthparents across the United States and Canada regardless of when their placement occurred: last month or decades ago.

Birthparents are too often treated as a footnote in the adoption story — present at the moment of placement and then forgotten. BSA exists because that grief does not end when the paperwork is signed. Placement is not a single event; it is the beginning of a lifelong relationship with loss, identity, and — for many birthparents — an ongoing role in an open adoption that can be beautiful, complicated, and unlike any other family relationship in American life. Birthparents need more than good wishes on their way out the hospital door. They need practical resources, community with people who understand, and clinical support delivered by professionals who are actually trained in the unique grief of relinquishment. BSA was founded to be that resource, and it remains one of the only organizations in the country built entirely around the needs of birthparents themselves, rather than the needs of adoptive families or adoption agencies.

What We Do

BSA operates as an umbrella organization with two program entities, each addressing a different part of the ecosystem birthparents live in.

Shared Journeys: A Birthparent Collective is BSA's direct-service arm. Through Shared Journeys, birthparents access individualized case management, peer community, and clinical mental health support designed specifically around the experience of relinquishment. This includes Beyond Placement, a therapeutic support group for birthparents that runs in structured cohorts throughout the year under clinical supervision, and a monthly alumni drop-in space for birthparents who have completed a cohort and want to stay connected to community and ongoing support. Shared Journeys also connects birthparents to case managers who help navigate the practical side of life after placement — everything from emotional check-ins to material support like food and transportation assistance during periods of acute need.

Activism in Adoption (AiA) is BSA's education and professional training arm. AiA exists because birthparents are so often failed not by any one bad actor, but by systems — hospitals, adoption agencies, family courts, and mental health providers — that were never trained to understand what birthparents actually need. AiA develops and delivers training for ask members of the adoption constellation including the professionals who sit across the table from birthparents at the most vulnerable moments of their lives: social workers, adoption agency staff, attorneys, and clinicians. Through live trainings, conference presentations, and on-demand programming — including "AiA Your Way," a library of on-demand training videos — AiA is building a professional field that treats birthparent care as a specialty in its own right, grounded in trauma-informed, adoption-competent practice.

Together, Shared Journeys and Activism in Adoption reflect BSA's belief that lasting change for birthparents requires working on two fronts at once: supporting birthparents directly, and transforming the systems and professionals who surround them.

Our Approach

Everything BSA does is grounded in a few non-negotiable commitments:

Trauma-informed, adoption-competent care. Relinquishment grief is not the same as other kinds of loss, and it cannot be adequately served by generic grief counseling or generic social work training. BSA's programs — and the professionals BSA trains — are built around the specific, well-documented realities of birthparent trauma, ambiguous loss, and the ongoing negotiation of identity and relationship that comes with open adoption.

Gender-inclusive language and practice. Birthparents are not only birthmothers. BSA's programming, materials, and language are built to be inclusive of birthfathers and all birthparents, reflecting the full reality of who relinquishes a child and who needs support afterward.

Centering birthparent voice. BSA's programs, workbooks, and public education materials are shaped by birthparents themselves, not designed on their behalf by people who have never lived the experience. This shows up in the organization's clinical materials, including resources on the realities of open adoption relationships that don't always function the way they were promised — material that speaks honestly to birthparents about disappointment, boundary-setting, and grief within open adoption rather than offering platitudes.

A lifelong lens. BSA does not put an expiration date on support. Whether someone placed a child five weeks ago or fifty years ago, BSA's door is open. Birthparent grief can resurface at any life stage — a birthday, a reunion, a change in the open adoption relationship, the birth of another child — and BSA is built to meet birthparents wherever they are in that lifelong journey.

Our History

BSA was founded 25 years ago as On Your Feet Foundation, built on the recognition that birthparents were falling through every crack in the adoption system: not clinically served by adoption agencies whose primary client relationship was with adoptive families, not understood by general mental health providers, and largely invisible in public conversation about adoption. Over two and a half decades, the organization grew from a small support effort into a national leader in direct service and professional education.

In early 2026, the organization completed a rebrand — from On Your Feet Foundation to the Birthparent Support Alliance — to more clearly reflect its national scope and its role as an umbrella organization housing two distinct but connected programs: Shared Journeys: A Birthparent Collective and Activism in Adoption. The name change did not represent a change in mission. It represented a clarification of one: BSA exists in alliance with birthparents, and its structure now makes that explicit, giving each program area room to grow while keeping the organization's full continuum of care — direct support and systems-level education — under one roof.

Today, as BSA marks its 25th anniversary, the organization is in a period of deliberate growth: expanding its clinical partnerships to widen access to affordable, adoption-competent therapy; building out a tiered agency membership model so adoption agencies nationwide can formally partner with BSA to better serve the birthparents they work with; and investing in on-demand training so professional education can reach far beyond the limits of an in-person conference schedule.

Why This Work Matters

Every year, thousands of people in the United States place a child for adoption. Nearly all of them will spend the rest of their lives navigating a relationship with that decision — a decision that, for most birthparents, is one of the most significant events of their lives, often made under enormous pressure, in the context of financial hardship, lack of options, or family and social pressure. The adoption industry, as a whole, is built to support adoptive families through the process of building their families. Far less exists to support the birthparents who made that family possible, once the placement is finalized and the paperwork is signed.

Without adequate support, birthparents face elevated rates of complicated grief, depression, and isolation. Many struggle silently for years because they don't know where to turn, or because the people around them — well-meaning as they may be — simply don't understand what they're carrying. Open adoption, now the norm in most domestic infant adoptions, adds another layer of complexity: birthparents are often navigating an ongoing relationship with the child they placed and the family who is raising them, a relationship with no cultural script, no established norms, and enormous potential for both connection and heartbreak.

BSA meets birthparents in that reality. Not with pity, and not with a one-time check-in at placement, but with sustained, professional, community-based support for as long as it's needed — alongside a genuine effort to change the professional systems that birthparents have to move through for the rest of their lives.

How Your Support Helps

Gifts to BSA directly fund the continuum of care described above: therapeutic support groups and clinical supervision for Shared Journeys; the Journey to Healing Fund, which subsidizes the cost of adoption-competent therapy for birthparents who could not otherwise afford it; case management and material support for birthparents facing acute need; and the development and delivery of professional training through Activism in Adoption, which extends BSA's impact to every birthparent who will ever sit across the table from a trained, competent professional because of the education BSA provided.

As BSA marks 25 years of this work, the need has never been clearer, and neither has the opportunity: to build an organization that treats birthparent care not as an afterthought in the adoption process, but as an essential, permanent, professionally rigorous field of its own — led by and centered on the people who know it best.