Whoa! Thanks!
Thank you so much for the outpouring of donations. We’ve surpassed $2,000 in less than a few hours, which is more than enough to pay the expenses of advocates in Albany. If you still wish to give, we will use any excess funds for two purposes: 1) the DNA Kit Donation Project or 2) seeding a charitable fund to assist other organizations seeking to enact equal rights legislation for adoptees in their states.
We set up this page and effort to help defray the expenses that Annette O’Connell and Claudia Corrigan D’Arcy have incurred in traveling to Albany, New York, to lobby for the passage of Assembly Bill A5494. They are advocates for the New York Adoptee Rights Coalition, but they did not ask us to do this and they would likely refuse to allow us to request help in reimbursing their expenses. But it’s necessary for all of us to share the financial costs of doing this work. None of us are paid lobbyists, and we give up a substantial amount of time and expense to work on equal rights legislation for all adult adopted people.
A small donation would be great, and it will be used to defray the costs of lodging and meals for Claudia and Annette while in Albany. Already the New York legislature has gone into an extra day and may even go into early Friday morning. We just booked a room for them for Thursday night, and none of us had anticipated such a drawn out process. Whatever happens, we will be working on this to the very end.
Thanks! We hope you can pitch in (and no funds go to either of us at all—like you, we are watching this unfold and just want to do something to help).
Gregory Luce and Shawna Hodgson
Adoptee Rights Law Center and Equality4Adoptees