How many people have heard like this? More than you think.

For nearly 140 years, the good people of the Gladney Center for Adoption have been helping to build families by honoring the legacy of one woman who almost single-handedly changed adoptions in the United States.

Edna Jones came to Fort Worth in 1904 to live with her aunt and uncle. She was not planning on staying in Texas long, but fortunately for so many children, she did. In 1906, an engaged Edna met Sam Gladney, and they eloped two days before Edna was supposed to marry her (now former) fiancé.

Photo courtesy of Gladney Center for Adoption

The Gladneys lived in Wolfe City for a couple of years before settling in Sherman. Sam bought a flour mill, and Edna went to work inspecting local markets and public facilities for cleanliness. During one inspection in rural Grayson County, Edna came across the Grayson County Poor Farm, a dumping ground for the unwanted: people with mental illnesses and disabilities, the physically disabled, the homeless, and unwanted children.

Horrified by the conditions at the Grayson County Poor Farm, Edna helped to remove the children to the Texas Children’s Home and Aid Society in Fort Worth, on whose board Edna served. She also established a free daycare for the children of women working as part of the war effort. It was one of the first daycares in Texas, and the City of Sherman continued to run it until 2008.

When Edna and Sam returned to Fort Worth in 1921, Edna continued to work with the Texas Children’s Home and Aid Society. She was named superintendent of the Texas Children’s Home and Aid Society, a position that she held until 1959. She was a tireless advocate for children and unwed mothers. Through her efforts, Texas led the way in adoption legislation.

Photo courtesy of Gladney Center for Adoption

In 1936, Texas removed the word “illegitimate” from adopted children’s birth certificates. In 1939, Texas passed a law that sealed an adopted child’s original birth certificate and issued a second birth certificate with the child’s name and the names of the adoptive parents. In 1951, adopted children were granted the same inheritance rights as biological children. None of this would have happened without Edna’s lobbying and advocacy.

The Texas Children’s Home and Aid Society bought the West Texas Maternity Hospital in 1950. Now known as the Edna Gladney Home, in recognition of Edna’s tenacity and love, the organization was able to provide pre- and post-natal care for birth mothers and their infants. Edna died in 1961, having changed the lives of countless families.

Photo courtesy of Gladney Center for Adoption

Fast forward half a century, and the Gladney Center for Adoption (the name was changed in 1991) continues to create families through domestic adoptions, international adoptions, and foster adoptions and continues to lead the way in memory of Edna Gladney.

Gladney is licensed in 12 states and 11 countries, and since 2000, has helped the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services place children waiting in the foster care system with loving, forever families.

“We’re in a big growth stage right now,” said Holly Yarborough, Gladney’s Marketing & Communications Manager. “This is such a special place, but so many people here are unaware of how many people Gladney has impacted over the years.”

Photo courtesy of Gladney Center for Adoption

Holly was excited to tell me about their new program for international adoptees. “Kids from domestic adoptions usually know about their birth family, but until now, it’s been hard for kids who were adopted from another country to find out anything about their birth families.”

To change this disparity, Gladney has created the Heritage Experience. Licensed counselors will accompany adopted children and their families to their country of birth. “Adopted children usually get really curious about their roots,” Holly said. “We’re the only adoption agency sending a licensed counselor along on these trips to support our families emotionally. This really is a labor of love, like everything we do here.”

In 2027, the Gladney Center for Adoption will celebrate 140 years of creating loving families. To celebrate, “Project 140” will share 140 stories to celebrate and honor everything that Gladney has accomplished. Adoption has come a long way since Edna Gladney began her life’s work, and Gladney continues to lead the way, ensuring that more children find their families.

Oh, that memory at the beginning? It’s my story.

The first photo ever taken of the author, taken on the way home from Gladney
Photo credit: Robert N. Virden (author’s dad)

The post Thank You, Mrs. Gladney first appeared on Tanglewood Moms.

Storytelling is at the heart of every culture. It is the original art form. It’s through stories that we communicate our histories, our morals, and our rituals. Stories give us a feeling of belonging. Stories turn individuals into a community.

When you sit with Duke Greenhill, you can tell immediately that you are in the presence of a master storyteller. He’s headed national ad campaigns for Tiffany & Co., MasterCard, and L’oreal, just to name a few. He’s written screenplays. He and Red Sanders helped found the Fort Worth Film Commission. He’s currently teaching strategic communications at the Bob Schieffer College of Communications at TCU while using his considerable talents to help nonprofits like Rogue Water and The Gladney Center for Adoption. Before bringing him back home, his adventures have taken him from Fort Worth to Austin to Washington, DC. to New York City to Savannah.

And storytelling is the thread that ties it all together.

photo credit: Andre Le

I met Duke at the TCU bookstore before he had to go teach a class. It was a chilly afternoon, and Starbucks was packed with students. I assume they were all diligently studying.

Duke is an eye-smiler with a contagious laugh and a way of leaning in while he’s both talking and listening, making you feel like you’re the only person in the room. He not only cares about the stories he’s telling, he cares about the stories he hears. We talked about our sound-bite society and about how we have lost the ability to listen to other people’s stories. I asked how a storyteller can overcome a shortened attention span and a lack of empathy.

“It may seem overly Pollyanna-ish, but if you are a good storyteller, and you tell stories well, people will listen,” Duke said. “I have to believe, and I’ve seen it play out anecdotally in my work, that if you have a good story, it will find an audience…You see this in the short documentaries that win Academy Awards – they are hyper-specific, hyper-simple. They’re a tiny little story, but they’re so well-told. And by giving them awards, by buying tickets to see them, we’re celebrating the craft of storytelling.”

Duke learned how to tell a story from his parents. The oldest of three boys, Duke is a proud Gladney baby, as is his middle brother, Frank. “My youngest brother, Joe, was a very happy surprise,” Duke grinned. Every night, instead of asking his parents to read Green Eggs and Ham or The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Duke would ask for another story.

“We call it ‘the Gladney Story,’ and it was my bedtime story. It was how I came from Gladney,” Duke remembered. “My dad and my mom told it differently, of course, and I don’t remember a time when I didn’t hear it. It was my very favorite story. Maybe they didn’t realize the impact it would have on me, but the choice they made to tell me that story the way they did most nights was just genius parenting.”

Origins, belonging, and love, all wrapped up in a bedtime story.

“That’s the kind of storytelling I like. Where do we come from? What’s our heritage? How did we become what we are?” Duke said.

photo credit: Andre Le

Carrying this love of stories with him through college and grad school, Duke, like many of us, worked in a variety of fields. During college at the University of Texas, he was an editor and producer at Austin’s CBS affiliate. He worked in politics. He worked in film production and wrote screenplays. “My graduate degree is in film, and I worked in film for a while,” Duke said, “But I knew myself well enough to know that I needed something faster-paced. When you’re on a film set, it’s 20 hours a day, and that’s plenty fast, but the breaks in between were intolerable.”

This need for something faster paced with fewer breaks led to producing television ads. At the time, Madison Avenue was transitioning. The tried-and-true method of advertising was selling the latest and greatest. It was about creating a want. Not a need. A want. But as the Millennial generation grew up and began buying, advertising began to change.

Duke said, “At the agency I was at in New York [R/GA], there was an understanding – it wasn’t conscious or even articulable – that there was a need for more heart. We can’t continue to sell things based only on features and benefits. We have to understand what a brand stands for, what does a brand believe in… for lack of a better phrase, who are they? People want to support brands whose values align with their own.”

This change in the way goods and services are advertised played right into Duke’s strengths. Going from creating a want to selling the brand behind the goods required stories. Good stories.

One campaign that Duke headed was a social media campaign for Tiffany & Co. that changed the way advertising utilizes social media. By updating Tiffany & Co.’s mobile app to include social sharing, couples were able to share their love stories and photos. “They [Tiffany & Co.] were willing to expand their vision of what true love is beyond the traditional,” Duke said. “It was so exciting to be part of that.”

Duke also worked with MasterCard in a campaign that recognized the emergence of a class of very affluent young people while evolving the classic “Priceless” campaign. Duke harnessed the power of the hashtag; by using #PricelessSurprises, MasterCard users could receive surprise gifts – from a pair of headphones to spending the day with Justin Timberlake.

“But while MasterCard was recognizing the opportunities that came from the emerging affluent young people, they were devising programs that prevented them from incurring burdensome credit card debt,” Duke said.

I asked Duke why he left the corporate world to jump into academia. After all, teaching is widely considered to be antithetical to the American Dream of making as much money as you can. Teachers aren’t valued in our society – remember that hoary old chestnut, “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach?” Duke can clearly do. So why teach?

photo credit: Andre Le

“The short answer is, and I don’t mean this in any sort of negative way, is that I don’t care,” Duke grinned. “It took me a long time to learn not to care about what other people think, but I finally did, thank God.”

“The longer answer is that in the industries I’ve worked in – film, advertising, coaching, writing – once you’ve reached a certain level, it’s about teaching. It’s about mentorship. It’s about leading a group of people toward a singular idea, a singular vision, whether that’s the classroom or an ad campaign.”

Duke began to warm to his subject. “The impact you have on a set of students is direct; you can see it and feel it, and the reward for that is far greater than any amount of money. With film or advertising, you can look at the data and say, ‘Yes, we made a change.’ But data is inert. I started in film. I’ve worked in politics. I’ve worked in news and advertising and coaching, but it was the storytelling that was the thread that kept me going. Teaching is storytelling and storytelling is teaching. It’s not a diversion or departure. It’s a return to the craft that maybe I should have been doing all along.”

After a stint at Savannah College of Art and Design where he was a multi-department chair (“I loved the kids, I loved the school, but I knew that three years was about all I could do without sacrificing my health and sanity”), he missed the direct impact of teaching. So Duke decided to come home to Fort Worth and TCU. When I asked what drew him back, his answer was immediate.

“Family.”

All of Duke’s family, with the exception of his middle brother who lives in Montana, are here in Fort Worth. “My youngest brother has twin eight-year-old sons… I’ve gotten to a point where I realized that family is one of the most important things to me, and I wanted to come home.”

While teaching is his “real” job, Duke lends his considerable talents (or in corporate speak “consults”) for nonprofits like Rogue Water and Gladney. According to their website, Rogue Water “builds bridges between the water industry and the people they serve.”

When asked what about Rogue Water intrigued him, you can hear the passion in Duke’s voice and see it in his bearing. “I was aware water was going to be an issue. I was aware that half a globe away, people didn’t have access to clean, healthy water, but I was ignorant to the realities and the immediacy of the problem”

photo credit: Andre Le

“I met Stephanie [Corso, the founder of Rogue Water] about five years ago… Water is a problem that’s not in the future, it’s a problem that’s right now. It’s not Africa’s problem. It’s not Australia’s problem. There are 2.2 million Americans who don’t have access to clean, healthy water, which to me is a basic human right… If people don’t have access to clean water, their story should be told. If their story is told, empathy and hopefully solutions will follow. Water isn’t just about a commodity. It’s about life and death. I just hope it’s not too late.”

Duke’s other passion is Gladney. “The folks at Gladney laugh when I say this, but I feel a sense of duty here. Without them, who knows where I would be, so to me, the opportunity to assist them is a gift.”

Leaning forward to make his point, Duke said, “Gladney and adoption is at a crossroads. Domestic infant adoption is on a steep decline worldwide for a number of reasons, and international foster adoptions seem to be what is in demand. Gladney has heretofore been focused on domestic infant adoption, but they had the foresight to begin expanding, and now they have a very robust international program and foster program. They built out this suite of services but don’t really know how best to integrate them into the singular Gladney brand.”

“In advertising, we talk about brand persona. Gladney approaches their brand persona from a place of unconditional love and unconditional duty to the child. When you think about Mrs. Gladney, and you think about the families each adopted child impacts, and then the number of people they [the families] impact, then you’re looking at the impact that one single person made across the world. One person can’t do that. But she did.”

While it may seem that our interview was neat and linear, in reality, it was anything but. Like any good storyteller, Duke understands the value of tangents to underscore a point. We talked about the controversy surrounding Stephen Ambrose. Duke asked, “What was Ambrose’s bullseye? Was it to be literally precise, or was it to be emotionally precise? I think he was close enough to both, and he’s a big hero of mine.”

Taking a deep breath, Duke said, “I never ascertained from my grandfather what caused the shift in him, but after reading it [Band of Brothers, Ambrose’s 1992 books that was the basis for the 2001 miniseries], he sat down and wrote out his war stories. He printed them out and gave them to all of us. It was a vehicle for asking questions.”

“Some of that stuff in that little narrative was more revealing to who he was and who he became after than any of the 20-something years I knew him as his grandson. And because of that little narrative, I realize that I want to capture my parents’ stories before it’s too late.”

photo credit: Andre Le

In this world of soundbites and noise, we need storytellers more than ever to make connections for us to widen our world. And that’s the power of what Duke does. He brings his listeners out of their stories and gives them the opportunities to learn about someone else. And when you learn about someone else, you begin to empathize with them. When you empathize with someone, you begin to break down the walls that divide us.

All by simply listening to a story.

The post Recognizing the Power of Stories first appeared on Tanglewood Moms.

Most of you have likely heard about the Gladney Center for Adoption. You probably know that it is a well-respected adoption agency here in Fort Worth. You might even know that it has been a part of our community for many years. But unless you have a personal involvement with Gladney, you may not know exactly what an amazing place it truly is.

The Gladney Center for Adoption has its roots in the Orphan Train movement of the last decades of the nineteenth century and first decades of the twentieth century. A supervised welfare program, “Orphan Trains” transported orphaned or homeless children from the big cities of the East Coast to the farms of the Midwest, the idea being that the children would have better lives out West. Between 1854 and 1929, over 200,000 children were relocated.

Reverend I. Z. T. Morris, a Methodist minister, and his wife, Isabella, started taking in train children who arrived at the end of the line in Fort Worth without being taken in by families along the line, attempting to find homes for them. This lead to the formation of the Texas Children’s Home in 1896. In 1910, Edna Gladney (née Edna Browning Kahly) joined the Board of Directors of the Texas Children’s Home and began to widen the scope of the Home’s services to include helping unwed mothers and providing adoption services for their babies. She was appointed the Home’s Superintendent in 1927.

Under Mrs. Gladney’s leadership, the Home continued to grow. Mrs. Gladney lobbied the Texas State Legislature to remove the word “illegitimate” from the birth certificates of adopted children, succeeding in 1936, making Texas the first state in the Southwest to remove the stigma of illegitimacy from adopted children. In 1949, she helped get a bill passed that gave adopted children the same inheritance rights as biological children. To thank Mrs. Gladney for her continued service, the Board of Directors renamed the agency the Edna Gladney Home. Mrs. Gladney served until 1959, placing over 10,000 children with adoptive families and revolutionizing adoption practices in the United States. Her legacy continues in the work of the Gladney Center today.

In 2017, the Gladney Center serves birth parents, adoptive families, and adopted children through an extraordinary array of programs. Domestic adoptions. International adoptions. Adoptions of older children and children with medical needs. Training and educational programs for adoptive families. Outreach programs for doctors, high schools, and family support services. Gladney not only places children with loving, caring families, it supports the birth families, adoptive families, and adopted children throughout their whole lives. And Gladney is expanding their services to include all adoptive parents, not just those who are part of the Gladney family. The Gladney Center for Adoption continues to be the place where hope is born.

Mrs. Gladney considered all the children she placed for adoption to be her children. The Gladney Center for Adoption is proud to continue her legacy and in the spirit of Mrs. Gladney would like to invite you to the 53^rd Annual Blossoms Luncheon (named in honor of the 1941 highly fictionalized biopic Blossoms in the Dust, starring Greer Garson as Edna Gladney) in celebration of the 130^th anniversary of the Gladney Center on Tuesday, April 18, at the Omni Hotel. The Flower and Gift Market opens at 9:30 am. Sip mimosas while you shop the latest trends. Then enjoy a lovely luncheon while Gladney families, from children to grandparents, strut the runway in the latest fashions. The event will be emceed by NBC5’s Deborah Ferguson and will honor Alicia Taylor, the 2017 Leslie Amend Award Winner.

To register for Blossoms, please click here. Join in celebrating 130 years of placing children with loving, caring families and help to start the next 130 years of the Gladney Center for Adoption in style!

Lee Virden DuBose is a proud Gladney Baby. She is honored to be a part of Mrs. Gladney’s legacy.

The post Blossoms: Continuing Edna Gladney’s Legacy first appeared on Tanglewood Moms.