AFAAD Board of Directors
Lisa Marie Rollins, Ph.D. Candidate
Founder and Director
Lisa Marie Rollins is the Founder and Director of AFAAD, Adopted and Fostered Adults of the African Diaspora. Lisa Marie was adopted into a white family in Washington State in the 1970’s. She has authored “A Birth Project”, a blog focusing on transracial adoption and black diasporic identity since 2006. She has been featured on NPR, KPFA, KPFK and was recently given the honor of one of Colorlines Magazine’s “2009 Innovators to Watch” for her social justice work around black adoptees. She is a writer and multidisciplinary performance artist developing her one woman show, “Ungrateful Daughter” and is the Artistic Director of Third Root Productions, a multidisciplinary theater company that supports artists in the Bay Area. Lisa Marie was the Adoption Education Specialist at Pact, An Adoption Alliance from 2006-2008. She is a Ph.D. Candidate at University of California Berkeley in African Diaspora Studies. She can be contacted at lisamarierollins@gmail.com
Connie Galambos-Malloy
Strategic Planning and Development Director
Connie is an Afro-Caribbean adoptee from San Andres Island, Colombia, who grew up with a Caucasian family in the United States from the late 1970s onward. Connie directs the Social Equity Caucus at Urban Habitat, an environmental justice and land use advocacy organization supporting the San Francisco Bay Area’s low-income communities & communities of color. She staffs the Community Capital Investment Initiative, part of the Bay Area Family of Funds’ effort to use market forces and real estate development to encourage community revitalization. Prior to joining Urban Habitat, Connie coordinated the Regional Sustainability Initiative at Redefining Progress. She has worked as a Peace Corps volunteer leading sustainable tourism development projects in Bolivia’s Amazon Basin and as a planner and funding liaison for United Way of the Inland Valleys in Riverside, CA. Connie previously served on the board of the California Planning Foundation, and is currently serving as Diversity Director on the California Chapter of the American Planning Association’s Northern Section board. Connie earned her M.C.P. in City and Regional Planning from the University of California, Berkeley.
Karie Gaska, MSW
Community and Operations Director
Karie Gaska is an adoptee who grew up in Long Island, New York. She is currently a fellow with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) temporarily assigned to the bay area. She is working with the Urban Male Health Initiative at the Alameda County Public Health Department to address improving health outcomes for men of color. She spent much of her career in Washington, DC working with children and their families in various settings including school support programs, community mental health programs, and in the child welfare system. She holds an MSW from Howard University with a focus in macro practice in health settings and a BA from Brown University with a double major in Ethnic Studies & Psychology. She recently reunited with her birthmother and considers this one of the major milestones of her life.
Lisa Walker
Outreach and Education Director
Bio forthcoming!
Advisory Board
Dr. Julia Sudbury aka Julia Chinyere Oparah is a Nigerian Igbo/ British woman who was adopted into a multiracial family in Scotland in the1960s. After moving to the U.S., she became a professor of Ethnic Studies at Mills College, a women’s liberal arts college in Oakland. She is the author of Other Kinds of Dreams: Black Women’s Organisations and the Politics of Transformation (Routledge 1998) and editor of GlobalLockdown: Race, Gender and the Prison-Industrial Complex (Routledge 2005). Her recently co-edited book Outsiders Within: Writing onTransracial Adoption (South End Press 2006) brings together powerful critical analysis, poetry and artwork by transracial/international adoptees and their allies. Julia is involved in the prison abolitionist, anti-violence and global justice movements.
Previous Board Members:
Cyndy Snyder, M.Ed
Director of Finance and Administration
Cyndy is a multiracial kinship adoptee raised by her grandparents in Washington State. Her Cyndy Snyder-Knauswork has focused on supporting the experiences of students of color in higher education. Cyndy is currently the budget manager for InnerWorks, a nonprofit that supports schools and related programs in south and west Berkeley. Before coming to the Bay Area, she previously worked in student affairs and educational research at the University of Washington. Cyndy is a doctoral student in Educational Policy at UC Berkeley . Her focus areas include: multiracial and transracial adoptees in schools, women of color in education, and higher education administration. She is the mom of one kitty – Tigger.
Dr. John Raible, Ed.D
John Raible has been educating adoptive parents and social workers about transracial adoption for more John Raible than thirty years. John was adopted in 1963 and raised in the USA in Wisconsin and Massachusetts. As a single, openly gay father, John adopted two African American sons from foster care. He served as president of Black Linkage for Adoptive Children (BLAC) in Los Angeles in the late 1980s. BLAC was a group advocating for the needs of children of African descent in foster care, and was especially interested in promoting adoption in the African American community of Los Angeles. John is well-known for his media appearances on Sally Jesse Raphael, the Joan Rivers Show, and in the films “Struggle For Identity: Issues in Transracial Adoption” and “A Conversation 10 Years Later.” Currently, Dr. Raible works as a professor of education at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where he teaches courses on multicultural education and family diversity. His research looks at the influence of diversity on the identities of white individuals in transracial adoptive families and in other racially integrated contexts.
