Editor’s Note: Invested Faith (IF) and Good Faith Media (GFM) are featuring the work of three IF fellows this week. Wednesday’s feature of Josh Richardson and Brugsmansia Ministries can be found here.
Marcy Bursac
The Forgotten Adoption Option
St. Louis, Missouri
Approximately 113,000 children are in the U.S. foster care system waiting to be adopted. Marcy Bursac wants to change that. She describes her work as a passion project to help every waiting child in foster care find a home with their forever family.
Bursac founded the Forgotten Adoption Option, a non-profit dedicated to advocating for children lost in the system. Through a gentle, faith-rooted approach, Bursac provides mentorship and resources to potential adoptive families, helping them overcome obstacles and successfully navigate the sometimes arduous regulations of the adoption journey.
Of particular concern for Bursac are the older children who may age out of the system before being adopted, putting them at risk for homelessness or other negative outcomes.
In 2014 and 2015, Bursac blogged her way through her 18-month-long journey to adopt a sibling pair through the foster care system. This life-changing experience opened her eyes to the stark number of children awaiting adoption.
According to Bursac, “60% of children awaiting adoption will wait more than two years for a forever family. When children linger in foster care, they confront daunting odds.”
She adds, “Annually, 23,000 youth exit foster care, with 20% immediately facing homelessness. By age 24, only half find employment, while one in five become incarcerated before they turn 21. We need intervention and support to ensure every child in foster care can flourish and find a stable, nurturing family.”
After becoming an adoptive parent, Bursac recognized the need for a resource to help adults with a desire to adopt and the thousands of adoptable children in the system.
While continuing to work full-time as a cybersecurity analyst, Bursac decided to do something and used her pandemic stimulus payment as funding to start the Forgotten Adoption Option. She has become an outspoken advocate for foster care adoption, using that platform in her successful bid to be crowned 2022’s USOA Mrs. Ohio.
Using the pageant to raise awareness of the need for foster care adoption, Bursac crowdfunded her way into the competition with no prior pageant experience. She was among the top 16 at the United States of America’s Mrs. Pageant, winning the People’s Choice Award.
She is also a recipient of the Angels in Adoption® Award from the Congressional Coalition on Adoption Institute and a Pilot Pen Overachievers Grant winner. Bursac advocates for and guides potential parents through the foster-to-adoption process through her free app, children’s book, how-to book, book of real-life stories and a monthly podcast. She also spreads her message during TV, radio, magazine and podcast appearances.
November is National Adoption Month, anchored by a national campaign that highlights the needs of teens aging out of the U.S. foster care system. This year, Bursac is launching an online course called “How to Adopt through Foster Care.”
She describes the course as a “melding of all I do – one-on-one private coaching with families, the books I’ve written, what I talk about. It will all be available in video modules as a resource for families. My overarching goal is to prevent families from abandoning the process when they get frustrated for various reasons as a part of the difficult journey to adoption.”
Bursac adds, “There’s a lot of confusion and stigma around foster care – ideas like how kids need to reunify with their families, preventing foster care, and so on. While those are all worthwhile issues, there are still these kids whose status is ‘ward of the state’ until someone adopts them or they age out. These kids continuously get overlooked and dismissed.”
Bursac is currently writing a graphic novel about the stigmas and realities of being a foster teen in the foster care system.
Named in August of 2024 as an Invested Faith Fellow, Bursac has embraced the Invested Faith community of changemakers, saying:
“The Invested Faith fellowship is an answer to what felt like an unanswered prayer. When you’re called to do something and take action, but it feels a little like you’re doing these crazy things, you can feel really lonely. Through Pastor Amy and the Invested Faith community, I felt genuinely seen to the core of my spirit and recognized that this work I’m trying to do is so critical.”
