Shepherd’s Centers of America is an interfaith network of community-based groups in 21 states caring for older adults. Headquartered in Kansas City, Missouri, the organization was begun by the Rev. Elbert C. Cole, whose wife had dementia for 17 years before she died.

Calvin College psychology professor Glenn Weaver, whose mother died of Alzheimer’s dementia, has studied the spirituality of Alzheimer’s patients.

Dorothy E. Roberts is the George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology and the Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights at the University of Pennsylvania Law School.

Sandra Patton-Imani, an adoptee, is an associate professor of American studies in the Department for the Study of Culture and Society at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa. She is the author of Birth Marks: Transracial Adoption in Contemporary America, in which black and multiracial adoptees discuss their experiences.

Rachel Wegner is the president of Ethica, an adoption advocacy organization that works for ethical adoption practices internationally.

Trish Maskew teaches adoption law, policy and practice at American University Washington College of Law. She founded Ethica, an adoption advocacy organization that works for ethical adoption practices internationally. She wrote Our Own: Adopting and Parenting the Older Child.

Randall L. Kennedy is the Michael R. Klein Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. He wrote Interracial Intimacies: Sex, Marriage, Identity and Adoption, an examination of the role of race in those arenas.

Heather Jacobson is assistant professor of sociology and anthropology at the University of Texas at Arlington. Her interests include sociology of families, the intersection of social inequality (race, class, gender) and families and family formation.

Marilyn Holt is a historian of American orphanages and an expert on the history of American Indian adoption. She wrote Indian Orphanages and The Orphan Trains: Placing Out in America.