Get to know us

RJiA Co-Founders

Angie Swanson-Kyriaco (she/her)

Angie is a nonprofit professional working in outreach and communications. Angie has over seventeen years of experience working in the field of reproductive freedom and justice for organizations such as Planned Parenthood California Central Coast and MPower Alliance, where she served as the Executive Director from 2021- 2023. She holds a master’s degree in psychology from Antioch University Santa Barbara, is an appointee to the Santa Barbara County Commission for Women, and serves on the Board of Directors for LEAP (a childcare and early childhood education provider), in addition to other volunteer roles in her community. Angie relinquished her only child for adoption in the late 1990s due to reproductive coercion, domestic violence, poverty, and housing insecurity. Despite numerous inequities and injustices she experienced from the adoption industry, Angie has been in reunion with her child for the past thirteen years. Her essay, “A Birthmother Reflects: The Perpetuation of Adoption Myths,” is featured on Bill of Health, the online publication of the Petrie-Flom Center at Harvard Law School and her artwork was included in the Adoption Museum Project’s “Our Place at the Table: Honoring Birth Mother Stories.” Angie has shared her unique personal and professional experiences in various speaking engagements and trainings such as Reframing Adoption-Centering Our Patients for Essential Access Health. A lifelong Californian who has called the Central Coast her home for nearly twenty years, Angie can most likely be found Angie riding her bike to a local coffee shop, randomly singing show tunes to her husband, or practicing her photography skills while simultaneously thinking about ways to smash the patriarchy.

Benjamin Lundberg Torres Sáncherz (they/elle)

Benjamin Lundberg Torres Sánchez (b. 1987, Bogotá) uses their art to transform individual witness into collective action by creating work and spaces that encourage action, participation, and collaboration. Lundberg Torres Sánchez’s work has been shown in the U.S. at the Queens Museum, Museum of the Moving Image, Latchkey Gallery, The Mills Gallery at Boston Center for the Arts, RISD Museum, and the Knockdown Center, and internationally in Montreal, Mexico City, São Paulo, Lima, and La Paz. They were a 2022 Broadway Advocacy Fellow, and the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts 2017 and 2018 Merit Fellow in New Genres and Film & Video respectively. They are co-founder of We Are Holding This, an abolitionist press focused on independent publishing for people impacted by family policing and separation. Lundberg Torres Sánchez organizes with Adopted, Fostered, and Trafficked Abolitionists (AFTA), Reproductive Justice in Adoption (RJiA), within a reparations project with adopted compas from Colombia and colleagues at Universidad de Los Andes, and with autonomous networks of people fighting against ethnic cleansing, occupation, apartheid and genocide in Palestine من النهر إلى البحر / فلسطين ستتحرر

Liz Latty (they/she)

Liz is a writer, researcher, educator, and community organizer originally from the Detroit area and based in New York. They are a white, queer, fostered and adopted person, separated from their first/birth family through catholic “maternity home” coercion. Liz has advocated for people impacted by family separation through her writing, public speaking, and organizing. She has taught everywhere from middle schools and higher ed, to public libraries, adult literacy classrooms, and protest encampments. Liz has shared their work at conferences including SPARK Reproductive JusticeNow, the Association for the Studies of Adoption and Culture, American Adoption Congress, Allied Media Conference, and Woodhull Sexual Freedom Summit, as well as at the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center, Concerned United Birth Parents retreat, and All Together Now. They were a member of the Vision and Strategy Team for the History Initiative at The Adoption Museum Project, have been featured on AdopteesOn, and their essay, “What We Lost: Undoing the Fairytale Narrative of Adoption” was a notable essay selection in Best American Essays 2017. As a longtime activist and organizer in anti-war, anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, and queer liberation movements, Liz is committed to liberation for all people and proudly reps RJiA and Adopted, Fostered, and Trafficked Abolitionists (AFTA) in movement spaces whenever she can. Her dog approves of this message.

Samantha Gonzalez (she/her)

Samantha Gonzalez is a mixed race, queer person. She is a birth mother in an open transracial adoption, a caregiver, and a co-founder in RJiA. For nearly two decades, Samantha has been an educator on many things including the complications of the adoption industry, speaking on her own lived experience as a birth parent, and specializing in topics related to harm-reduction in adoption and reproductive justice. Her work centers around offering support and advocacy for informed consent, specifically in ensuring the rights and preferences of pregnant people, birth/first parents, and adoptees are upheld. Samantha is a native Californian, a born and raised Bay Area urbanite, spends most of her free time re-establishing legitimate correspondence to meet residency requirements for the local homeless populations, and now campaigning for ethical changes to the system that criminalizes poverty at the state capitol.

Schuyler Swenson (she/they)

Schuyler is an award-winning radio and podcast producer, journalist, and educator who has worked in media for over a decade. Currently a producer for new content development at NPR, she’s previously worked at the New York Public Library, New York Magazine and other outlets and cultural institutions. Schuyler’s work often focuses on race, identity and adoption and is interested in bringing stories of marginalized experience to wider audiences — from pop cultural representation of adoption to comedy as a tool of survival. She has produced limited series about the history of gender affirming care for trans youth, and immigrant experience through the lens of sports. As a sensitivity editor for Rebel Girls she's guided audio producers to create bedtime stories for young people about famous women in history. Schuyler is a Korean American transracial adoptee and has organized with other adopted artists from around the world as a selection committee member for the inaugural Adoptee Film Festival and collector of oral histories of Korean birth mothers and adoptees.

Shannon Hardt (she/her)

Shannon is a queer chicana who was separated from her family in México at six weeks old. She is a single mother of two, an abolitionist community organizer deeply rooted in mutual aid, and a grief expert. Shannon focuses her work on creative writing, art, queer radical parenting, community building, and agitation.

Susan Dusza Guerra Leksander, LMFT (she/her)

Susan is a Latina first/birth mother, a transracial domestic adoptee, and a licensed psychotherapist who has specialized extensively in adoption and foster care issues since 2008. She is the Agency & Clinical Director at Pact, an Adoption Alliance, a non-profit organization whose mission is to serve adopted BIPOC youth and their families. Previous professional experiences include counseling former foster youth with significant mental health needs in a Housing First program, supervising Family Preservation services to reduce the need for child welfare removals, and leading therapeutic retreats for first/birth parents. She proudly serves on the Board of All-Options, has previously served as Board President of MPower Alliance, and was a founding member of the Leadership Team of the Adoption Museum Project. She is on the ongoing complex journeys of reunion with her first families and the daughter she placed for adoption.

Suzi Martinez Carter (she/her/ella)

Suzi is a politicized career coach, strategist, and community impact consultant dedicated to advancing reproductive justice, adoption and family policing abolition, and collective liberation. Removed from her family by NY state, Suzi is a bi, formerly-fostered, and transethnically adopted Puerto Rican twin of mixed heritage. A 2017 History Lab Fellowship with the Adoption Museum Project inspired her exploration and study of family separation and its movement intersections, deepening her connection to other adopted people and first/birth mothers in the critical adoption space. Suzi has shared work at conferences including the Association for the Studies of Adoption and Culture, Allied Media Conference, National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures, and helped found Adopted, Fostered, and Trafficked Abolitionists (AFTA) before the fall of Roe and the co-founding of RJiA. After becoming a mom herself, Suzi reunited with her foster and first families. Before its closure in 2018, Suzi served on the collective board of Wayside Center for Popular Education, an intersectional movement and activist resource hub. Her work is informed by years of experience in U.S. South movement spaces, her own search and reunion journey, and a background in organizing campaigns across various justice issue areas. Suzi is currently a career coach and a nonprofit executive recruiter, supporting soft-hearted, justice-driven folks and organizations as they navigate transitions in alignment with their collective values.