Welcome to The [Inclusion] Conversation Podcast!

Our guest this episode is Shelise Keum Mee Gieseke, educator, editor, and mentor, in conversation with our host, Grace Yung Foster. 

We are thrilled to close National Adoptee Awareness Month (#NAAM) with Shelise's voice and story. Her experience and perspective is a great way to wrap up this important month to elevate Adoptees and our narratives in a topic area we don't discuss enough – the workplace and job searching as an Adoptee.

This podcast dives into the world of work, careers, and life for Adoptees, Fosters, our allies, parents, child welfare professionals, policy experts, and all within the Adoptee and Foster's orbit.

Shelise has been involved in the adoption community for over a decade as an educator, editor, and mentor, including working at Adoption Mosaic as the Head of Operations until earlier this year, and now as a Course Facilitator, and also had the honor of editing the blog Land of Gazillion Adoptees and the Gazillion Voices online magazine.

Shelise is an intercountry, South Korean, interracial adoptee. She was adopted as an infant and raised by a white family in Minnesota. She has three siblings who are her parents’ biological children. She has been to Korea to search for her family, but did not find them. In her free time she likes to watch k-dramas, go to taekwondo with her family, and pretend she is going to learn to speak Korean.

We dive into Shelise’s journey as an Adoptee, her experiences as a person working in the Adoptee space and how she;s evolved, and not as a person who is job searching and what that is like for her as an Adoptee, and why we need resources like The Inclusion Initiative for this very reason – to support Adoptees and Fosters as they navigate the world of work. 

We end the show with “Rapid Fire” questions which brings levity and also some fun facts about our guest. This is an incredible episode and we hope you enjoy learning about our guest. 

Shelise Keum Mee Gieseke

https://www.linkedin.com/in/shelise-keum-mee-gieseke-834b35225/  

https://adoptionmosaic.com/team 

Follow her on Insta: @skmg_adoptee 

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Our executive producer is Grace Yung Foster. This show is brought to you by The Inclusion Initiative Media Studio.