The Adoption and Foster Care Venture

Strengthening the resilience of adoptive and foster families, expertise in attachment injury and its transformation into safety, closeness and connection, while reducing children's risk behaviors.

Our expertise is creating secure connection and reducing extreme events within a short time, with long-term impact. We are a social venture born of families' personal distress. We guide and accompany adoptive and foster families, the wider family, and education and care professionals. In light of our extensive activity and the changes we have brought about at the level of 'saving families', we have received national recognition.

Our guiding values

Safety, connection, balance and partnership. The venture focuses on strengthening a secure bond between parents, teachers and children who experienced attachment injury. The approach we developed successfully addresses violence, including self-harm. The path offers hope, strength and guidance for transforming trauma, stress and crisis into safety, success and flourishing. We nurture parents' inner well-being, including practicing mutual emotional regulation, and we have brought families back from extreme situations to balanced functioning and relationships.

The five anchors we built

• A safe community, open to every issue.
• A leading body of knowledge making practical tools accessible.
• Group programs for learning and emotional support.
• A unique accompaniment model for the family and its support network, delivering results within a short time.
• Hands-on workshops for professionals.

We collaborate with brain researchers, trauma and attachment experts and nonprofits, among them Nitzanei Tikva, Adoption in Arab Society, Mishpachot HaTikva, and Alumot. We are now focusing on integrating regulation technologies and on creating staff training in local authorities and educational settings, as is customary worldwide. We will work for Israel to become the nation of attachment.

Founder and CEO: Sharona Duchna, social entrepreneur, single mother to a grown child she adopted.

What people say about us

I am a single mother to a wonderful fourteen-year-old girl, adopted in Ukraine at a year and a half old. My daughter has attention difficulties, learning disabilities and, as an adoptee, developmental post-trauma, all of which affected her day-to-day life. I needed guidance to create a supportive, right and empowering atmosphere at home. Over the years I took part in group and private parent-guidance programs; at best they did not help, and at worst they did harm, leaving me with guilt and insecurity about my functioning as a mother. In recent months I began ongoing guidance and accompaniment with Ms. Sharona Duchna, who supports adoptive and foster parents, is deeply versed in attachment trauma, and founded the Adoption and Foster Care Venture, a venture selected by the state for a social-entrepreneurs accelerator program. I want to note Sharona's ability to be a supporting shoulder all along the way, with close accompaniment marked by empowerment, constant encouragement and genuine generosity toward me as a mother. Her unreserved support helped me regain confidence in my abilities. I also learned from Sharona tools for life, accompanied by deep theoretical explanation and advice grounded in a profound understanding of developmental trauma and adoption. Most importantly, the advice is practical, and it worked like magic within days of our first meeting! Within a short time I watched my child change before my eyes: outbursts that began mostly ended as they started, her frustration threshold rose, her calm grew and her reactions softened. Thanks to the close accompaniment, the atmosphere at home changed profoundly. This change was and remains critical to my daughter's healthy emotional development and to my warm bond with her. I use what I learned and internalized every single day, and I can say the new responses I learned are already part of me. I call Sharona "the magician", because she truly brought magic into our home, with the rapid, amazing change she brought about in our family. I hope many families can benefit as we did from accompaniment grounded in a high capacity for containment and deep knowledge of adoption and its effects on children's souls.

Y.K., mother of a teenage girl adopted in infancy (at the mother's request, the feedback is published without her full name)