Meredith Rose is the mother of two. The Chestnut Hill resident gave birth to her son, Ethan, 29 years ago. Her daughter, Katherin, joined the Rose family through adoption when she was 21 months old and is now 28 years old.
Rose is the director of the Open Arms Adoption Network, a program of Jewish Family and Children’s Service of Greater Philadelphia. But she didn’t always want to work in adoption.
Born in Elkins Park, Rose and her family were members of Reform Congregation Keneseth Israel. She graduated from George Washington University with a degree in journalism and spent the next three years working at C-SPAN as a producer across the street from Capitol Hill in Washington.
While at C-SPAN, Rose took a part-time job working the overnight shift at a shelter for children who were kicked out of their foster homes.
“I learned about this whole other world of families,” she explained. “I learned that there’s a way to be of service and be useful to children that are struggling in their life and struggling to find safety and family and it became my passion.”
Rose decided to leave the world of journalism to pursue her master’s in social work and public health at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and ended up working in Seattle with pregnant teens, parenting teens and young adults.
“It became very solidified in my brain that most often young families don’t know about this option of adoption. They don’t know that it can be available to them, and it can fulfill their job as parent, as mother or father, and it can be something really worth considering,” Rose said. “I just became very passionate about wanting to work in this void where I felt like services were not being offered and all options were not being presented.”
From 2002 to 2003, Rose worked for JFCS managing a Pew grant to recruit people who wanted to become foster parents. However, as her passion was in infant adoption, she took a position at Lutheran Social Ministries of New Jersey, where she launched its open adoption program.
Then, in 2006, Rose was asked to come back to JFCS and help create the Open Arms Adoption Network program.
“I felt very proud to be hired by Jewish Family and Children’s service, because I always knew of this agency growing up, as did everyone in my community, and so to get to be a part of JFCS, and to support the values of the Jewish people working within this agency, has always been something I’m proud of,” Rose said.
Today, 20 years later, Rose continues to empower families to make the right decision for them.
“In my life, growing up, I had no idea of the type of suffering that was going on around me, and I just found as a human being, I was like, this is where I belong. Here’s where I can make a difference,” she said. “It wasn’t something that took a lot of work for me. This is an option, an idea that I want to promote, I want to talk about in the community. I want people to consider this and whatever they end up deciding I’m going to support that.”
As director, Rose works with JFCS social workers in Pennsylvania, Delaware, New Jersey and New York to help pregnant and newly delivered women consider the option of open adoption, while creating systems and educational programming to support families.
“We stay in full contact throughout this process and then forever, as long as they will have us,” Rose added. “This is a program that’s grounded in ethics and morality and doing right by children, and then staying involved with everyone, with birth families, with children and with families formed by adoption to be a hub for them, because adoption is not a one-day thing for anybody. It is a lifetime experience for all.”