‘I saw a need’: Changing countless lives through courage and advocacy

Marcy Bursac

Online Master’s in Business Administration, 2023

Marcy Bursac is a woman of many stories. This one starts at an orphanage in Moldova.

Marcy was fresh out of her undergraduate studies and looking to discover her calling in life. Through her church, she found a week-long mission opportunity working with orphaned teenage girls in one of Western Europe’s most impoverished countries. It was a transformative experience for her.

“They were at the orphanage not because they had no family,” she says. “Their families actually dropped them off there — and they were dropped because the family couldn’t care for their basic needs. They couldn’t feed them.”

From the first moments visiting the orphanage and throughout her career, Marcy has seen firsthand how disadvantaged and dangerous life can be for children who don’t have a family to raise them. Many struggle throughout childhood, she says, and those who age out of the system without finding a forever family are at extreme risk of abuse, imprisonment, or worse.

“I remember coming back from that trip,” she says, “and just having a moment of, ‘I am going to adopt children. I’m going to go find kids just like the girls I just met, and I want to do something to really make that not repeat itself.’”

It’s easy to connect the dots between that trip and Marcy’s life today. Now a St. Louis resident and Maryville University online Master of Business Administration (MBA) student set to graduate this May, Marcy has dedicated her life to helping kids in need. She is a proud adoptive mom of two, a congressionally honored foster care adoption advocate and coach, a philanthropist, a two-time book author, and the founder and CEO of The Forgotten Adoption Option, a charitable organization focused on helping children waiting in foster care find adoptive families. She also acts as creator, host, author, and designer of the organization’s related podcast, books, blog, and app. Last year she was named United States of America’s Mrs. Ohio 2022 after entering the pageant in partnership with the Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption to promote foster care adoption.

That’s all on top of her day job as a technical analyst and product owner at an international cybersecurity firm.

One spark of interest lit a fire of adoption advocacy that has changed lives across countless families: Through philanthropy, outreach, and personal counseling, Marcy has dedicated herself to helping connect children in need with loving families.

Adoption is, by its nature, a family affair. So when Marcy met her future husband, Nathan, she was sure to broach the topic early in their relationship.

“I saw a need,” she says, “and I thought he’d say, ‘Well great, let’s break up,’ or something like, ‘This is a terrible idea, how dare you,’ or ‘I don’t even want kids anyway.’ But instead, he said, ‘I’m 100% on board with you.’”

As it turned out, adoption was close to Nathan’s heart, too. His great uncle, great aunt, and grandfather, Sam, were orphaned as children in the 1920s in St. Louis when their parents both died of pneumonia. While the other two were taken in and adopted by a family who needed help on their farm, Nathan’s grandfather never found a family. Instead, he lived a tough life struggling with homelessness, hunger, and crime.

The couple’s relationship with adoption led them to focus their efforts on older children — as opposed to infants or toddlers — in the United States. It initially proved more difficult than they had hoped.

“We couldn’t find information,” Marcy says. “We could find out about infant adoption. We could find out about adopting children from other countries. But I couldn’t figure out how to adopt an older kid in the U.S.”

The process took years. But when things finally started moving — once they learned about adoption through foster care — it was a whirlwind. After a promising lead fell through, Marcy and Nathan decided to eat their feelings, but before Nathan even made it home from the store, Marcy learned through an email that their lives were about to change.

“While he was at the store, I messaged and said, ‘When you get home, be ready for anything,’” she says. “And he was like, ‘What is anything?’”

In her inbox, Marcy learned about a pair of siblings within her state — three and four years old — who needed a family quickly. There were no photos, and only a little bit of basic information was available, but time was limited. Nathan wanted to sleep on it, but Marcy reminded him that their social worker would have to do a lot to prepare their application on such short notice.

“The deadline was actually the next day, so we didn’t have the time to wait,” Marcy says. “Typically what happens is it’s months long in the process.”

The next week, they learned they had been approved and chosen, and just two days later they took the five-hour car ride to meet the sibling pair. The process of going from fostering to the adoption hearing was at times difficult and frustrating, but ultimately it was one of the most rewarding and defining times in Marcy’s life.