Jordan Schrandt, 32

To say Jordan Schrandt is a family person is an understatement. When she married her husband, she also adopted his five children and since then, she’s had a special place in her heart for fostering and adoption. In fact, the passion is so strong that it extends into her professional life.

Four years ago, Schrandt started a small nonprofit that, to-date, has funded three adoptions. When she first got started, she helped a couple adopt their son from Bulgaria. He was nine years old and blind, and having adopted her own children at an older age, she felt emotionally tied to the experience.

Months later, Schrandt was reading posts of a high school friend who was selling odds and ends to fund her own adoption. Seeing the sacrifice her friend was willing to make, Schrandt sent a check in the mail and her friend was on a plane to India to meet her child in no time.

“Adoption should never be delayed because of finances, yet children sit in orphanages all day long because their parents don’t have the financial backing yet, and I would just love to see a world where as soon as somebody wants to adopt a child, that those funds become available, and that child can get out of the orphanage immediately,” Schrandt says.