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Lily Nie
Born July 12, 1963
Inducted 2008
Lily Nie, born in Yingkou in northeastern China and raised during
the Cultural Revolution, knows first-hand the fragility of life
in
China. She
earned a law degree at Fushun University and became a business
law attorney in China. In 1987, she came to the United States to
marry her fiancé, Joshua Zhong, who had been allowed to
leave China to attend a bible college in South Carolina. She learned
English from a couple who were raising four adopted children. They
became examples to her of what caring people could do to save abandoned
children. She and her husband moved to Colorado in 1988, where
both continued their education. They became U.S. citizens in 1999.
In 1992, the law in China changed to allow foreigners to adopt
Chinese children. This was the sign that Lily Nie needed to change
the fate of China’s abandoned children, most of them girls.
She and her husband founded Chinese Children Adoption International.
In 1994, they rescued 20 babies from China’s grim orphanages
and brought them into Colorado homes. That mission was so successful
that in 1995 Nie made nine trips to China and saved 140 babies.
To date, Chinese Children Adoption International, the largest China-only
adoption agency in the world, has found American homes for more
than 8,000 abandoned Chinese children, the vast majority of whom
are girls.
Lily Nie created the Chinese Children Charity Fund to raise money
to feed and care for the children in Chinese orphanages. The charity
opened three model orphanages in China called Lily Orphan Care
Centers and established a training program for orphanage care workers.
When Chinese policy changed to make foster care possible, the charity
pioneered a foster care program to train families and place hundreds
of children out of orphanages and into loving foster homes in China.
In 1996, Nie opened the Joyous Chinese Cultural School in Littleton
to teach adopted children their native language and culture. The
school has become a national model for cultural education. She
helped to create the Red Thread Counseling Center, the first in
the U.S. to provide emotional support to adopted children and their
families. Nie’s ChinaRoots program sponsors heritage tours
to China for adoptive families and children. Lily Nie’s groundbreaking
work in adoption in Colorado paved the way for a national movement
that has brought more than 70,000 adopted Chinese children to new
lives in the United States.
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