Joseph A. Garcia / Star staff Joe DiDonato, right, with his wife, Tatiana, began The Orphan Foundation, a nonprofit foundation that provides financial support to facilitate adoptions. The DiDonatos purchased donation boxes and put them in gas stations and convenience stores to raise money.

When Joe DiDonato went to Russia to initiate distance learning to remote orphanages in the Far East, little did he know he would meet his future wife and together they'd launch a nonprofit organization focused on reducing or eliminating barriers to adoption.

An American businessman and advocate of education, DiDonato said he was invited to Russia by the Department of Education "to discuss different ways to get education to the remote orphanages, in order to better prepare the children for their transition out of the orphanages."

It ended up altering his entire life — beginning with his personal life.

"My trip to Russia led to meeting Tatiana — Dr. Tatiana Khudoyarova at the time — my interpreter and the physician assigned to many of the children by the Primorye Region's Department of Education," recalled DiDonato of Newbury Park, who recently celebrated five years of marriage.

DiDonato, president of ESource Corp., a 16-year-old New Jersey-based company, is a longtime activist in the nonprofit community. Among his duties, he is an art commissioner for the city of Thousand Oaks and is on the board of directors of the Wellness Community, a nonprofit organization that provides education and support services to cancer survivors.

Earlier this year, the DiDonatos launched the nonprofit Orphan Foundation with the lofty vision of finding permanent families and homes for all the orphans of the world, and to secure the health and welfare of children-in-waiting.

"We hope to empty the orphanages around the world," said Tatiana, adding that statistics are horrible for orphans everywhere, not just in more publicized places, such as Africa.

"Less than 50 percent of the children will live to see their 20th birthdays," she said. "Of those that do, they are so ill-prepared for transitioning to life outside the orphanage's walls — at the age of 17 or 18, without a family or other support structure — that more than 40 percent turn to drugs, prostitution and organized crime to survive."

The foundation grows

The Orphan Foundation focuses 100 percent on tearing down barriers to adoption as they emerge over an orphan's life cycle, the couple said, with goals prioritized to move children out of the orphanage system as quickly as possible.

Most children aren't adopted after five years because of the nearly endless supply of infants, "so we augment the families' wishes wherever they lead us," Joe said.

"But we don't stop there," Tatiana added. "We are organizing medical and health intervention teams with physicians and surgeons who can go in and repair minor problems to make another whole class of children more adoptable."

The organization also strives to bring older children to the U.S. for summer respites — "think of these like going to Grandma's home when things are tough at home," Joe explained.

Another goal is under way with pilot programs for which they'll seek grant money.

"To visualize this goal, picture the equivalent of our foster care system for the kids that get booted out when they're 17 or 18 years old and told to make a living," Tatiana said. "We're going to find them homes to live in until they transition to independent living. We'll have life counseling centers that help find jobs, arrange for medical care, vocational training, interviewing skills support groups and a host of ring-network services."

A problem of this magnitude can only be solved by people who can think in terms of the scale of 143 million children needing help, Joe said. "This is why I've seeded the board with people like Drank Maguire, one of the co-founders of FedEx and one of the task force author's of the Special Olympics and Project Head Start ," he said. "We have CEOs, presidents, other nonprofit heads, finance people, and we're even trying to convince experts in theory like spiral dynamics to join us."

Now more than ever

The organization is important — especially now — because while nations pass more and more laws to protect children from harm during the adoption process, they've just made the wall higher to scale financially, Joe said. Adoptions average $18,105 domestically and nearly twice that internationally because of travel requirements, document translations into other countries' languages, and so on.

"The higher that wall, the more children will die of suicides, failures to thrive, lack of minimal healthcare and all the other factors that make their existence so fragile," Tatiana said, adding that even today, in many institutions around the world, "they put tape over the children's mouths if they don't want them keeping the other children awake. They bathe infected children with non-infected children. Use the same spoons to feed every child in a line. Most of these caretakers have never been trained to love the children. Some of the children have never been outside of their institutions."

Of those who do make it, she said, "these children are so ill-prepared for the world in which they must contribute productively that they will be the victims of terrorist recruitment activities, become child warriors in Africa, and enter into the organized crime syndicates.

"The question we must all ask ourselves is: If not now then when? If not you then who?"

For more information or to make a donation, go to www.TheOrphanFoundation.org.