CHILD WELFARE FUND

In 1992 the Child Welfare fund was established to support direct services to children and their families and to create system reform within the child welfare system in New York City. It’s been a wonderful run made possible by the extraordinary work done by the grantees and the families they work with and the staff of the Child Welfare Fund.

 

After almost two decades there are changes ahead for the Child Welfare Fund.  As of April 1, 2009:

 

If you have any questions please contact:  Info@nycwf.org

 

“The New York City child welfare system has fundamentally changed over the last several years….because you have forced us to change, because you have said openly and loudly, ‘Things cannot continue to go the way that they have been going.' And we've listened to that.”
	---William Bell, then-ACS Commissioner, at an event honoring the Child Welfare Fund, June 2004

 

Click here to view the chronology for the CWF

In 1992, the New York City child welfare system was in deep crisis.  Poverty, the crack cocaine epidemic, and the spread of HIV/AIDS were devastating families.  The number of children in foster care had more than tripled, from 16,230 in 1984 to 49,365 in 1992, putting enormous strain on the system.  The city budget for foster care had expanded by hundreds of millions of dollars per year—yet the foster care system was dysfunctional.    Too often, foster care had become the city’s first response to vulnerable families rather than a last resort after other measures had failed.  Budgetary incentives within the system actually encouraged breaking up families by putting more children in foster care.  The result was a system of which no one was proud, and in which no parent would want his or her child placed.

To address this crisis affecting hundreds of thousands of lives, a donor with experience and knowledge of the child welfare system formed the Child Welfare Fund (CWF) in 1992, which is now a project of the Johnson Street Foundation. First and foremost, CWF believed that the best way to improve the system was to give children and families within it a greater role in decisions affecting their own lives. Otherwise the system, no matter how well-intentioned its goals, would continue to break families apart rather than keep them together; it would punish rather than heal.

Using as models other social service areas (developmental disabilities, mental illness, etc.), where parents had many more rights and helped shape policy, CWF set out to create and fund and in some cases guide organizations dedicated to similar goals.  Although many judged these schemes likely to fail, CWF believed that teens in foster care could publish powerful stories about their experiences in Represent, that parents with children in the system could organize through the Child Welfare Organizing Project and other groups, that families would gain if biological parents had more rights to visit children in foster care, and that client empowerment could have an impact on a huge city agency, ACS.

Today, parents and youth in the system have acquired a voice, and ACS staff has become more sensitive to clients’ needs and experiences.  For example, battered women have begun to advocate for themselves and to change the way the system responds to domestic violence.  Other groups have raised awareness about discrimination and related problems faced by immigrant families in the child welfare system.  To a greater degree than many thought possible, clients speak for clients.

One effort concerns the crucial Service Plan Review, which determines what parents must do to recover their children from foster care.  Parents have had the right to attend these Reviews, but in the past only 10% of parents did so, largely because of barriers placed in their way by agencies and because of difficulties in their lives.  To address this, CWF funded programs to train advocates for parents, ease participation by parents, publish adult and teen articles on the problem, and bring political pressure on ACS to change its approach to the Reviews.  CWF also worked with ACS to make the Reviews more accessible.  More than 50% of parents now attend their Service Plan Reviews.

In its early years, CWF was highly critical of ACS.  But when ACS began to reform, CWF began to work with the agency.  Both organizations have made strong efforts to encourage and support preventive services.  One result is the Highbridge initiative in the Bronx, a concentrated campaign in a highly-distressed area to help families before they’re overwhelmed and their children are placed in foster care.  CWF and the Open Society Institute started the program; nine other foundations and ACS have now joined in.

CWF has supported many other programs of direct service to families.  It does so because it sees specific needs and effective organizations, and because providing service helps CWF understand system-wide issues.  CWF also promotes in-depth analysis of the system and its services.  To that end, CWF helped create Child Welfare Watch, an independent journal that has shed light on the system and provided blueprints for innovation and reform.

Accomplishments

The child welfare system has changed significantly since the Child Welfare Fund was founded in 1992, when almost 50,000 children were in foster care.  Today, fewer than 19,000 youth are in the system.  In addition, far fewer are placed into foster care each year—from 12,000 in 1992 to 6,000 in 2005.  New York City now has an accountability system to evaluate outside agencies under contract as well as the city’s direct care program.  Staff in ACS are better trained and better paid.  The emphasis at ACS has shifted toward preventing the break-up of families and promoting neighborhood-based services.  For the first time, more children are receiving preventive services than are in foster care.

The CWF approach has grown popular.  It is taking hold in other cities.  One example: Represent, the publication by and for youth in Foster Care, is being replicated in California.  The Child Welfare Organizing Project, which trains parents to be spokespersons, is also being emulated.  Both organizations received their first grant from the Child Welfare Fund.  The CWF approach has also attracted several other foundations, which now share many of its goals and programs and have joined with CWF to fund them.

Recent Developments

In the winter of 2006 the deaths of Nixzmary Brown and several other children dramatized ongoing problems within the child welfare system.  Families in difficulty were not adequately investigated for abuse and neglect nor thoroughly assessed to identify services they might need.   It became clear that these families were often not receiving the help they needed. The Child Welfare Fund (CWF) believes that without further system-wide effort in New York City, children and families in the system will continue to be at risk. In response to improvements elsewhere in the system, CWF has shifted some resources to preventing family crises that might lead to foster care and to helping families and children after the children have been reunified with their families.

 

Initiatives

Four of the Child Welfare Fund’s initiatives are likely to have far-reaching effects on the New York City child welfare system.

 

Hiring Parent Advocates: The Child Welfare Fund (CWF) has created an extraordinary collaboration with New York City Administration for Children’s Services Commissioner John Mattingly; New York State Office of Children and Family Services Commissioner Gladys Carrion; Council of Family and Child Caring Agencies’ Executive Director Jim Purcell; the Seamen’s Society for Children and Families; and the Child Welfare Organizing Project. Other foundations will also join. Together we are promoting the hiring of Parent Advocates by foster care agencies. The advocates are parents who have lost custody of their children, changed their lives for the better, received extensive training, been reunited with their children and are now helping other parents deal with the child welfare system. Parent Advocates lend a human face to the system. On both the practical and the psychological levels, they make their experiences with child welfare available to other parents whose families are at risk. They make sure parents know their rights, they direct them to the appropriate professional services, and they provide a true voice of experience that can both bolster the morale of parents and deliver a bracing dose of tough love, when needed.  Parent Advocates also provide a valuable source of real-world information for child welfare policymakers and administrators.

 

To kick off this public-private collaboration, the member organizations will hold a forum in May 2008 for foster care agencies in New York City. At that meeting, the aforementioned leaders, Parent Advocates, and executives of foster care agencies will share information and promote the hiring of Parent Advocates. Currently there are approximately 30 Parent Advocates employed in foster care agencies and another 30 working in preventive service agencies out of thousands of child welfare workers. This initiative aims to dramatically increase those numbers.

 

Over the next year, the collaboration will begin an open, competitive process for foster care agencies to apply for funds to hire Parent Advocates. The collaboration will provide a six-month Parent Advocate training program for mothers and fathers who have dealt with the child welfare system. The collaboration will also create a citywide support network for Parent Advocates. The University of Chicago’s Chapin Hall Center will evaluate this initiative.

Parent Advocate Video

Parent Advocate Stories

Parent Advocate Posters

 

New York City Court Team Project: Infant Mental Health:  The Child Welfare Fund is partnering with the Early Childhood Center at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine on a pilot project that will address the lack of mental health services for infants and parents in New York City.  The Infant Mental Health Pilot Project, which will be linked to the Bronx Family Court, will provide dyadic therapy to children ages zero to three who are at risk of being placed in or are already in foster care, and to their parents.  This intensive therapy promotes attachment between parents and small children to support the healthy development of the youngsters long after the intervention ends.

 

The pilot project, the first of its kind in New York City, is based on a successful model used in Miami, Florida. The New York City project will work with Judge Clark V. Richardson, supervising judge of the Bronx Family Court, who presides over the recently inaugurated Family Court Part exclusively for the Highbridge section of the South Bronx. Families who come before this part can be referred to the project for child-parent psychotherapy and intensive case management. A range of mental health services will be available to these families. The project will also be linked to Bridge Builders, a community collaboration to reduce violence against children and placement into foster care.

 

Parent Educational Opportunities Program: The Child Welfare Fund has provided a grant to the Child Welfare Organizing Project to design a college scholarship program for parents whose families have become embroiled in the foster care system and who have been reunited with their children. The program will provide peer guidance, financial assistance and other support to enable parents to attend and succeed at college or other post-secondary education.

 

The goal of the program is for these parents to realize more of their academic and vocational potential, to earn advanced educational credentials, and to secure better jobs. The program will respect parents’ choices, including the pursuit of careers unrelated to child welfare or community service, though we expect that some parents will have an interest in these areas. We anticipate that the first awardees will receive their scholarships in the fall of 2008. 

 

The program will be guided by an advisory panel comprising representatives of parent advocacy groups, child welfare and educational organizations, legal services, foster care federations, New York City’s Administration for Children’s Services, and colleges.

 

Preventive Assessment: Preventive service programs have been an essential part of the support network for families at risk of having a child placed in foster care. New York City’s Administration for Children’s Services (ACS) will soon begin to evaluate the performance of the roughly 140 preventive service programs it funds to determine which are providing effective help to families.

 

The Child Welfare Fund has provided grants to the Child Welfare Organizing Project (CWOP) to collaborate with ACS in the design and implementation of a system to interview client-parents as part of the evaluation. Parents will be asked what their needs were and whether those needs were met by the preventive service agency. ACS and CWOP are also exploring the possibility that specially trained Parent Advocates will conduct the interviews.