Our Allies:

Many individuals and organizations share credit for the growing acceptance of parent involvement as an essential force for child welfare reform.   CWOP has purposefully cultivated relationships with:

•  The NYC Administration for Children's Services :   Since the election of Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the appointment of Commissioner William Bell, in 2002, CWOP has been able to move beyond an adversarial relationship with ACS, form a more cooperative relationship, and work in collaboration with the public agency towards some shared goals.   CWOP Parent Organizers helped revive a relatively inactive ACS Parent Advisory Work-Group, and helped plan and convene the first ACS “Parent Advocate Consortium” – a citywide gathering of parents in staff roles at ACS contract agencies – in November 2002.   ACS's stated goal in this work is to “advance parent involvement in agencies by promoting the concept of hiring parent advocates.”   While we are mindful of both the real danger and the potential appearance of being co-opted, we believe we have worked constructively with ACS and maintained our organizational integrity in the process to date.   For example, the seventh quarterly Parent Advocate Consortium, held in September 2004, focused on preventing and responding to maltreatment of children in foster care, an issue we don't believe ACS would have been inclined to acknowledge or discuss publicly even just a few years ago.

•  ASFA (Adoption and Safe Families Act) Implementation Working Group / Training Subcommittee:   Usually referred to internally as the “Workbook Group,” this is a self-selected collaborative group of CWOP Parent Organizers, attorneys, and social workers from Legal Services for NYC (including Bronx and Brooklyn LSNY Corp. A and B), the NYU Family Defense Clinic, Legal Information for Families Today, the Public Advocate's Office, the Center for Family Representation, and the Bronx Defenders .   Members of this group co-authored our “Survival Guide to the Child Welfare System,” which has become the text for dozens of parents' rights trainings offered throughout the city over the past three years.   The trainings are co-led by attorney / Parent Organizer teams, and emphasize parent self-advocacy and empowerment through Service Plan Review participation, maximizing parent / child visiting in foster care, and understanding the Family Court process.   The Workbook Group meets monthly, and is currently expanding the Survival Guide to include information on averting foster care placement, in addition to the predominant content on family reunification.

•  The Bridgebuilders (a.k.a. The Highbridge Partnmership for Family Supports and Justice):   As described above, under “History,” beginning with a year-long planning process started in Fall 2002, continuing through its formal inception in Fall 2003, the Bridgebuilders has become an important vehicle both for CWOP's expansion into the South Bronx, and a key testing ground for the efficacy of grass-roots public child welfare reform in an extremely high-need community.

•  Center for Family Representation :   With CWOP's support, the Center for Family Representation secured funding from New York Foundation for Community Advocacy Teams, that include Parent Advocates.   The Community Advocacy Team is widely acknowledged in the legal services community as a promising alternative model of legal representation for indigent parents facing child maltreatment allegations, and it is largely due to CWOP's influence that the model includes a peer advocate.   CWOP also works with CFR to help parents amend and seal NY State Central Register records, and CFR provides representation for some of our members.  

•  Chapin Hall Center of the University of Chicago :   Fred Wulczyn of the Chapin Hall Center is serving as a consultant to CWOP and helping us design an alumni survey of our Parent Leadership Curriculum graduates, intended to assess, document, and improve the effectiveness of the Curriculum.

•  Children's Rights, Inc. :   In 2004, CWOP and CRI collaborated on a participatory study of permanency in NYC child welfare, in which CWOP parents helped determine the research agenda, participated in interviews, and received training in order to conduct interviews with other parents.   We currently have a joint proposal pending for a similar study of group parenting training classes.

•  Human Services Consortium of East Harlem :   CWOP belongs to a Human Service Consortium of East Harlem that has been active since 1979.   Membership in the Consortium has helped CWOP, which moved its main office from Central to East Harlem in June 2001, to become part of a reciprocal referral network and to develop mutually supportive relationships with key personnel in most of the member agencies.   Through the Consortium, we have direct access to services including youth development, family preservation, health care and education, legal services, employment and job readiness training, mental health services and developmental evaluation, home care, domestic violence intervention, substance abuse treatment, and emergency food.   Collaborative work with Consortium members including Community Voices Heard, the JusticeWorks Seven Neighborhood Action Partnership (for repeal of the Rockefeller Drug Laws), and the East Harlem Coalition for Domestic Violence also forms a basis for learning and leadership activities offered through our Parent Leadership Curriculum.

•  May 1st Technology Collective (formerly Media Jumpstart) :   May 1st is group of social activists who use computers as a tool for social change. Their services were initially made available to CWOP through a Technical Assistance Grant from the New York Foundation.   May 1st helped us create our website and improve the functionality of our database.   We have maintained an ongoing consulting relationship with them.

•  National Coalition for Child Protection Reform :   NCCPR is a Washington, DC based organization that promotes improved public understanding of child welfare issues through more responsible and accurate media coverage.   Executive Director Richard Wexler is himself a former journalist, and has served CWOP as a media-relations consultant thanks to a grant from the Child Welfare Fund.   Mr. Wexler has helped CWOP develop our “core materials,” which can be accessed on this website.

•  Represent and Voices of Youth : Represent is a nationally distributed magazine written by youth in foster care for a readership of both peers and professionals.   CWOP helped Represent develop a “Parents' Perspective” feature.   Represent editorial staff facilitate writing workshops as part of CWOP's Parent Leadership Curriculum.  These workshops eventually involved into Rise magazine, written by and for parents and distributed nationally.  To download free issues of Rise, go to:  www.risemagazine.org Voices of Youth is an organization analogous to CWOP, created by and for older youth in foster care and young adults recently discharged from foster care.   Voices of Youth holds an organizational seat on CWOP's Board, and CWOP Parent Organizers engage in joint professional education activities with VOY staff, including an annual guest lecture at the Columbia School of Law.   Through our work with these two remarkable organizations, we seem to be arriving at a shared understanding and message that, most often, the needs of children and parents in the system are not competing interests, but vitally interrelated.

•  Welfare Rights Initiative :   WRI is a CUNY-based organization of women who have had first-hand experience changing the public welfare system and becoming civically involved in the decision-making that effects their lives.   A 2003 New York Women's Foundation Technical Assistance Grant allowed CWOP to retain WRI as training consultants to our Parent Organizers.   We found this to be an invaluable learning and development opportunity, as well as the beginning of a collaboration that we will continue, deepen, and expand via a grant from the Ira W. DeCamp Foundation.   WRI has helped CWOP's Parent Organizers to develop their public speaking and messaging skills, to refine their approach to developing and promoting CWOP's City Council legislative agenda, and avail themselves of continuing education opportunities at CUNY.  

While CWOP shares common values and goals with a variety of organizations, two things that set us apart are:

•  The extent and depth of parent involvement in both the direction and the daily activities of the organization

•  Our commitment to work for change both within and outside of the existing system.

Both of these qualities are works in progress.   Through our Board development and staff decision-making processes, we are continually seeking not simply to advocate parent involvement in child welfare decision-making, but to model it.  

We have also struggled with achieving a balance between “inside” and “outside” system change strategies.   Our difficulty in establishing a working relationship with the initial leadership of ACS, and in maintaining a partnership with the Bushwick Managed Care Initiative, raised doubts as to whether or not real partnership between CWOP, ACS, and ACS contractors is truly desirable or attainable.   This is a dilemma that CWOP will continue to wrestle with, even as we continue working to develop these types of relationships.