Introduction

The Child Welfare Organizing Project (CWOP) is a parent / professional partnership dedicated to public child welfare reform in New York City through increased, meaningful parent involvement in service and policy planning.  Founded in 1994 with a grant from the Child Welfare Fund to the Hunter College School of Social Work, CWOP’s early research led to the conclusion that clients, particularly biological parents, had practically no voice in NYC’s public child welfare system. 

Today, parents who have had direct, personal experience with the system

• Have formed an active Parent Advisory Work Group to the New York City Administration for Children’s Services (ACS)

• Work as peer advocates in over twenty foster care, preventive, and legal services organizations
• Were instrumental in passing City Council legislation creating a Parent Advocate Advisory Committee to the ACS Commissioner
• Guest lecture at virtually every area school of law and social work, and develop training curricula for the public and voluntary sector child welfare workforce
• Have created and successfully delivered seven annual cycles of a peer-led Parent Leadership Curriculum.  Over half of the Curriculum’s graduates have secured employment as Parent Advocates.  Over 70% of those who had a child in foster care when they entered the Curriculum had reunited their family by the time they graduated six to eight months later.
• Helped instigate and inform a NYC Criminal Justice Coordinator’s Request for Proposals for interdisciplinary providers of legal services that seems destined to revolutionize the nature and quality of representation and due process available to low-income parents responding to child maltreatment allegations in Family Court.
• Write for and publish their own newsletter and magazine, and work actively with the media to challenge the racist stereotypes of ACS-involved families that depreciate service quality.
• Are working with the ACS Division of Research and Evaluation to create family interview instruments for use in performance evaluation of ACS Preventive Service and Foster Care contractors.

Within the same time period, NYC’s foster care population, and involuntary removals of children from their families declined by close to 50%.  Referrals for preventive services increased by 25% between 1999 and 2003, and the leadership of ACS has made neighborhood based family support and preservation services central to ongoing system reform efforts.  In a defining moment for CWOP, at our 10th anniversary celebration in June 2004, departing ACS Commissioner William Bell publicly announced: “this system has fundamentally changed over the last several years…because you have forced us to change.”

CWOP, with a staff and Board consisting largely of ACS-involved parents, has contributed significantly to this transformation through a wide range of evolving, constituent-driven activities and strategies including:

• Parent education and organizing
• Facilitating parent dialogue with child welfare policy-makers and parent participation in professional education
• Helping parents write for publication and work with the media
• Ongoing development of a peer-led parent leadership curriculum orienting clients to their rights and responsibilities within the child welfare system, and preparing them to serve as uniquely qualified policy analysts.