Current Programs and Accomplishments

In 2003, Highbridge had the highest number of children removed to foster care of any of NYC’s 59 Community Planning Districts.  In the same year, East Harlem ranked fourth on this list.  Strangely enough, both communities are also known for a relatively large array of neighborhood-based child and family services.  East Harlem for example, in June 2003, had a larger number of active Preventive Services cases than any other Community District in NYC.

There seems to be a paradox between this wealth of services and some of the highest child maltreatment and placement rates in NYC.  It is exactly this apparent disconnect between service providers and users that CWOP was formed to explore and address.  CWOP’s understanding of both East Harlem and Highbridge is informed by staff members with multi-generational roots in each community.  In our collective experience:

• Parents, particularly non-English-speaking parents, often do not know their legal rights within child welfare and other public service systems. 

• Professionals often fail to discuss parents’ rights and responsibilities with them, or to give them relevant information about benefits and services.
• There are large power imbalances between public service authorities and parents that often result in parents – mothers in particular - feeling demeaned, intimidated, and excluded from the very kinds of help they feel they need most.

Families’ service needs often go unmet, not simply due to a lack of resources, but because available services are not often offered on terms that parents can understand or accept, or within an organizational culture of trust and respect.  These themes play out systemically in poor indicators of child welfare “family engagement.”  There has been improvement in certain indicators of family engagement over the past few years, which can be attributed to the ongoing work of CWOP and other committed organizations, including the Administration for Children’s Services.  As the following indicate, however, continued improvement is needed: 

• Low rates of parent/ child visiting in foster care:  In 2001, according to the OCFS Foster Care Case Review, only 29 percent of New York City foster children with a goal of reunification visited with their parent at or above the mandated bi-weekly level.  This percentage significantly increased to 63 percent in 2005 (The Current Status of Parent Advocacy Programs at ACS Foster Care Agencies, Summer 2005).  The progress is notable, but it also demonstrates that more than a third of families with children in foster care continue to have limited or no opportunities to visit with their children.

• Lack of family participation in Service Plan Reviews:  In 2000, OCFS reported that, in 1999, no Service Plan Review (SPR) was held or documented in 17% of NYC foster care cases in which reunification was the goal.  In those cases where Service Plan Reviews were held, parents attended SPR’s less than one third of the time.  Only 22% of foster children over age 10 attended their SPR’s.  In their August 2003 Report on Family Engagement, the New York City Child Welfare Advisory Panel observed –  “FTC’s [Family Team Conferences] and SPR’s have not yet become the family engagement and family decision-making vehicles that ACS envisioned…the conferences…were run as though planning decisions…were made elsewhere…Service Plan Reviews observed were used for administrative review rather than as the opportunity envisioned by ACS for planning and shared decision-making between ACS, contract agency caseworkers, and parents.” Progress has been made since 2003 with regard to parental participation in SPRs.  Data for 2005 indicate that parents attended SPRs in 46% of the cases where reunification was the goal (The Current Status of Parent Advocacy Programs at ACS Foster Care Agencies, Summer 2005).  As with parental visiting, this progress is meaningful. However, it is important to note that in more than half of the cases in which reunification is the goal, parents are not attending SPRs.

CWOP currently has a database of close to 1,500 parents, most of who have, or have had, children in foster care.  Staff has regular contact with about half of these parents through meetings, trainings, and public events.  The bulk of our membership consists of single African American or Latina mothers living in poverty.  This closely reflects the demographics of the foster care population.  Eighteen Community Planning Districts account for the majority of NYC’s foster care population.  All are low-income, African American, Latino, and / or immigrant communities.  Over 95% of the New York City children in foster care are African American or Latino.  Systemically, it is generally assumed that child maltreatment represents the failure of motherhood.  Fathers are often overlooked, with ACS at times carrying this dynamic to lengths as extreme as charging battered mothers with endangering their children by “engaging in domestic violence.”

These mothers are heavily stigmatized and disenfranchised even before coming into contact with the child welfare system.  Most parents involved with CWOP acknowledge and accept responsibility for the personal vulnerabilities and mistakes that brought ACS into their lives.  Many concede that their children needed protection, and that they needed help.  Their issue is that, while they often met some good people working in the system, on the whole, ACS compounded the pre-existing damage and danger to their families, while ignoring their legal rights and denying their value as parents and as human beings.  The three concerns most commonly cited by CWOP’s members are:

• Inadequate legal representation by court-appointed attorneys and a resulting lack of due process in the Family Court
• Foster care is tenacious.  Even once issues cited as grounds for child removal are resolved, new factors (such as insufficient income or living space) become impediments to discharge.
• Equating placement with child protection is a false premise.  Many children are mistreated in foster care in ways of which their parents were never accused or suspected

CWOP helps such parents, individually and collectively, to develop the knowledge and access needed to achieve a greater voice in public policy; dispel unwarranted negative stereotypes of users of public child welfare services; and influence public and private agencies to become more respectful of clients in their philosophy and more consumer-driven in their service approach.  We believe that no group of people has a deeper personal stake, nor a more basic human right to participate, in public child welfare reform.

• Since a universal concern of CWOP’s membership is lack of access to adequate legal counsel, basic information about child welfare law and regulation, and about parents’ rights and responsibilities, much of our core activity is centered on parent organizing and education through three basic types of meetings:

• Weekly peer-led support and self-help groups, in both East Harlem and Highbridge, engage and assist parents in working through the serious trauma of child removal, and prepare them for participation in more structured, goal-directed activities.
• Monthly general membership meetings are organized around themes that parents identify as important, for example: understanding the Adoption and Safe Families Act, Service Plan Review participation, helping your court-appointed attorney to represent you effectively, remaining involved in the educational process of children in foster care, and sealing or amending NY State Central Register records.  Outside experts are often brought in to facilitate these meetings.  This serves an important secondary function of developing working relationships with other organizations invested in child welfare reform.
• Parent Organizer / attorney - led parents’ rights workshops are offered in settings where clients of the child welfare system are generally found: drug-treatment programs, halfway houses and Tier II shelters, NYCHA tenant associations, and immigrant mutual assistance societies.  These meetings also serve important secondary functions of outreach and membership building.

 

• One of CWOP’s core beliefs is that any significant discussion of the needs of children and families in the child welfare system must include the voices of parents, yet too many do not.  CWOP has facilitated meaningful parent participation in:

• New York City Council, New York State Assembly, Community Board, and New York State Bar Association hearings
• Dialogue with ACS management staff, up to and including the Commissioner, and with other key policy-making entities such as the Special Child Welfare Advisory Panel, authorized to monitor and report on the progress of ACS reform efforts
• Professional conferences sponsored by the Children’s Defense Fund, the Child Welfare League of America, the National Association of Social Workers, the National Resource Center for Foster Care And Permanency Planning, and the US Department of Health and Human Services, among many others.
• Public forums sponsored by Child Welfare Watch / Center for an Urban Future, the Reverend Al Sharpton’s National Action Network, the Conference of Non-Governmental Organizations in Consultative Relationships to the United Nations, among many others
• Professional education at the New York University, Columbia, and Fordham University Schools of Law and Social Work, the Hunter College School of Social Work, Adelphi University, the College of New Rochelle, and the New School for Social Research
• Training of professional staff at agencies including the ACS Satterwhite Academy, Concord Family Services, Family Dynamics, and the Northern Manhattan Perinatal Partnership
• Media coverage of child welfare issues by the New York Times, CNN, and National Public Radio, among many other media outlets.

 

• CWOP helps parents write for publication as a means of debunking stereotypes, using our stories and experiences as a teaching tool, reaching, engaging, and educating other parents in language and terms to which they can relate.  We have:

• Helped Represent (formerly Foster Care Youth United), a nationally distributed (and acclaimed) periodical written by and for youth in foster care, to develop a monthly “Parents’ Perspective” feature

• Published our own quarterly newsletter – “For Parents By Parents”

Worked in collaboration with Legal Services for New York, the NYU Family Defense Clinic, Legal Information for Families Today, and the NYC Public Advocate’s office to develop fact-sheets and workbooks for distribution to respondent parents in the Family Court.  “The Survival Guide to the NYC Child Welfare System:  A Workbook for Parents by Parents” serves as a guide and text for our parents’ rights trainings.

• Graduates of our Parent Leadership Curriculum have secured employment at CWOP and other agencies including the Birth Fathers’ Support Network, CASAWorks / Palladia, the Center for Family Representation, Children’s Rights, Inc., the Child Welfare Fund, Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center, Community Voices Heard, Concerned Citizens for Family Preservation, Family Consultation Services, the Harlem Community Justice Center, the Harriet Tubman Residence, the NYC Department of Education, the Salvation Army, St. Christopher–Ottilie, St. Dominic’s, the Southern Queens Park Association, and Talbot Perkins Children’s Services.   The Parent Leadership Curriculum has become a key, indispensable element of CWOP’s approach.  We anticipate replicating and refining the curriculum indefinitely.  CWOP believes it is important to keep producing quality Parent Advocates because of the enormous contributions they make on personal, agency, and systemic levels:

 

• On a personal level, nobody understands the trauma of child removal better than someone who has experienced it.  The Parent Advocate is a role model, living proof that you can reunite your family.  Parent Advocates understand the needs and strengths of their communities from their own life experience.  They understand how to make the system work, as opposed to how it’s “supposed to” work. 
• On an agency level, Parent Advocates promote better service outcomes.  Their presence “changes the dialogue” within the agency.  Professionals become more conscious and respectful of the parent perspective.  They are the link between agency and community, and can advise the agency on how to better serve the community.
• On a system level, we can find successful precedents for child welfare Parent Advocates in other public services systems such as child mental health and services for children with developmental disabilities.  By hiring from the community, publicly funded agencies can become engines of economic development, a conduit for reinvesting public resources in job creation.  And perhaps most importantly, ours is a democratic society, and people have a human right to participate in the operation of the public institutions that exist to serve them.