History:
The Child Welfare Organizing Project (CWOP) began in 1994 with a grant from the Child Welfare Fund to Beth Rosenthal, a research consultant, and the Hunter College School of Social Work / Education Center for Community Organizing. CWOP’s initial purpose was to explore in what ways – if any – clients of the public child welfare system in New York City were involved in the design, practice, and evaluation of programs and policies impacting their families. Extensive interviews, a series of 1995 focus groups, and a 1996 “Client Summit” attended by over 300 parents, youth, foster parents, professionals, and advocates yielded a broad consensus that the client voice in general, and the parent voice in particular, were the missing links in child welfare reform efforts at that time. These activities were also instrumental to making parents an integral part of CWOP’s organizational structure, and prioritizing issues that they wished to pursue.
Under the leadership of founding Executive Director Mabel Paulino, in 1996 and 1997, the CWOP-led Child Welfare Client Coalition for Change – composed of a variety of representatives of family service, governmental, and advocacy organizations – was formed to support and advance the principle of parent involvement in child welfare reform. Some of the Coalition’s member agencies created Parent Advocate positions in their own foster care and preventive service programs, an idea that has since persisted and spread.
Current Executive Director, Michael Arsham, assumed leadership of CWOP in late 1998. CWOP’s present core activities include:
Through this range of activities, we believe we have achieved, and will continue to achieve, significant results. For example:
The New York City Administration for Children’s Services was created in 1995, close to the same time as CWOP. Formed in the aftermath of the death of Elisa Izquierdo, ACS was charged with a mission statement that any “ambiguity” regarding child safety must be “resolved in favor of removing the child.” Involuntary removals increased by over 50% in the next two years. Parents were jailed and prosecuted for misdemeanor-level child endangerment “offenses” such as living in substandard housing or leaving children briefly unattended. Already inadequate family preservation resources were cut by close to 20%, with former Mayor Giuliani expressing his belief that the city had been trying too hard to keep families together.
While a great distance remains to be traveled, we have come a long way in the years since 1995. Numbers of involuntary removals and the total foster care population began to trend downward in 1998. Restorations have been made to preventive services, preventive spending and the rate of ACS referrals for family preservation services has increased. Commissioner William Bell, during his two-year tenure from 2002 - 2004, began to use parents in meaningful advisory capacities, including taking steps to assure that parent voices informed the national Pew Commission on Children in Foster Care. In stark contrast to the 1995 mission statement, a 2002 “Renewed Plan of Action for ACS” reads:
“ACS believes that when a family in need comes to our attention, every effort should be made to explore options with the family that would allow the child to stay safely at home. A child’s family is the first, and most likely best, place to support healthy growth and development. If a child must come into care to ensure his or her safety, ACS believes that foster care, a temporary intervention, must be planned with relevant family members involved as partners…(P)arents should be included at every step. They must be fully engaged…understand why their children have been removed, fully participate in designing their own and their children’s service plans…”
While many people and organizations share credit for this dramatic shift in public policy and philosophy (and there are still significant gaps between philosophy and practice), CWOP indisputably holds a unique place among them. Specifically:
- Throughout 1999 and 2000, CWOP facilitated numerous meetings and communications between parents and the Special Child Welfare Advisory Panel, created to assess and make recommendations to ACS as part of the settlement agreement to a federal lawsuit, Marisol v. Giuliani. The parents’ perspective was reflected in most of the Panel’s reports, particularly their final report, which identified permanency as the area in which ACS most needed to make progress, and meaningful parent involvement as the key to that progress. The central recommendation of the Panel’s Final Report was: “(W)e believe that the heart of a new system-wide approach to permanency is a re-thinking of the role of parents, around the primary themes of enhanced respect, engagement, and partnership…”
- Working in cooperation with Hon. Roger Green (New York State Assembly Member from Brooklyn and Chair of the Assembly Committee on Children and Families and the Black and Puerto Rican Legislative Caucus), CWOP helped draft language for a New York State Office of Child and Family Services budget appropriation for “Child Welfare Parent Self-Help and Advisory Councils.” With the funds from this appropriation, CWOP hired three Parent Organizers in July 2001. These Parent Organizers staff parent support and education groups, serve on the ACS Parent Advisory Work-Group, the NY State Office of Child and Family Services Program Improvement Plan Work-Group, and consult with the Special Child Welfare Advisory Panel. It is our hope that this successful relationship with state government, which we are also striving to replicate on a local / NY City Council level, represents the beginnings of a financial and statutory base for consumer involvement in the planning and delivery of child welfare services analogous to that existing in other public service systems such as mental health, developmental disabilities, early childhood education, and substance abuse treatment services.
- In October 2000, CWOP joined the planning committee of the Fordham University Interdisciplinary Center for Family and Child Advocacy Spring Conference. The Conference, which took place on April 27 and 28, 2001 was titled “Achieving Justice: Parents and the Child Welfare System.” It featured parents as keynote panelists, and parent representation in all of its work-groups. We had never before seen parents this integrally involved in the planning and presentation of a professional conference, and this effort set a valuable precedent for consumer involvement in professional and public education that has since been emulated in many other venues.
- Our 2½-year partnership with the Bushwick Managed Care Initiative from 1998 - 2001 was a pivotal, formative experience for CWOP, and one through which we also achieved significant outcomes. We guided and witnessed the development a cadre of seven outstanding Parent Leaders, who collectively raised public consciousness about the role of parents in the child welfare system through dozens of CWOP activities. They reached out to, educated, and inspired hundreds of other parents throughout the city. About half secured full-time employment in child welfare agencies. The remainder helped CWOP import the Parent Leadership Curriculum developed in Bushwick to East Harlem in 2001 / 2. The Curriculum course outlines became legacy materials that parents have used to successfully replicate the curriculum in East Harlem for three consecutive years, 2001 - 2004. Use of pre- / post-test instruments consistently reveals measurable cognitive and attitudinal gains on the part of the Parent Leaders. Cumulatively, over 50% of the Curriculum’s graduates have secured employment as peer outreach workers, advocates, and / or organizers. Over 70% of the Parent Leaders who had a child placed in foster care when they began the Curriculum had reunited their family by its conclusion.
- CWOP’s experience in both Bushwick and East Harlem prepared us to play a key role in facilitating parent / community participation in the Highbridge Partnership for Family Supports and Justice, formed for the purpose of reducing both child maltreatment and unnecessary foster care placement of Highbridge children. The Partnership is supported by a funders’ collaborative, and consists of a variety of community agencies, both public and private, including ACS. The initiative has four basic components: parent and youth empowerment, enhanced community-based family support and preservation services, diverting families from child protective investigations when this is safely possible, and community legal education and alternative models of legal representation. Through the Partnership, in 2002 – 3, CWOP established a South Bronx office. CWOP Highbridge Parent Organizers are working with ACS, ACS contractors, and other key local agencies to support family life in this very high-need community in a variety of creative and unprecedented ways.