Resources
Click the Category links below to see word documents and pdfs that provide information on our work and resources for Parents and Volunteers. Click the Category links below to see To the right are links to articles on that give an overview of the Child welfare system.
Chapin Hall Reports
In 2008, CWOP joined the Fund for Social Change Parent Advocate Initiative. CWOP’s role over the next two years was to train Parent Advocates to work in six foster care agencies, and to develop a city-wide Parent Advocate Network. The Fund retained the Chapin Hall Center at the University of Chicago as a research consultant. Chapin Hall has completed two Evaluation Reports. Both reports are positive and encouraging. While it is too soon to speculate about the impact of Parent Advocates on permanency outcomes for children and families, the reports lay some of the groundwork for future studies.
- The first, issued in May 2010, focuses on the Parent Leadership Curriculum.
- The second, issued in October 2010, examines the role of the Parent Advocates in their respective agencies.
- CWOP in a Box: Parent Leadership Curriculum
Parent Advocate Letter from Child Welfare Agency
The purpose of this Informational Letter (INF) is to provide information to local departments of social services and voluntary authorized agencies regarding the use of parent advocates. Parent advocates can be part of an agency program or may be additional staff hired to supplement the child welfare services already provided in the agency.
Memorandum of Understanding between CWOP and Child Services
Memo detailing the interactions of pilot program with CWOP to create and support Child Safety Conferences in the East Harlem District.
Community Partnership Project
One way that the work of Parent Advocates & Community Representatives are supported is through the Community Partnership Project (CPP) with ACS. Read the Winter 2012 issue of Child Welfare Watch : One Step Back: The Delayed Dream of Community Partnership. CWOP’s work receives much attention and support in this issue.
Weinstein Order
Senior District Judge Jack B. Weinstein’s Order in support of Mother’s who have had their children unfairly removed by ACS.
Changing The Narrative Of Child Welfare – by Matthew Fraidin
“In child welfare, the difference we can make as lawyers for parents, children, and the state, and as judges, is to prevent children from entering foster care unnecessarily. And we can end a child’s stay in foster care as quickly as possible. To do that, we have to fight against a powerful narrative of child welfare and against the accepted “top-down” paradigm of legal services,” explains Matthew Fraidin, Visiting Professor at Georgetown University Law Center. See the full text of his article here:
Parenting Under Scrutiny – by Chris Gottlieb
Chris Gottlieb, in a guest blog on NYTimes.com, argues that in the vast majority of child neglect or abuse cases, the people that these children most need to be protected from is not their parents. “It is us,” she notes. “For we have empowered the government to judge parents and when the parenting is found wanting, to take children.” Chris Gottlieb is a lawyer with the Family Defense Clinic at New York University School of Law.
Social Services Law 424-a
Legal opinion on New York Law regarding employers’ responsibilities when considering employing or retaining an employee with an indicated child abuse and maltreatment report.
Racial Disproportionality
This article describes work being done in Texas to address racial disproportionality statewide through promising practices and innovations in Undoing Racism trainings, values-based leadership development,and community engagement strategies.
This brief from the Government Accountability Office is an excerpt from African American Children In Foster Care: Addition HHS Assistance Needed to Help States Reduce the Porportion in Care
Letter from Chair of the House of Representatives Ways and Means committee with information the Invest in Kids Act.
- In 1998, when the color of children in foster care was barely discussed in polite company, this issue was a game-changer. Once the elephant in the living room is clearly pointed out, it becomes that much harder to overlook. Read it here
Adoption and Safe Families Act
A series of papers on the Adoption and Safe Families act of various perspectives and policy briefs.
Rise Magazine: http://www.risemagazine.org/
Rise trains parents to write about their experiences with the child welfare system in order to support parents and parent advocacy and guide child welfare practitioners and policymakers in becoming more responsive to the families and communities they serve.
The Center for Family Representation: http://www.cfrny.org/
CFR uses a groundbreaking team approach that offers each family a lawyer and social worker, as well as a Parent Advocates who has experienced the foster care system firsthand and can empathize with the struggles vulnerable families face.
The Anti-Racist Alliance: http://www.antiracistalliance.com/
The Anti-Racist Alliance is a movement for racial equity. They are an organizing collective of human service practitioners and educators whose vision is to bring a clear and deliberate anti-racist structural power analysis to social service education and practice.
The People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond: http://pisab.org/
The People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond’s Undoing Racism™/Community Organizing Workshops move beyond a focus on the symptoms of racism to an understanding of what it is, where it comes from, how it functions, why it persists and how it can be undone.
Training schedules can be found here: http://www.antiracistalliance.com/ARA-training.html
National Resource Center for Permanency and Family Connections at Hunter College School of Social Work: http://www.nrcpfc.org
The National Resource Center for Permanency and Family Connections at the Hunter College School of Social Work is a training, technical assistance, and information services organization dedicated to help strengthen the capacity of State, local, Tribal and other publicly administered or supported child welfare agencies to: institutionalize a safety-focused, family-centered, and community-based approach to meet the needs of children, youth and families.
National Advocates for Pregnant Women: http://www.advocatesforpregnantwomen.org/
National Advocates for Pregnant Women (NAPW) seeks to protect the rights and human dignity of all women, particularly pregnant and parenting women and those who are most vulnerable including low income women, women of color, and drug-using women.
