 |
|
|
 |
|
 |
| |
|
Bringing Innovative Legal Services to Scale
|
| |
|
A Brief History of CFR's Community Advocacy Teams: from Pilot to Promise
In 2004, CFR set out to change the way poor children and their families received needed social work
and legal services when there was a risk of a child being abused or neglected. For years,
experts had called for an approach that would provide comprehensive services to families, early on,
before a problem or crisis became a danger to a child -- and, should foster care be inevitable, an
approach that could continue providing services to help the family reunify safely. CFR's
Community Advocacy Teams (CAT) answered that call.
CAT is the only model of its kind in the nation and is a response to three
distinct but related realities: one, it is primarily poor families of color whose children end up in
foster care and almost always poor parents who end up charged with neglect.
Second, foster care can have long term, detrimental effects on children of any age. And third,
very often children who spend time in foster care grow up to become adults whose own children go into
foster care, continuing a detrimental cycle that spans generations.
CAT provides a full cycle of services by offering families the
assistance of an attorney, a social worker and a parent advocate (a parent who has directly experienced
the child protective and foster care systems and has successfully reunified with his/her child.)
Early on, dozens of community based agencies made referrals to CAT, and so did
the Administration for Children's Services (ACS), the agency responsible for child welfare investigations
and foster care placements in New York City. In its pilot phase, CAT
served 75 families a year between 2004 and 2006; we prevented foster care 95% of the time in situations
where we met a family during a child protective investigation and where we met a family after a parent
had been charged with neglect and a child placed in care, we achieved an average length of foster
care of 4.5 months-compared to a statewide average of more than four years.
In early 2007, the City of New York awarded CFR a contract to provide CAT services
to 600 families a year and to focus on parents already brought before the court in the borough of Manhattan.
While valuable opportunities to avoid foster care are often compromised when CFR can not intervene early
(during an investigation), CAT continues achieve results for the city's most
vulnerable families that drastically outpace city and state outcomes. Children of CAT
families spend, on average, 73% less time in foster care than children in the city and state and in 50% of our
cases, children never enter care at all, but instead stay at home with the services needed to help them stay
safe and thrive.
To read more about CAT, click on the following:
More on CAT's Results
Our CAT Families
How Foster Care can Harm the Children it should Help
Poor Children are More Likely to End up in Foster Care
Why CAT Works
The Cost of CAT vs. the Cost of Foster Care
CAT's Community Partners
How you can Help
|
| |
|
More on CAT Results
|
In 2007, CFR developed a comprehensive database to track our results for CAT
families and to determine if what had worked with a small but dedicated staff could translate into safe
and effective outcomes for a vastly expanded client base-and the answer has been a resounding YES:
- Our average length of foster care continues to be just under four months (compared to more than 11
months for children citywide who return home in less than a year and nearly four years for all other
children in care);
- Requests for technical assistance on the CAT model have come from professionals in the states
of Vermont, Connecticut, and Michigan.
Equally important, CAT's expansion has given us a platform from which to
convince civic and government leaders that competent, compassionate and comprehensive assistance
helps children stay safe, helps parents get healthy and helps the whole system become more cost
effective and better at supporting families.
|
| |
|
Our CAT Families
|
|
As of September 2008, CAT has served more than 600 families, including more
than 1200 children. 87% of our CAT families are people of color and 80%
are headed by women. Close to a quarter of CAT families are headed by a young single parent
between 17 and 25 years old. 25% of CAT parents were diagnosed with a mental
illness, either recently or in the past. 33% struggle with problems of addiction, and 9% are
homeless. More than a fifth of CFR's clients are victims of domestic violence.
|
| |
|
How Foster Care can Harm the Children it should Help
|
While always well intentioned, foster care can have serious deleterious effects on children:
a removal means that a child must cope with the trauma of separation from parents and sometimes siblings,
extended family, friends, school teachers, churches, teams. Lost connections and compromised
relationships impact children for a lifetime.
Children who spend extended time in foster care more frequently experience emotional, psychiatric and
educational difficulties and as adults often fall victim to poverty, homelessness, unemployment and
incarceration:
- Foster youth are more than twice as likely as the general population to be pregnant by age 19.i
- 37% of youth leaving foster care are neither employed nor in school.ii
- 65% of foster youth experience seven or more school changes from elementary through high school.iii
- Foster care children are twice as likely to suffer from mental illness and post-traumatic stress
disorder (PTSD) as the general public.iv
- Children in foster care perform lower on citywide tests than their peers in reading and math.v
- As adults, people with a background in care make up 26% of the homeless population (and 61% of
the homeless population between the ages of 18 and 19), are 15 times less likely to finish college
than the general public, and are three times more likely to live in poverty.vi
Studies also demonstrate that children who spend time in foster care experience greater social
vulnerability later in life, largely stemming from the absence of family and emotional support during
childhood development. When added to negative behaviors often learned from other troubled youth
in care or group homes, depressed self-esteem, and the absence of appropriate conflict resolution skills,
foster care children face serious obstacles to successful social integration in their adult lives.
The result of these compounded factors is the heightened chance that as adults, they will experience their
own children entering foster care, continuing the detrimental cycle. In fact, 42% of
CFR's young adult parents are either still in foster care (our teen parents) or they
experienced foster care as children.
|
| |
|
Poor Children are More Likely to end up in Foster Care
|
Poor parents are 44 times more likely to be accused of neglect than parents with resources.
Why? Because families with means can afford to get the help they need as soon as a problem
occurs, well before an investigation or court proceeding would begin. A study of cases in
New York City where parents were accused of failing to supervise their children found that 52 percent
of the time, the service needed most was babysitting or day care. The "service" offered most
was foster care.
83% of the children in foster care in Manhattan come from the city's 5 poorest neighborhoods.
And children from the 15 poorest neighborhoods account for more than half of the total foster care population
in the city.
Read the headlines and it is easy to assume that all parents accused of mistreating their children
have done awful things. But over 90 % of official allegations of "abuse" are not abuse at
all, but are in fact "neglect," much of it poverty related: substandard housing, impoverished
schools, a lack of high quality child care, unemployment, all strain poor families.
Unemployment, depression, the death of a parent, addiction, a special needs child, inadequate educational
resources, or domestic violence are stressful and can impact a family for months and even years.
When families with means face such challenges, they can engage competent professionals, rely on extended
family, turn to a wide network of community supports-but for poor families the equation is quite
different-Poor families living in impoverished neighborhoods are often headed by single parents, who may
be isolated, overwhelmed, or unable to navigate complicated bureaucratic service delivery systems.
They may need advocacy to help secure entitlements for themselves or their children and they may need
additional support to stay engaged in services. Yet too often, poor families in New York are not
offered help until they are being investigated or charged with neglect; then, they may spend months and
even years trying to reunify their family in a family court system that is overwhelmed and plagued by delays.
|
| |
|
Why CAT Works
|
Past efforts aimed at helping at-risk families stay together and avert the perils of foster care -
typically labeled "family preservation" strategies - often failed for two reasons. First,
parents need confidential legal advocacy in addition to social services when a risk to their
child is first identified. Second, services for at-risk families rarely encompass
the full range of a family's involvement with the child welfare system, from an initial child
protective investigation, to possible family court or foster care placement, to reunification and
crucial support following reunification.
When someone suspects a child is being neglected, and calls the State hotline, a child protective worker
employed by ACS is supposed to both investigate the parent and offer a family services-but very
often parents mistrust the intention of a caseworker (who has tremendous power to take their children)-
and so will not follow up on referrals for needed services. Or, equally frequent, parents are
asked to attend meetings about their situation, but feel their voice is not heard-- or feel too intimidated
to ask the right questions about how to safely parent. Parents may be asked to attend services
that are inappropriate, not culturally sensitive or that conflict with employment or other obligations.
CAT provides parents with trusted advocates who provide additional referrals to
services such as substance abuse treatment and counseling. CAT social
workers and parent advocates accompany parents to ACS meetings to insure protective concerns are addressed
while helping parents stay engaged in every aspect of the process. CAT
attorneys assist families with entitlements they need to get services.
If a case goes to court or children are removed, CAT attorneys represent the
parents until the case is over. A family's ability to safely and quickly reunify usually results
from two things: intensive help for the family outside of court and a great deal of information
available when the family is before the court so that a judge can make informed decisions.
CAT staff provide this help outside of court and make sure that judges know all
they need to make sound decisions for a family.
Foster care agency workers are often overworked and turnover is high; thus, they prescribe formulaic
service plans that are ill-suited to a parent's strengths or needs. CAT
provides enhanced referrals to well-matched services and additional case management and assists parents
between court appearances. Too often parent-child visits occur in sterile agency settings without
attention to the underlying problems that led to a removal. We frequently help recruit visit hosts
and visit coaches and assure visits integrate therapeutic needs of the family.
CAT team members attend these meetings with the parent to help them engage
productively, to collaborate on a service plan, and later provide results to the court.
Finally, we work with families even after children come home, assuring that parents remain in services
and to assist with issues that may arise that could compromise a family's progress.
|
| |
|
The Cost of CAT vs. the Cost of Foster Care
|
Foster care is expensive, costing, on average, three times more than providing services to a family that
stays together in their community. The average cost to the City per year for all children in
foster care is nearly $181 million and to the State, $256 million.
The cost of CAT is a fraction of the cost of foster care: foster care
costs between $18,000 and $49,000 per child per year, while the annual cost of CFR's teams
is between $4000 and $6600 per family.
|
| |
|
CAT's Community Partners
|
Over the years, the following agencies have called CAT when they realize that
we can provide the critical link between parents and the services they need to parent safely:
- ACS
- Big Brothers Big Sisters
- Child Welfare Organizing Project
- Citizen's Committee for Children of New York, Inc.
- Edwin Gould Services
- Good Shepherd Services
- Groupwork (ACS's Parenting Skills Program)
- Harlem Children's Zone
- The Juvenile Rights Practice of the Legal Aid Society
- Lawyers for Children
- Legal Information for Families Today (LIFT)
- New York City Council and 311
- Northern Manhattan Perinatal Partnership
- Sanctuary for Families
- Union Settlement House
- Veritas
- Women's Prison Association (WPA)
|
| |
|
How you Can Help
|
Despite CAT's successes, city government does not provide funding for families
to access CAT services prior to court, or services which are often
the most critical to avoiding a re-entry into foster care-legal and social work support following
a court case when a family is reunified. As well, city government's primary obligation is to fund
attorneys, rather than social workers and parent advocates who provide CAT families
with crisis intervention, referrals to needed services, and an array of supports to secure housing and other
entitlements.
CAT's goals in 2009 are to serve 675 families, to broaden its referral base to
reach more families early on and to continue to demonstrate to city government the importance of sustained
and combined legal and social work assistance to NYC's neediest families.
To donate to CAT and CFR, click here.
|
i See, "Preparing Youth for Adulthood," ACS, June 2006, p. 3 and see National Coalition for
Child Protective Reform at
http://www.nccpr.org/newissues/1.html.
ii Ibid
iii See "Improving Family Foster Care: Findings from the Northwest Foster Care Alumni Study" (2005)
Pecora, Peter J. et al Casey Family Programs, Seattle, WA.
iv Ibid
v A study of school children in the Bronx demonstrated that children in foster care scored 24%
lower in reading and 28% lower in math on citywide tests than their peers not in foster care.
Finkelstein, Marni et al. (2002) "What keeps children in foster care from succeeding in school?
Views of early adolescents and the adults in their lives" Vera Institute of Justice.
vi The Urban Institute's 1996 National Survey of Homeless Assistance Providers and Clients (NSHAPC)
demonstrated that 34% of young homeless adults between the ages of 20-24, 61% of homeless adults between the
ages of 18-19, and 26% of all homeless adults spent time in foster care. Burt, Martha, Aron
Laudan Y., Lee Edgar (2001). Helping America's Homeless: Emergency Shelter or Affordable Housing?
Washington, DC: The Urban Institute Press. Similar trends can be observed in New York City.
In their 2005 article, Jung Min Park et al report that 21% of New York City's emergency homeless shelter
population spent time in foster care and 29% had been involved with child welfare services. Park, Jun Min
et al. "Childhood out-of-home placement and dynamics of public shelter utilization among young homeless adults"
Children and Youth Services Review 27. 2005. Also, proportions of the homeless population who previously
spent time in foster care may vary by geographical location. For example, Covenant House, a network of
shelters for homeless youth under the age of 21, estimated that in New York, 38-39% of the people it serves
previously lived in foster care. Nancy Downing, Staff Attorney, Covenant House as stated on February
11, 2008 at "Update: ACS's Plan to Improve Outcomes for Children Receiving Foster Care and Preventive Services,"
Citizen's Committee for Children; New York, New York.
vi See iii
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
