Family Justice Journal // Special Issue Fall 2023

SPECIAL ISSUE | FALL 2023

FAMILY JUSTICE JOURNAL

ON BELONGING

Strengthening Families & Communities, Advancing Relational Health CareSource is a proud sponsor of both the Institute for Relational Health and The Family Justice Journal

The Family Justice Group is grateful for the financial sponsorship of this issue of the Family Justice Journal by the Institute for Relational Health (IRH) at CareSource. We are happy to advance the work of the IRH in promoting relational health for families, children, youth and communities, particularly those impacted by our child welfare, juvenile justice and mental health systems and individuals with disabilities. We believe that discussing and bringing to light the harms of disconnection are necessary acknowledgements of the critical importance of relational health in all our lives.

Strengthening Families & Communities, Advancing Relational Health CareSource is a proud sponsor of both the Institute for Relational Health and The Family Justice Journal

CONTENTS

FAMILY JUSTICE JOURNAL Fall 2023

008 Shrounda Selivanoff

Social Services Manager Washington State Office of Public Defense Parents Representation Program

010 Justin Abbasi

Co-Founder, Harbor Scholars: A Dwight Hall Program at Yale

012 Shereen White, J.D.

020 Angela Olivia Burton, Esq.

Co-Convenor, Repeal CAPTA Workgroup

022 Elizabeth Wendell & Kevin Campbell Founders of Pale Blue

024 Dr. Melissa T. Merrick

President and CEO Prevent Child Abuse America

Director of Advocacy & Policy, Children’s Rights

014 Kathleen Creamer

Managing Attorney, Family Advocacy Unit Community Legal Services of Philadelphia

026 Yven Destin, Ph.D.

Educator and Independent Researcher of Race and Ethnic Relations

028 Jey Rajaraman 016 Angelique Day, Ph.D., MSW

Associate Professor, Faculty Affiliate of the Indigenous Wellness Research Institute Director of Federal Policy for Partners for Our Children School of Social Work, University of Washington Seattle Adjunct Faculty, Evans School of Public Policy and Governance

018 Paul Vincent, MSW

Former Alabama Child Welfare Director Consultant and Court Monitor

Associate Director, Center on Children and the Law, American Bar Association Former Chief Counsel, Legal Services of New Jersey

030 Jerry Milner & David Kelly

Directors of the Family Justice Group

For this special issue of the Family Justice Journal, we invited Advisory and Editorial Board members to write about connection and belonging in their lives and how it shapes who and how they are in the world. Rather than traditional articles, authors offer brief, visual essays to convey the need to be mindfully aware of relational health in all that we do. Such awareness calls us to let go of structures, practices and approaches that do not honor and promote essential relationships and replace them with new ways that do. Each essay adds to already overwhelming evidence that change is necessary.

Taken together, they speak to depth, breadth, and urgency of the need. We are grateful for the courage and generosity of the authors in sharing deeply personal experiences and convictions.

Editor - in - Chief Jerry Milner

Co-Director of the Family Justice Group

Editor - in - Chief David Kelly

Co-Director of the Family Justice Group

Design Director Ann T. Dinh

Design Consultant

ADVISORY BOARD MEMBERS Christopher Baker -Scott Executive Director & Founder SUN Scholars, Inc.

Angelique Day, Ph.D., MSW

University of Washington Seattle Associate Professor Faculty Affiliate of the Indigenous Wellness Research Institute Director of federal policy for Partners for Our Children

April Lee

Director of Client Voice Community Legal Services of Philadelphia

Dr. Melissa T. Merrick

President and CEO Prevent Child Abuse America

Lexie Gruber Peréz

Service Design Masters Candidate Royal College of Art in London Former Senior Advisor on Child Welfare in the Biden Administration

Jey Rajaraman

Associate Director, Center on Children and the Law, American Bar Association Former Chief Counsel, Legal Services of New Jersey

Vivek Sankaran

Clinical Professor of Law, University of Michigan, Michigan Law

Shrounda Selivanoff

Social Services Manager Washington State Office of Public Defense Parents Representation Program

Victor E. Sims, MBA, CDP

Senior Associate Family Well-Being Strategy Group The Annie E. Casey Foundation

Paul Vincent, MSW

Former Alabama Child Welfare Director Consultant and Court Monitor

EDITORIAL BOARD MEMBERS Justin Abbasi

Co-Founder, Harbor Scholars: A Dwight Hall Program at Yale

Laura W. Boyd, Ph.D.

Owner and CEO, Policy & Performance Consultants, Inc.

Angela Olivia Burton, Esq.

Co-Convenor, Repeal CAPTA Workgroup

Melissa D. Carter, J.D.

Paul Dilorenzo, ACSW, MLSP National Child Welfare Consultant

J. Bart Klika, MSW, Ph.D.

Chief Research Officer, Prevent Child Abuse America

Heidi Mcintosh

Principal, LGC CORE Consulting, LLC

Kimberly M. Offutt, Th.D.

National Director of Family Support and Engagement Bethany Christian Services

Clinical Professor of Law, Emory Law

Kimberly A. Cluff, J.D.

MPA Candidate 2022, Goldman School of Public Policy

Kathleen Creamer, J.D.

Managing Attorney, Family Advocacy Unit Community Legal Services of Philadelphia

Angelique Day, Ph.D., MSW

Associate Professor, Faculty Affiliate of the Indigenous Wellness Research Center Director of Federal Policy for Partners for Our Children School of Social Work, University of Washington Seattle Adjunct Faculty, Evans School of Public Policy and Governance

Yven Destin, Ph.D.

Educator and Independent Researcher of Race and Ethnic Relations

Jessica Pryce, Ph.D.

Director, Florida Institute for Child Welfare Florida State University

Mark Testa, Ph.D.

Distinguished Professor Emeritus, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Elizabeth Wendel, MSW, LSW

Co-Founder, Pale Blue International Consultant, Family Well-Being and Mental Health Systems

Shereen White, J.D.

Director of Advocacy & Policy, Children’s Rights

Cheri Williams, MS

Founder and Chief Co-Creator at CO-3

Shrounda Selivanoff

Social Services Manager Washington State Office of Public Defense Parents Representation Program

008

Family separation is in the DNA of this nation.

Removing children from their siblings, parents, communities, and culture is in the soil. Generation after generation has experienced this suffering and endured the loss of connection and identity because of this act of oppression, disguised as benevolence.

So, are our children and parents better off by being separated? If you look at the overflowing evidence from the impacts of trauma, you’ll see an exhausted mental health system, mass incarceration, substance use disorder, and unhoused individuals; the answer is a clear NO.

Claiming that family separation is in the best interest of children, the system burdens our children and their families to make sense of their experiences and feelings of loss and unworthiness.

And as children, families, communities, and generations grapple with these feelings, our nation’s social service response remains underinvested in addressing trauma and the pursuit of healing.

If we do not learn from our mistakes, we are destined to repeat them. Family separation causes irreparable harm. The only answer is to learn from the past and to do something different; to invest in families rather than separating them. Our time is now. There is no time to waste. We must invest in families and divest in family separation. It is time for us to do better, as the evidence shows we know better.

FAMILY JUSTICE JOURNAL, FALL 2023

“ Do the best you can until you know better.

Then, when you know better, do better.”

- Maya Angelou

FAMILY JUSTICE JOURNAL, FALL 2023

009

Relational permanency requires creativity. I hardly had any family in the United States when I entered foster care at age eleven. The majority of my family lived in Iran where my parents had immigrated from before I was born. I loved my family there dearly; I cherished the summers that I spent visiting them and the sense of belonging that I felt around them. After I entered foster care, and without my parents to help translate, I found myself struggling to maintain my relationships with them, reduced to international phone calls frayed by my limited proficiency in Farsi. I craved the connection that I had with my family overseas, but I lacked the resources to rekindle it until adulthood when I had more time to learn their language.

010

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Had the child welfare system considered my circumstances more creatively, I may not have needed to wait that long. A creative caseworker may have considered securing additional resources for me, including funds for more frequent international phone calls, professional translation services, and language learning opportunities. By thinking creatively, we acknowledge that every child will have their own unique challenges to relational permanency, and that they will often require unique solutions to address them.

Justin Abbasi

Co-Founder, Harbor Scholars: A Dwight Hall Program at Yale

FAMILY JUSTICE JOURNAL, FALL 2023

011

012

FAMILY JUSTICE JOURNAL, FALL 2023

Society, including the family policing system, must stop perpetuating racist ideologies and myths about Black fathers that minimize their contributions to the family unit for they, too, are integral to relational health. I know how sacred my and my siblings’ relationship is with my father, and his with us, and how our well-being is connected to this bond. I also know, through my dad, the isolation felt without any connection to a father, a mother, and siblings. My dad was taken into New Jersey’s foster system, separated from his mother, father, and sisters, in his early years and aged-out at 18 years old. While he reunited with my grandmother and my aunts and uncles as an adult, he never reconnected with his father and was too young to remember him. My father, my siblings and I, and my children were all robbed of that relationship. I wonder if New Jersey’s records from the late 1960s through the early 1980s show any attempt to locate my dad’s father. As a child advocate attorney, I recall inquiring countless times about a child’s father and the agency response made clear that no one had thought to connect with him. Black fathers must not be treated as ancillary to their children’s lives. The ongoing failure of the family policing system to recognize the value of Black fathers as nurturing caregivers is partly responsible for the destruction of Black families. The role of Black fathers in building relational health must be valued, nurtured, and protected.

Shereen White, J.D.

Director of Advocacy & Policy, Children’s Rights

FAMILY JUSTICE JOURNAL, FALL 2023

013

A just and caring approach to helping children requires that we center, in everything we do, the need for families to belong to each other. Children need their families and suffer tremendously across their lifetimes with grief and loss when we terminate their rights to their parents and relatives.

We must promise children that they will always belong to their own family, and they can trust us to preserve their connection to their parents, their grandparents, their siblings, and their ancestors.

Family trees will remain intact and branches will never be torn away.

Kathleen Creamer

Managing Attorney, Family Advocacy Unit Community Legal Services of Philadelphia

FAMILY JUSTICE JOURNAL, FALL 2023

015

A photo is worth 1000 words. They help us hold on to memories, both good and bad.

Photos can be used as a connecting tool. And events where photographs are regularly taken can be used as venues to promote a sense of belonging. For foster youth, our box of photos is more limited. In the name of confidentiality and to protect us, it has largely been against child welfare policy for children in foster care to be photographed when they have an open case. Consent can only be given by parents, but our parents are not available to give consent because we don’t live with them; they are not the ones transporting us to events in which we regularly engage. These photographworthy events that youth in foster care can be invited to participate in, but when not invited to be photographed when everyone else is, can cause disconnection, feeling isolated and reinforce feelings of not belonging. Some policy and practice solutions that can prevent disconnection and promote belonging can be small. Allow youth to be photographed, if they want it, so that they can be counted, included, and recognized in the social networks that are important to them to have that opportunity.

Angelique Day, Ph.D., MSW Associate Professor, Faculty Affiliate of the Indigenous Wellness Research Institute Director of Federal Policy for Partners for Our Children School of Social Work, University of Washington Seattle Adjunct Faculty, Evans School of Public Policy and Governance

016

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Angelique Day at age 6. This photo was taken before foster care entry. I received it from a cousin after I was an adult.

It is one of only 4 child photos I own of myself. There are no photos of me after I was placed in foster care- none that I can find. Those years of childhood are not captured in any photographs. I imagine today through my daughter what I must have looked like at that age.

Angelique Day, taken in September 2016 when I first joined the University of Washington school of social work faculty. A position I have been able to use to study what is working and what isn’t in child welfare - research that is done in hopes that we can build and test interventions that promote connection and belonging for youth that have been disconnected from their families due to child abuse and neglect.

FAMILY JUSTICE JOURNAL, FALL 2023

017

The practice principles of Genuineness, Empathy and Respect have to underlie all relationships with families, not just because they are just, but also because they work.

018

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And empathy is maybe the strongest motivation for activism.

Paul Vincent, MSW

Former Alabama Child Welfare Director Consultant and Court Monitor FAMILY JUSTICE JOURNAL, FALL 2023

019

Stop financing Black Family disruption, destabilization, separation and destruction under cover of child protection, child safety, and child welfare.

Start

a Family Policing Reparations fund to compensate Black survivors and invest in the Black community for individual and collective intergenerational damage inflicted by agents of the family policing system.

020

FAMILY JUSTICE JOURNAL, FALL 2023

Angela Olivia Burton, Esq.

Co-Convenor, Repeal CAPTA Workgroup

FAMILY JUSTICE JOURNAL, FALL 2023

021

During a conversation many years into knowing and working together we realized we had both started our careers at the end of life, working with those in their last days and hours of living. Sometimes young and sometimes old, the outcome was always certain.

What we learned alongside those facing certain and imminent death, was that the remaining time could be used to write a brave new ending. Healing was possible, but it wasn’t us who facilitated it; it was the individuals, framed by their life’s relationships.

Without an expectation of being gifted anything from those suffering and dying, we were given the secret to living and dying well: life for humans is made in the meaning we make of living together in the present, never in the past.

As we sat with the dying, regardless of their age, they did not tell us of their regrets about the hardships of their lives, instead they grieved missed opportunities for more love, more experiences, the ability to better understand others, to receive forgiveness and missed adventures shared with other people.

It was not the absence of hardship they craved, but the absence of the good stuff that had made living and dying most difficult.

Today we know it is not the presence of hardships in the lives of children we must focus on but the absence of the good stuff. As a dear Irish friend of ours, Cormac Russell, says “moving from what’s wrong to what’s strong.” Healing is never about changing the past, but about changing our collective futures informed by our post-traumatic wisdom earned from our past.

Elizabeth Wendell & Kevin Campbell Founders of Pale Blue

022

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“ The greatest predictor of our future health is the presence of our connection, not the number of adversities.”

- Dr. Bruce Perry

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023

024

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“The work of love is never done.” These words were powerfully spoken by a friend of Prevent Child Abuse America during the closing session of our recent national conference at which 1200 partners joined together to dream and nurture prevention. Amidst his rhythmic sharing of nuggets of liberation, justice, and belonging, Corey Best’s cadence grew shorter and sharper when he belted those words. “The work of love is never done.”

The work of love? But love just is, or so we are erroneously taught. It’s supposed to be enough to send love into the universe to honor fallen warriors— schoolchildren in Uvalde, shoppers in Jacksonville— and those consistently othered and surveilled—Black, Brown, and Indigenous fathers, mothers, children, families. It’s woefully not enough! The work of love must be active if we are to actually achieve the vision of love, hope, connection, and belonging for children and families. The why (because we love) is simply not as critical as the how we love.

We love by listening with humility to communities, families, parents, and children AND believing them!

We love by elevating their experiences and expertise so that their power ignites the change we require to live our collective values of liberty and justice for all. We love by ensuring that families have what they need before a crisis strikes, through policy and action. The work of love is never done—and when we embrace this fully and are comprehensive and aligned in a prevention ecosystem, we are reminded that we belong to one another and need the work of love to chart the course.

Dr. Melissa T. Merrick President and CEO Prevent Child Abuse America

FAMILY JUSTICE JOURNAL, FALL 2023

025

“ Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.”

James Baldwin American social critic

A key driver for the stress and poor health and wellbeing of American children and families, especially for children and families of color, is economic insecurity.

When a parent’s capacity to provide safe, stable, and nurturing relationships and environments for the child is hindered because of racial and low-income disparity, for example, then despair and frustration naturally will result for the parent. Their emotions, despite a parent’s best intentions, can then reflect in the child and perpetuate stress and poor health.

More than simply imitating their parent’s stress levels, children brought up in economically insecure environments can activate their own stress mechanisms which can bring about health problems for them, including depression and disease. In these ways, children raised in such insecure environments may acquire the stresses they imitate, like anxiety, that compound their already poor physical and mental well-being.

026

FAMILY JUSTICE JOURNAL, FALL 2023

This is why some health providers’ recent adoption of a focus on nurturing relationships and environments for young children and families is so important. For children and families of color whose relationships within and outside their communities are forged and frayed by America’s racial legacy, the commitment to relational health is dire! But the use of any approach to building a health-creating environment for America’s most vulnerable population—it’s children—will need to confront the ways in which race and racism inhibit and destroy bonds of community that prevent those relationships from building health-creating environments.

Yven Destin, Ph.D.

Educator and Independent Researcher of Race and Ethnic Relations

There is a growing movement to work “upstream” in the child welfare system. Often called Prevention Work, that spurs the questions of what we are preventing, why do we presume it will happen and whose role is it?

Parental defense attorneys define “prevention work” as legal representation in non-child welfare civil legal matters, e.g., eviction proceedings and child custody matters, to “prevent” agency removal due to poverty-related legal issues.

By resolving unmet legal needs we remove the underlying causes for many agency removals.

Too many stakeholders define “prevention work” as getting ahead of the abuse or neglect caused by parents to their children. If the entire child welfare system supports families early enough by providing needed support and services, such as civil legal assistance and community resources like food, housing, behavioral health and more, the family will be stabilized, reducing the need for agency exposure and intervention.

Neither of these definitions are what I mean.

I mean anti-separation work. The earlier descriptions fail to appreciate the historical racist and anti-poverty underpinnings of the child welfare system.

Jey Rajaraman

Associate Director, Center on Children and the Law, American Bar Association Former Chief Counsel, Legal Services of New Jersey

Parents should never face an investigation or be required to sign a “case plan” or “safety plan” promising that they will secure food, housing or a “safe home” to remain with their children. Instead, the state should meet its constitutional affirmative duty to assist families who face unsafe or unstable housing, food insecurity and other forms of basis assistance. Unresolved legal or poverty issues do not warrant agency interventions such as conditional family stability and removal threats.

As system participants, whether we are agency staff, judiciary or legal advocates, our decisions and actions must be done through an anti-racist, anti-poverty and now anti-separation lens.

FAMILY JUSTICE JOURNAL, FALL 2023

029

People are not broken, our structures are.

The structures of child welfare create holes in families and leave lives in rubble. To build further upon those structures is hazardous, a willful disregard. It is the easy way out that creates the illusion of progress but will never make things whole or right. Caring about parents and their children--- with respect and compassion-- looks and feels different. We must step away from efforts to make existing child welfare structures better and build something new. ASFA, CAPTA, and archaic funding mechanisms must go. We must replace them with policies that demand family unity, whole family approaches, and incentives for community-led opportunities and support. We have a moral obligation to build policies on an architecture of hope, healing, and restoration. Parents, young people, and communities must be the designers. Only then will we demonstrate that everyone is inherently worthy, and everyone belongs. Only then will we set a foundation of justice on which children and parents can flourish.

Jerry Milner & David Kelly Directors of the Family Justice Group

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The FJJ features original artwork, poems, and other visual and audio works that speak to the experiences of impacted individuals in every issue of the journal, including the front cover. If you have a creative expression you would like considered for inclusion in a future issue, please write to info@thefamilyjusticegroup.org The Winter issue of the FJJ is anticipated in December 2023 and will be entitled the Need for Belonging.

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