Spotlight on Parent Voices

Earlier this year I wrote about the importance of a social movement to radically reconceptualize "child welfare" and dismantle the family regulation system as we currently know it. After a summer of participating in conversations with policy advocates, researchers, family defense attorneys, and child welfare caseworkers, the vacuum of parent voices seems especially pressing to me.

I am grateful for the good folks at the Shriver Center on Poverty Law in Chicago, who have been working to convene a table of parents who can advise their policy advocacy initiatives. I have been lucky to collaborate with this incredible team for a few months now, and last month we had the first output of our work, this webinar: Moving from Why to How: Parent Leaders’ Perspectives on the Movement for Child Welfare Justice. I was grateful to work alongside the Shriver team to design the content shared at the beginning of the webinar, which grounded the parents' perspectives in some historical and present-day context. This introduced an incredibly rich conversation about the future parents want to see. Please take a look, and join me in learning from these awesome parents!