December/January 2020Vol. 20, No. 10Print issueSpotlight on Knowing the Difference Between Poverty and Neglect

Issue Spotlight

• A Wheel to Crisis

  A Wheel to Crisis

  Written by Bobbi Taylor, foster care alumni, advocate

  I aged out of foster care at 19 years old. Like many young adults, I was ready for freedom, or so I thought. Life still had a lot to teach me about becoming a responsible young adult. During that time, I often thought of the advice my sister gave me. She tried to share her own insight with me so I would not have to learn the hard way. Unfortunately, that advice went in one ear and out the other. When I started listening to her, I got on track to be successful. I had a job, I was enrolled in college, and had just moved into my own apartment. Yet, the one thing she had no advice for was how to take care of a baby, and that is exactly what life gave me after just a year of being on my own.

  After my son's arrival, our budget was tight. Another challenge was trying to balance work, school, and motherhood. I was trying so hard to make ends meet and to provide a good life for my son, but it just wasn't enough. More often than not, I would come up short one way or another. I felt so defeated, like I was an inadequate mother. 

  Many nights, I would watch my son sleep and cry silently next to him, admiring his peaceful sleep and reflecting on his unconditional love for me. The one thing I knew was that he was the single most important person in the world to me, and I loved him unconditionally as well. I was doing it for him, and I'd pick up where I left off the next day. As sure as I was that things could only get better, life hit me again.

  There were a few things that factored into my wheel-to-crisis situation. I had not built up my credit, which created barriers. I eventually had a $350-a-month car payment for an unreliable car from a "buy-here-pay-now" dealership. Earlier that year, we relocated for my son's safety and well-being and settled for the only place that didn't run a credit score. By winter, I learned that our new home was poorly insulated. In addition, our triplex was cross-wired with our neighbor, whose home was larger. This increased our energy bill to more than what I had budgeted for.

  By the holidays, I knew I wouldn't have money to spare for my son's first Christmas, which broke my heart. The car needed a new tire, and I didn't even have spare money for that. I needed to make a decision on whether to fix the car or try alternative transportation methods. Ultimately, I made the decision to fix the car to make sure we had reliable transportation in case of an emergency. I was short on rent but hoped to make it up at work. Then, I was faced with another challenge.

  The following week—1 week until our rent was due—we woke up to a cold house and found our electricity had been shut off. I had been making small payments hoping it would suffice. It didn't, and the bill was now devastatingly high. Not only did I have to pay the entire balance of my account, but I also had to pay a $250 deposit to turn it back on. If that wasn't bad enough, the next bill included an additional reconnection fee. This destroyed me. My pride as a mother was hurt. I had failed to provide for my son's basic needs. I felt like I failed as a mother, despite trying so hard. Although it cost the same as our rent, I decided to make the payment to turn on our electricity. 

  That decision jeopardized our housing situation. The rental company sent letters and called me multiple times a day. I was scared to tell them the truth about the rent, but I knew avoiding them would make the situation worse. They told me we were close to getting evicted. I couldn't hold back the tears as I explained to them what was going on. They allowed me to make payments on the rent until I got caught up. The weight on my shoulders was lifted. I knew I had a chance to save everything I worked so hard for. Eventually, I paid everything off and moved to a more stable home with affordable utilities.

  Through this whole experience, there was never a time that my love for my son waivered. If anything, it's that love that kept me going. Every decision I made was for his well-being, and ultimately I have my son to thank for keeping me moving forward. It wasn't a lack of trying that put us in this situation. It was life teaching the lessons that eventually every young adult will learn. However, there was a lack of guidance and support through this learning process. I had to learn how to be a new mom and balance a budget to meet the needs of a baby on my own. Being connected to community resources prior to aging out of care would have made a significant difference in my life. I was a young mom, in poverty, with no supports, and the only thing to drive me through my wheel to crisis was the love and commitment I had to being the best mother to my son.

  Today, we are in a different place, and I embrace the life lessons that come our way. I am better at decision-making and prioritizing what is necessary and what we can live without. I regret nothing because it has made me a better mother and built my resilience. The best lesson I learned through this was regardless of how rough and dark things got, my son was happy as long he was with me. He didn't care about toys for Christmas; he would rather play with me as I cooked us dinner. He wasn't worried about how little money we had at the time; he wanted to play peek-a-boo with paper as I tried to finish my assignments for the next day. I learned that regardless of how bad things seemed, my love for my son would never change. As long as I continued to be the best mother I could be, things would turn out okay. The crisis never defined how much I love my son. My love for him helped conquer every obstacle that would lead us to a better place.
   

• How to Help Agencies Stop Confusing Poverty With Neglect

  How to Help Agencies Stop Confusing Poverty With Neglect

  Written by Jey Rajaraman, chief counsel, Legal Services of New Jersey, Edison, NJ  
   

  In New Jersey, like many places throughout the United States, most agency-involved interventions and removals arise from poverty, particularly the inability to access stable housing. Children are routinely removed from their homes because their parents struggle to pay the rent. Greater support from child welfare agencies for struggling families could significantly decrease the number of family separations. Federal and state laws do not permit child removals or separation based on impoverished living conditions. Under New Jersey law, before separating a family or otherwise exercising the state's parens patriae rights, child welfare agencies must do everything possible to keep the family together.

  To reduce the prevalence of family separations, child welfare agencies should better understand and address the plight of impoverished families. A lack of housing, or housing instability, does not render a parent incapable of parenting his or her children. For example, while living in a motel or shelter or remaining in an apartment pending eviction is not ideal for children, such conditions do not necessarily mean the children are unsafe or at risk of harm. In most cases, the circumstances, conditions, and factors that lead to a family being in poverty are beyond the family's control and often stem from multigenerational poverty and racism.

  Under both federal and state law, courts must first focus on whether the agency's removal was justified. Removal should only occur when there is actual harm to a child or when immediate removal is necessary to avoid imminent danger to the child's life, safety, or health. Courts also must ensure the agency complied with the reasonable efforts requirements under state and federal laws. In New Jersey, agencies typically must demonstrate they have "made every reasonable effort, including the provision or arrangement of financial or other assistance and services as necessary, to enable the child to remain in his home." When a court grants a removal application based on a lack of housing or other manifestations of poverty, the holding essentially equates a parent's state of poverty with neglect. This both misapplies legal requirements and causes unjustified and tragic trauma.

  For the agency to meaningfully address poverty issues and the needs of struggling families, it must understand the ramifications for families living in poverty. For instance, it is unrealistic to ask a family to relocate to an apartment during a pending eviction when that family has poor credit or a criminal history, which could result in application denials. The agency should be aware of the legal and economic barriers to suitable and affordable housing and assist families in responding to those barriers, including helping them seek legal representation or advocacy.

  Legal Services of New Jersey (LSNJ) recently initiated a pilot program to help facilitate that process. In the last year, LSNJ started to work directly with a county-level child welfare agency by accepting direct referrals from the agency so that LSNJ can quickly identify and assist with legal issues. These cases may involve issues such as pending evictions, unpaid child support, domestic violence, welfare denials, and barriers to accessing medical care and education. For each of these referrals, LSNJ also works with the agency to meet the needs of the family, which assists in preventing the loss of housing and helps agency staff recognize that unstable housing is not neglect and address the family's needs with poverty-informed services. 

  Agencies should establish internal mechanisms and protocols to meet families' needs through financial, transportation, and other assistance as well as tailored case planning. Child welfare agencies should be encouraged to coordinate with local legal services agencies, such as LSNJ, to identify legal needs and barriers and connect these families with necessary legal representation. 
  
  
   

• Reckoning With History and Building a New Future: Reflections on Race, Immigration and Poverty in Ch

  Reckoning With History and Building a New Future: Reflections on Race, Immigration and Poverty in Ch

  Written by Kaylene Quinones, M.S.W., cofounder, The Bravehearts, and coordinator, BraveLife Intervention at The Children's Village;
  David Collins, L.S.M.W., chief program officer, The Children's Village; and Jeremy Christopher Kohomban, Ph.D., president and chief executive officer, The Children's Village

  In the May 2019 CBX spotlight, Julia Jean-Francois, codirector, Center for Family Life in Sunset Park, New York, noted that "children who enter the foster care system should not undergo the secondary trauma that results from being uprooted from their homes, neighborhoods, schools, play spaces and friends, pediatricians, and all that is familiar and stabilizing about their lives."

  We agree. The pioneering work of the Center for Family Life inspired many and gave birth to the prevention and primary prevention concepts. Building on the example of the Center for Family Life, The Children's Village spent the last 15 years rethinking our role in family separation and the vilification of poor communities.

  The history of family separation in the United States is inextricably linked to race, immigration, and poverty. The Children's Village has been part of that history since it was founded as the New York Juvenile Asylum in 1851 to serve children lawfully removed from community and family. This represented the first documented instance of mandated residential care for children. From 1854 to 1923, The Children's Village, working with two other prominent charities, established and operated the Orphan Train, a movement that transported over 200,000 children from eastern cities to the Midwest, where they were indentured to work and live among rural families. The Children's Village model of child removal and residential care also influenced the American Indian boarding schools of the late 19th century.

  In the second half of the 20th century, enduring perceptions of poor families as inept, morally deficient, and dangerous to their own children went on to drive the growth of public child welfare and foster care systems. Research on those systems consistently points to poverty as correlated to neglect and abuse. However, in 2017, almost 75 percent of child maltreatment reports were for neglect, and the majority of children who come into foster care do so solely on that basis. We must understand, then, that while neglect and maltreatment are real phenomena that can and do harm vulnerable children, their definition is socially constructed based on a legacy of systemic racism and disproportionately enforced in poor and marginalized communities. Compounding the problem, public child welfare systems have historically been willing to invest almost exclusively in child removal, often spending far more to needlessly separate families than it would cost to safely support the child in the family home. Based on this history, we know that increased surveillance, disinvestment, and exclusion are not the solution.

  While the long-term solution to poverty is beyond the scope of any one organization, it is clear to us that we have an important role to play in creating a new history and a new relationship between The Children's Village and the communities we serve. Our focus today is to give children those things that we want for ourselves and work hard to provide for our own children and those we love. This is called giving children things that are permanent. 

  All children need at least one adult who loves them implicitly and unconditionally. Government and charities can never take the place of family and should never claim that they can. For most children involved with child protective services, that person is one or both of their parents or another person in their family of origin, and it is our job to support and strengthen that bond, not tear it apart. We know that poor families love their children. When we needlessly separate children from families, we cause lifelong hurt to the family and the child. When we remove children from their communities, we are also perpetuating the historical narrative that describes poor communities as incapable of caring for their own.

  We strive to create safe and beautiful places and spaces. Most families touched by the child welfare system live in neighborhoods characterized by years of disinvestment, low-quality infrastructure, a lack of safe public spaces, and failing schools. In addition, most government and charitable services that cater to the poor also look and feel poor, with beauty and customer service relegated to a distant second or third priority. We have worked with community partners to develop beautiful high-quality, permanently affordable housing in Harlem, including two floors of apartments reserved for youth leaving the foster care system. We know that affordability and beauty can be achieved and should not be denied.

  We work to create and support economic mobility. Affordable housing is one key ingredient; youth and families who have a safe and stable living arrangement are more likely to make strides in other areas of their lives. We also provide education and employment programming in our community offices, including free college courses in partnership with Bard College, in addition to job readiness, afterschool, family planning, and mentoring programs for teens.

  We value and include people with lived experience in our organization. This means providing meaningful full-time employment and leadership opportunities, not just a seat at the table. It also means that we must be open and attentive to critiques of our practices and structures, engage productively with the tension that comes from empowering different perspectives, and recognize the unique abilities of credible messengers to engage clients, develop trust, and support lasting change. The Children's Village was one of the first organizations to hire full-time parent advocates within our foster care program in 2005. We are proud to count graduates of the Institute for Transformative Mentoring among our staff mentors and to partner with the Bravehearts, an authentically youth-led organization that advocates for young people touched by foster care and juvenile justice.

  We are present in the communities we serve. Historically, though most children in our care came from New York City, all our activities were concentrated on our residential campus in suburban Westchester. That distance only reinforced negative stereotypes about the families and communities that our children call home. We cannot support and empower families if we are afraid to visit them in their homes or walk down their block. Today, we have program offices in the Bronx, Harlem, and Queens, in addition to a variety of community centers, school-based initiatives, and voluntary home-based services for families that go beyond child welfare. The closer we get to these communities and people, the less dangerous and damaged they seem and the more often we see the love and tenderness they have for each other and their children.
  
  It takes time, commitment, leadership, and courage to understand and implement these principles. Doing so also requires us to renounce our posture of expertise; listen to youth, families, and advocates; constantly update our thinking; and partner with the public sector to take risks. Change is not a linear process; at times we stumble, fall back on old thinking, or miss the mark. Nevertheless, we know first-hand that change is possible and that reckoning clearly with the past is the only way to move forward. Doing so also requires us to think critically about how concepts of neglect and maltreatment are socially constructed and differentially enforced and move away from a lens of deficit and dysfunction. Only then can we start to lift up the inherent dignity and value in every person, family, and community and support them in their desire to care for one another and build a better future.
  
   

• The Lessons of Mary Ellen Wilson: Invest in Prevention

  The Lessons of Mary Ellen Wilson: Invest in Prevention

  Written by Katie Albright, Safe & Sound, San Francisco
  
  What would our child welfare system look like today if we had supported Mary Ellen Wilson's parents at the time when they so desperately needed help, when they were living in poverty and caring for their infant daughter in the late 1800s?

  You may have heard of Mary Ellen Wilson. Her court case became the first reported child maltreatment case in our country. In April 1874, she was removed from an adoptive home after a neighbor, a home visiting nurse, and a community organization reported her severe abuse and neglect to the New York  State Supreme Court. This first-reported case of maltreatment ultimately led to the creation of the child welfare and foster care system that we know of today. 

  While history remembers Mary Ellen Wilson's tragic circumstances, the story of her biological parents Frances and Thomas Wilson is nearly forgotten. By all accounts, they were well-meaning parents, but their own life circumstances prevented them from caring for their daughter. Thomas was a soldier in the Civil War. When he died fighting, Frances, now a widower, took a job doing laundry and could no longer stay at home to care for her infant daughter. Frances boarded Mary Ellen, which was common practice at the time. But when Frances' financial situation worsened, she missed visitation dates with her daughter and could not make child care payments, so the boarding house put Mary Ellen up for adoption. It was the abuse in this adoptive home that led to the court case.

  This may be an interesting history. But why am I writing about the Wilson family?

  My hope is to prompt consideration about how much better Mary Ellen's childhood outcomes might have been if we—as a community and as a country—had focused on supporting her parents, Frances and Thomas, in the first place, at the time when they deeply needed help. Instead of placing Mary Ellen out of her home, what if the community had a network of supports where Frances could have reached out for help when Thomas was at war? What if the family had access to food, housing, and child care? What if counseling services were available to help Frances cope with her tragedy—the loss of her husband and need to take care of her infant daughter on her own? What if support groups had been available to create a community so that Frances knew she wasn't alone? Ultimately, what if we had invested in prevention?

  Today, far too many families in our country make the unfathomable choice between eating and paying rent. Parents go hungry so that their kids can have food. Families living in poverty are more likely to be isolated and work multiple jobs to gain needed concrete supports like food, clothing, housing, health care, and child care. The overwhelming majority of parents—all parents, no matter their economic status—want the very best for their children and work each day to keep them safe, healthy, and thriving. However, research shows a profound link between poverty and neglect, with individual poverty often a risk factor for neglect. Because of systemic racism, poverty and maltreatment disproportionately impact communities of color.

  With the passage and implementation of the Family First Prevention Services Act, we have an opportunity to invest in prevention and community-based solutions to support families. In so doing, we have an opportunity to transform our child welfare system, which focuses on protecting children after harm occurs, into a family well-being system, which seeks to strengthen families, alleviate poverty, and prevent neglect before it happens.

  Family Resource Centers (FRCs) provide critical community-based solutions and infrastructure toward these goals. Approximately 3,000 FRCs offer services that strengthen families and prevent maltreatment in 29 urban, rural, and tribal jurisdictions throughout the United States. FRCs partner with parents and caregivers to build protective factors, which research shows prevent child abuse and neglect. The Center for the Study of Social Policy enumerates five key protective factors that strengthen families:

  • Parental resilience: Managing stress and functioning well when faced with challenges, adversity, and trauma
  • Social connections: Positive relationships that provide emotional, informational, instrumental, and spiritual support
  • Knowledge of parenting and child development: Understanding child development and parenting strategies that support physical, cognitive, language, social, and emotional development
  • Concrete support in times of need: Access to concrete support and services that address a family's needs and help minimize stress caused by challenges
  • Social and emotional competence of children: Family and child interactions that help children develop the ability to communicate clearly, recognize and regulate their emotions, and establish and maintain relationships

  Safe & Sound is just one of 26 FRCs in San Francisco that supports the diversity of families in our community. Similar to other FRCs, we provide a range of prevention services, giving parents and caregivers the opportunity to voluntarily seek help in the following ways:

  • Drop in to talk with a counselor about a parenting challenge or a family crisis
  • Access resources to find housing or a job
  • Attend a support group or workshop
  • Learn about skills for raising families, including evidenced-based parenting classes
  • Take a break in the common day area while their kids are in the playroom
  • Pick up food, clothing, diapers, and shampoo
  • Join together for a family meal, event, or activity
  • Call a phone line for help 24/7/365 days a year

  
  All of these are supports that would have helped to keep Mary Ellen with her own family—and would help millions of parents and children living in poverty today.

  Scholars have pointed to community-based programs as important solutions to helping families out of poverty and reducing neglect. Growing evidence shows that FRCs help parents mitigate risk factors and build protective factors that prevent childhood neglect. Investing in FRCs allow communities to increase access to jobs, housing, health care, child care, and other concrete supports for families; expand social connections and decrease isolation; increase family resilience; and, ultimately, prevent neglect for all children.

  Let's learn the lesson of Mary Ellen Wilson and invest in prevention.

  To learn more about FRCs, visit the National Family Support Network at https://www.nationalfamilysupportnetwork.org/family-support-programs
  and Safe & Sound at https://safeandsound.org/.
   

• It's Time to Stop Confusing Poverty With Neglect

  It's Time to Stop Confusing Poverty With Neglect

  Written by Jerry Milner and David Kelly

  As a field, we are fond of saying that child abuse and neglect cross all economic strata, but we know that it is not reported or handled equally or proportionally across all strata, as reflected by the children and families involved in the child welfare system. There is also a common refrain among many in the field that we should create a system that is "good enough for our own children." While the sentiment is earnest, we know that for most of us, the system will never be truly good enough for the children in our own lives. The truth is, for most people of certain socioeconomic standing and race, removal of a child to foster care is not a reality they will ever face—whether warranted or not. Moreover, to make that statement and mean it requires a fierce urgency in making the changes necessary to bring such a system to life. Should the improbable happen and a child in one of our lives require placement in the child welfare system, incremental improvement would never be satisfactory. It would be unacceptable.

  Yet, as a field, we seem quite comfortable with very small, incremental improvements and minor tweaks to the way we operate—tweaks that often benefit the operators more than those living the experience; tweaks that may not result in noticeable improvements in the way children, youth, and parents experience the system at all; and tweaks that are not likely to mitigate the need to enter the system.  We have to be honest in examining why we allow this to be so.

  We have to be honest that a large part of the problem is the way we see and judge families that make contact with the system. We see poor and vulnerable families as the "other." 

  The role that poverty plays in child welfare decision-making is a topic that has yet to be meaningfully confronted and addressed. Poverty is a risk factor for neglect, but poverty does not equate to neglect.  The presence of poverty alone does not mean a child is unsafe, unloved, or that a parent lacks the capacity to care for his or her child. Poverty can make it more challenging for parents to meet certain of their children's needs. We must be resoundingly clear that a child should never be removed from his or her family due to poverty alone. 

  We must also be very clear that poverty is disproportionately present in communities of color and that this fact carries direct implications for child welfare.

  Overwhelmingly, the faces of the children, youth, and parents involved in child welfare are black and brown or very poor and white—people who data tell us are more often economically vulnerable or disadvantaged. Most of the reasons for child welfare involvement fall into what we call "neglect" rather than physical abuse or exploitation. Our most recent child maltreatment data tell us that 60 percent of victims have a finding of neglect only. There are different types and definitions of neglect around the country. Neglect can take the form of failing to attend school and not keeping up with necessary medical care. It can also take the form of not meeting the emotional needs of a child. More times than not, poverty and struggles to meet the basic, concrete needs of a family are a part of the equation in all types of neglect. Substance use and or mental health challenges can exacerbate or perpetuate these challenges, but these conditions are not always present.

  Rather than seeing these root causes with clear eyes, calling them out, and taking them on with intention, we remain stuck as a system and society that focuses on the harmful aftereffects, often casting blame on vulnerable families for their very vulnerability. Rather than trying to prevent poverty and the many challenges associated with poverty, such as social isolation and lack of meaningful opportunities and support, we search for increasingly sophisticated evidence-based interventions to treat the trauma or "fix" the symptoms arising from a family's inability to meet their children's fundamental needs.

  We believe this must change.

  For the past 2 and a half years, we have listened carefully to the stories of parents struggling to provide for their children while trying to keep the threat of child removal at arm's length. Sometimes they are successful, and sometimes they are not. We have also visited programs and learned of efforts across the country that are committed to making sure families have the help and support they need, before, during, and after the crisis arises—the most impactful of which focus on preventing the crisis from arising in the first place.

  Many of the stories and programs speak directly to or reside at the intersection of poverty and neglect.  The consistency with which poverty has been a leading part of the story parents tell is eye opening but sadly not surprising. The following are some of those stories:

  A young mother had to make a difficult decision on whether to use money for a flat tire she got on her way to work soon before her rent was due, knowing that she would not be able to pay for both. She needed the tire to drive to work to earn money for rent and to meet her child's needs.

  Young parents who are foster care alumni incurred a burdensome debt while trying to earn an education critical to landing good jobs, while holding down very low-paying jobs and meeting the basic needs of their children.

  Children were removed from their parents due to chronic homelessness or housing instability.

  The children of a young, single mother were removed solely due to an eviction. She had hoped that the system would rally to help her find decent, safe housing only to be told "you must comply with this or that in your case plan in order to regain custody."

  Countless parents knew they needed help but did not have the means to obtain it on their own and were afraid to ask for it for fear of removal.

  Parents were required to pay for certain services or drug testing they could not afford and had that inability to pay used against them as failure to comply with a case plan, preventing them from regaining custody of their children.

  Each of these examples brings the challenges of poverty and lack of resources or support into acute focus. Absent such challenges and scarcities, odds are less that the families in the examples would make contact with the child welfare system. On the other hand, we have also seen exceptional efforts to address basic, poverty-related issues before and after child welfare intervention becomes necessary.  We have seen common-sense, kind, and effective efforts to assist families to overcome poverty related challenges and stay together. The following are a few examples:

  A community adoption agency took on the prevention mantle by rallying around a family at risk of losing its children by lining up safe child care, bringing meals to the family, and securing rent to head off an impending eviction.

  Several community-led organizations provided basic, concrete supports to families in need before those needs escalate to hotline reports (e.g., food, rent assistance, legal aid, and safe places with people that listen).

  A prosperity project designed to support economic mobility of parents provided job training and support, educational opportunities, and child care.

  A tribal Early Head Start and child care program provided children with a safe, educational environment while their parents learned about child development, received job training, and sometimes even became employed as teachers and aids within the program.

  A judge ordered a child welfare agency to pay for a necessary repair to a septic tank that would otherwise leave a home uninhabitable and a family separated.

  A parent attorney successfully argued that supplemental security income death and disability payments be made to a mother positioning herself for reunification instead of the child welfare agency so that she would not lose her apartment.

  Several subsidized housing programs operated within the child welfare system by both public and private agencies provided stable housing and support for youth emancipating from foster care to help prevent them from becoming homeless, allowing them to save money and to get an education. Some programs also provided housing to parents that have been or are working to reunify with their children or who are at risk of losing their children.

  These are two very different sets of examples and two very different types of stories that should be instructive to all of us on what is necessary to reimagine a child welfare system focused on strengthening the capacities of parents to keep their children safely at home. By investing heavily in the second set of examples, we can profoundly reduce the incidence, number, and severity of the first set of examples.

  We also must be clear about the likelihood that parents who are dealing with housing emergencies or food scarcity will be able to benefit from evidence-based services that require regular attendance or completion of a predetermined dose or number of sessions. Will the parenting classes or therapy, even if well-supported by the evidence, take or be sustainable when a parent does not have a place to live, a steady income, or a way to feed their children?

  Committing to a system that takes on poverty-related neglect in humane and effective ways requires active partnering with public and private entities that can, collectively, create the conditions where families can thrive and children are free from harm. It requires partnership with communities that know and understand the needs of their families and children. And, it requires a willingness to rally around families that are vulnerable and struggling with poverty, rather than judging them, labeling that vulnerability as neglect, and pathologizing them.

  If we truly care about children and families, it's time to stop confusing poverty with neglect and devote ourselves to doing something about it.
  
   

• Redefining Poverty in Tribal Communities

  Redefining Poverty in Tribal Communities

  Written by LeeAnn Garrick, Cook Inlet Council (CITC) chief of operations; Cristy Willer, CITC senior director of Strategic Initiatives; and Deborah Northburg, senior director of Child & Family Services, Anchorage, AK

  Families who are surviving or in crisis are often vulnerable to child welfare involvement. Cook Inlet Tribal Council (CITC), as a multiservice tribal organization, designs opportunities for families—many of whom are in crisis—to move from surviving to thriving. In Alaska, CITC defines "thriveability" as being "connected with one's own unique capabilities and the bounty of potential they provide." We support our program participants in the quest to thrive not just survive. Our participants define what thriving means to them by looking at their family's experience through the lens of five factors—financial stability, healthy lifestyles, relationships, education and training, and spiritual and cultural wellness. Through this process, participants design their own definition of success that leads to a plan of action in each and all of these domains. 

  The application of thriveability moves us to explore new ways to describe this success. We do not use terms like poverty to define financial status but rather the lack of social capital of family relationships, community connections, and tribal traditions. We value and use the understanding of social capital to create programs aimed at enhancing these critical relationships. We use strategies such as peer-to-peer support to guide program participants, providing a deep relationship in our program models and closing the gap of social isolation. This isolation creates a vulnerability that challenges our people and often breaks down the system by which families support each other in times of need. When we talk about education and training programming, we are striving to do more using what is known and what anchors our traditions, allowing us to innovate new models of education from old ways of knowing. Another way we infuse meaningful culture is to embrace our shared core values of interdependence, resilience, accountability, respect, and humor. These core values define and sustain our culture.

  Years ago, we began trying to understand our Tribal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TTANF) program participants by asking them about their experiences and focusing on what moves families forward. In this exploration, we discovered that we needed to consider the whole family's needs not just individual issues. This means using multigenerational mobility strategies like employment, education, and radical learning models to support families in all stages of their lives. Layered over these models are approaches that include meeting people where they are and understanding past experiences, whether historical or traumatic, and encouraging participants to move forward.

  The five factors model informs how CITC programs overlap and intersect to respond best to participant needs and experiences. For example, our Employment and Training Services Department's (ETSD's) management of all TTANF funds and state child care assistance funds for income-eligible Alaska native and American Indian families in the region, as well as the existence of several smaller supportive programs, connects Child and Families Services and ETSD. CITC's multitude of programs provide direct services to native youth, including employment and life-skills development through afterschool tutoring; camps for building science, technology, engineering, and math skills; supported work experience; suicide prevention framework-funded supports in the community; and building healthy relationship skills, provide a potentially useful service net for youth in state custody. The CITC Child and Family Services Department's extensive experience providing direct services to families in or on the verge of crisis is without a doubt the factor that provides some of the most significant support.

  Through all these approaches, we work in partnership with the families we serve—some in crisis and some not—to move from surviving to thriving. We encourage families to join us in this journey so they may better understand what builds their safety net of relationships and support, which not only insulates them from crisis but also builds a protective community.