There was a child went forth

Executive Director and Co-Founder, Bob Schwartz,

This post is the second in a series by Executive Director and Co-Founder, Bob Schwartz. Over the coming months, Bob will reflect on Juvenile Law Center's four decades of advocacy work for children at risk. This year marks Juvenile Law Center's 40th anniversary, and we're looking forward to celebrating our past successes. However, this year is also about anticipating the next wave of threats to vulnerable youth and ensuring that children at risk have ample opportunity for success as adults. Read the first post here.

 


May is National Foster Care Month, promoting attention to the nation’s 400,000 children and youth who are living away from their parents in a home approved by the state. 

Juvenile Law Center has been advocating for youth in the foster care system—and its umbrella child welfare system—since we started representing children in 1975. One year earlier, in 1974, Congress had enacted the Child Abuse, Prevention and Treatment Act. Pennsylvania passed its Child Protective Services Law (CPSL) several months after we opened our doors. 

Our early child welfare work identified three threads of activity that would endure for much of the next four decades. 

  • We represented dependent (abused or neglected) children in family and juvenile courts, developing an expertise in Pennsylvania and federal law, and in the protean, idiosyncratic service delivery system used by courts and counties. 
  • We planted the seeds of what would become a deep-rooted intellectual presence in the field—in 1977 we published the first of seven editions of “Child Abuse and the Law.”  It was the first publication to explicate the CPSL, and it became a handbook for state and county officials, including judges, for many years.
  • We litigated over the problem of kids languishing in foster care.  We brought one of several 1970s federal lawsuits that spurred Congress to pass the Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act of 1980.

Our foster care work has, like all of our advocacy, evolved over time. In the 1980s and early 1990s we devoted enormous energy to keeping kids out of foster care. Our national work in the 1990s focused on giving meaning to the 1980 federal law. 

Today we focus on teens who are in foster care. We no longer represent children in individual cases, but we work with colleagues across the country to improve policy and practice for older foster youth as they make the transition to adulthood.  We use a range of strategies to ensure that these deserving youth have access to health care, education, and housing.  Most importantly, we’re fighting today to ensure that foster youth have the same “normal” developmental opportunities as youth who grow up in their birth families.

 

There was a child went forth every day;
And the first object he look’d upon, that object he became;
And that object became part of him for the day, or a certain part of the day, or for many years, or stretching cycles of years.

-- Walt Whitmant (1819-1892), Leaves of Grass (1900)

 

Image via flickr.

 

THERE was a child went forth every day;  
And the first object he look’d upon, that object he became;  
And that object became part of him for the day, or a certain part of the day, or for many years, or stretching cycles of years.