FCYU-Feature Story

Keeping Families Together
Preventing foster care means building healthy neighborhoods

By Tamara

Six years ago, Glenda Diaz (not her real name) got a call that turned her world upside down. Her 2-month-old son had been diagnosed with shaken baby syndrome, a brain injury that can occur when a baby is shaken or thrown hard against something.

To this day, Diaz said, she’s not sure exactly how it happened. Even though her son had been with the babysitter while Diaz was at work, he was placed in foster care with her mother and Diaz was investigated for neglect.

The court allowed Diaz’s 9-year-old daughter and 10-year-old son to remain in her care, but required home visits to check up on their well-being. She went back and forth to court for about a year and could only see her baby during short, scheduled visits.

“I had from a certain time to a certain time to see him, and my mom always had to be there,” she told Represent. “It was just a horrible experience…it felt like they took my rights away.”

Getting Help Sooner

Eventually Diaz regained full custody of her son, who is now 6 and seems to have fully recovered, she said. The neglect charge against her was eventually withdrawn. But during her hard times throughout the case, Diaz received counseling for herself and her family, took yoga classes to relieve her stress, and let her two older children participate in summer camp and join clubs.

Diaz did this all at the Center for Family Life (CFL), a preventive services program in Brooklyn, New York. Preventive services are programs that try to prevent foster care placement by offering families support before they get to the point of crisis.

Preventive programs have been around in New York state for more than two decades and are now catching on in other states. But what makes the center different from a lot of other preventive programs is that they don’t just step in when a family’s facing the possibility of foster care.

“The neat thing about it is, unlike other states where the only thing is foster care, here you can get help a lot sooner,” said Julia Jean-Francois, co-director of CFL. “You don’t have to wait until things are so serious.”

Warm Welcome

Although many people are referred to the centers through ACS (New York City’s child welfare system) anyone is allowed to come down, whether they’re looking for counseling, financial help, or just some fun.

CFL’s goal is to fight poverty and keep the community and families together. To find out how they do that, I took a trip to the Sunset Park neighborhood that the center serves.
As I came out of the subway and walked down a busy street, I passed by several teenage boys, all speaking in Spanish. On every other block there were little restaurants and groceries with Spanish names. Later on I found out that there are many immigrants from Spanish-speaking countries living in that part of the neighborhood. A couple of blocks over, I was told, the immigrant community is mostly Chinese.

Finally I headed down a side street and arrived at the Center for Family Life, right next to a big Catholic church. Inside the center, the environment was warm and welcoming. The walls were covered with flyers for things like low-cost legal services, a rally at City Hall to protest school budget cuts and employment notices for women posted in both English and Spanish.

Tackling Poverty, Building Community

When I sat down and talked with Julia Jean-Francois, I learned that Sunset Park, Brooklyn is one of the many neighborhoods in New York City that’s struggling with issues of poverty. And, she said, research shows that poverty is one of the main reasons why people come into foster care.

“One of the best ways to confront poverty is by building community,” she said.

That, continued Jean-Francois, is what the center does, they get people connected to each other and try to make them feel like they’re one big family. With the whole support system under them, “it’s like a tide that lifts everybody up,” she said.

Heading Off Trouble

I gave some thought to her words, and I began to realize that the method the center uses makes a lot of sense. If poverty is a major factor in foster care, giving the whole community “plan B’s” helps stop the problem way before it even has a chance to start.

For example, if a parent is struggling with a drug or alcohol addiction, they can come on their own to the center for counseling—before ACS gets involved. At the same time, the center staff find out if there are other ways they can help, like showing the family how to get food stamps and health care, or providing a little money to help pay the rent if they’re in danger of becoming homeless.

They might also help parents find a job or affordable childcare, so that parents have a safe place to take kids while they’re at work. These kinds of things can help prevent neglect, and relieve stress that might lead to abuse.

That doesn’t mean there’s always a happy ending, though. Jean-Francois explained that the center staff are required by law to report cases of child abuse or neglect. But out of the 500 families the center works with, she said, there are only about two or three cases each year where a child is placed in foster care. And when that happens, the center tries to stay involved with the family and support them in getting things back on track, so the child can come home as quickly as possible.

“Our basic belief is that people are very good and want to be caring toward each other, but when life gets really stressful, really hard things happen sometimes,” said Jean-Francois. “We try to get to the point where people can be their best.”

Making Connections

That’s what Glenda Diaz came to realize, though it didn’t happen overnight. Her experience with ACS made her feel like she’d been labeled a bad parent, and she had a hard time believing that social workers and counselors at the center were really there to support her—not make her feel like she’d done wrong.

“I didn’t know who to trust or what to do. I felt like everybody was just going to take my kids and I didn’t want that. So it took me a while, but then I realized they were helping.”

Her older kids got involved in the center’s summer job program, and still go to the after-school drama and dance classes even though they’ve now moved to a different neighborhood.

“In talking to other kids and seeing what they’ve been through, they realize they’re not alone,” Diaz said.

As we walked a few blocks to one of the three schools where the center runs after-school activities, I got a chance to see what Diaz was talking about. In one room, a group of people sat around tables in a sewing class. Some were making costumes for a school show (another of the center’s programs) and others were making clothes for their families.

While their parents sewed, the children were running around and playing freely. Everyone had come together to talk with one another and do something that they enjoy.

Different generations all meet at the school. There are arts and crafts, adult education programs, tutoring, dance clubs and sports.

At the gymnasium I met David Garcia, a coordinator at the middle school program. Garcia was coaching soccer in the gym, and he told me an interesting story about one of his soccer players.

Like many people in this neighborhood, the teen is an undocumented immigrant, although he’s lived in the neighborhood for years. He’s almost 18, and since he isn’t a legal resident of the United States, his employment choices are limited. So Garcia got the boy to become a peer coordinator, coaching the younger children in soccer.

Instead of letting the boy go out and do something negative with his life, Garcia chose to help build him up. “I show them that we’re all together, I’m there to help you.”

A Helping Hand

I think that’s the way the whole center works. They try to build trust with the community so that everyone knows they can depend on the center, and each other, for just about anything. So when someone reaches a point when they are struggling, they won’t be afraid to come get help.

“We feel like just being here, offering all kinds of support all the time, maybe people will trust that if they’re ready, we’ll help them,” said Jean-Francois.

After my visit, I kept thinking of a painting by Diego Rivera (a famous Mexican artist) that I’d seen in the center’s reception area. The colorful painting showed three little children helping an older woman carry a bunch of oversized flowers.

Much like the children in the painting, the Center for Family Life is a “helping hand” to the people in the community who need it.