BY JEANETTE VEGA with Dominique Arrington and Sharkkarah Harrison
When children are removed from home, parents feel a level of grief and stress that can hardly be explained. Then they often face more stress, with things like losing a job because of mandated services, losing housing and juggling multiple services.
When our bodies feel too much pressure and threat, stress can put us in an “act now, think later” mentality that makes it even harder to … Read More
Rise hosted a screening of the film Custody, which was filmed in Manhattan Family Court and traced the shadow that a horrific case can cast across the entire system. Starring Viola Davis, Hayden Panettiere and Catalina Sandino Moreno, the film humanizes a mother caught up in the system and documents how minor challenges can cascade into a child’s removal for a poor family.
The screening was followed by a panel discussion featuring Jeanette Vega, a Rise parent leader whose … Read More
In March 2013, a poor Chinese immigrant mother in Brooklyn took her 9-month-old baby, Mathew, to the hospital because he’d had a seizure. She explained that he’d fallen trying to walk and hit his head, then had the seizure. Hospital personnel and New York’s Administration for Children’s Services (ACS) charged that either the mother, Mei Qi Bao, or the baby’s father, Xiao Hang Wang, had abused their son. They said his symptoms could not have … Read More
Caseworkers play such an important role in whether parents succeed in getting their children home from foster care. To build parents’ understanding of caseworkers and workers’ understanding of parents, Rise ran two writing groups for frontline staff at the NYC agency Sheltering Arms. These stories show the challenges caseworkers face, as well as ways they’ve overcome those challenges.
READ THE SERIES:
Transparency and Trust – As a caseplanner, I know I have power over parents’ lives – … Read More
INTERVIEW BY RISE PARENT LEADERS
When you’re investigated by child protective services, you have to make decisions every step of the way. You have to decide what information to share, whether to enroll in services, and, if you wind up with a case, whether or not to go to trial.
You can’t know for sure what will help or hurt your situation. But the more you know about investigations, the better able you are to make educated … Read More
