Recent news

The next meeting of the Pennsylvania Juvenile Justice Task Force is scheduled for Wednesday, September 30, 2020 from 3-5 p.m., and can be viewed on the Task Force website. The September 30, 2020 meeting will focus on data related to fines, fees, and restitution, as well as youth who are charged as adults. Look for a future blog summarizing what occurs.

In 2019, one of Juvenile Law Center’s Youth Advocacy programs, Youth Fostering Change, chose as their policy project older youth permanency. Many of the young people in the group aged out without being connected to family and they had a lot to say about what could have been done to help them find family, including their own relatives and kin.

Over the next four months, through a series of online events and blogs, we will look back on our 45 years of advocating for rights, dignity, equity and opportunity for youth in the child welfare and justice systems. Amidst COVID-19 and the racial reckoning underway in our country, it is challenging to celebrate (but we need to do so!) - and critical to reflect.

Over the past 14 years, I have worked to improve government systems for vulnerable children and families. This work is personal to me because I spent part of my childhood in foster care. I know what it’s like to be a small, defenseless child on the other end of a giant, dysfunctional government system.

Valuing and pursuing kinship care arrangements promotes racial equity and is essential to ensuring permanency for children and youth and their communities.

I am humbled to have received the Leadership Prize from Juvenile Law Center. Juvenile Law Center is one of the oldest and most effective organizations I know of that advocates on behalf of kids. There have been insurmountable issues before them which they have routinely overcome and there have been 1000’s of kids who have better lives because of their work.

We embark on this Kinship Month at a time of reckoning. Both the COVID crisis and the cries for racial justice have forced us to confront the failings of the child welfare system and have led to calls from our highest offices to reimagine the system as one with a mission of keeping kids safe with their families instead of safe from their families.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development has proposed a new rule which removes protections for transgender and gender non-conforming people, deeply impacting young people in and leaving foster care.

September is National Kinship Care Month. This blog series highlights the great importance of valuing and supporting family and kin to ensure a child welfare system that minimizes the trauma that children face if they come into contact with the system and promotes equity for families and well-being for children.

The major findings from the data are: (1) training varies among juvenile court judges and Juvenile Probation Officers (JPOs), but many JPOs report not receiving implicit bias training, (2) racial disparities exist both in the rates of those who receive probation and the length of probation.