NCCPR

In my previous column on child welfare finance reform, I wrote about the incentives that push governments toward needlessly tearing apart families. Those incentives exist for everyone from the frontline caseworker to the child welfare agency chief.

When writing about child welfare I often cite an old Peanuts cartoon in which the characters are gathered around Snoopy’s dog house trying to figure out how to keep him warm when he sleeps on the roof on cold winter nights.

This analysis is part of The Imprint’s series entitled: “Dollars and Priorities: The Financing of Child Welfare.” In the middle of the last decade, the State of Florida and two counties in California got a head start on the pack in developing and implementing the modern era of child welfare waivers.

A couple of months ago, I was updating one of the most popular pages on the NCCPR website. It’s called The Case Against CASA.  It’s all about how the most sacred cow in child welfare, the Court-Appointed Special Advocates program, harms the children it is meant to help.

After $4 million, 13 public listening sessions and eight deliberation meetings (many over the phone), the Commission to Eliminate Child Abuse and Neglect Fatalities is closing in on adoption of final recommendations for the Obama Administration.

In 2012, before The Imprint even launched its real website, one of our first Youth Services Insider columns lamented the shuttering of The National Coalition for Child Protection Reform (NCCPR). The organization, led and pretty much completely run by Executive Director Richard Wexler, was a tiny but effective champion for greater attention to family preservation in child welfare.

The National Coalition for Child Protection Reform (NCCPR) was borne of a 1991 meeting in Cambridge, Mass., in which its founders decided it was necessary to create a single entity that would identify and challenge media coverage and what NCCPR Board President Martin Guggenheim described as a “powerful desire to blame the worst things that happen to children on their parents.”