Children Belong with Family. Family separation is a traumatic experience that causes lifelong consequences for children, parents, and communities. It is an intervention that must be used extremely sparingly and only when no feasible alternatives exist to protect children from immediate harm if they remain with their parents or caregivers. The creation of feasible alternatives to family separation, and support for children’s lifelong familial relationships when separation becomes essential, are moral imperatives.

Common Ground. As we work toward lasting change in entrenched systems that harm children and families, we value open dialogue and cooperation across the political spectrum. We strive to embody respect, understanding and appreciation for the values, diverse experiences, and commitments of our members, partners, and allies even if we disagree. We value the relationships that we are building through our work.

Communities Should Design their Own Solutions. Child welfare systems offer services that fail to match the identified needs of children, families and communities. Services have too often been designed to meet the needs and resources of service providers, not the needs and resources of communities. This has led to a devastating number of families separated for poverty when concrete, material support could have kept them together. We urge investment that invites communities to design their own solutions to the real priority needs of children and families.

Listening and Valuing the Experiences of Those Directly Impacted. The child welfare system must hear, elevate, and amplify the voices of those with direct personal experience with its interventions. Parents and children who have experienced child welfare intervention understand its impact most powerfully. As advocates for families, some with lived experience and many not, we recognize the imperative to listen to and heed many voices of directly affected parents and children as we do this work.

Recognizing Disproportional Impact and Reducing Harm. As we recognize the harm family separation causes, we work to reduce such harm, understanding that the child welfare system has imposed disproportionate, severe and enduring harms of the child welfare system to poor, minority, and marginalized families, with harms falling especially hard on Black and Indigenous communities. We commit to using our resources and experience as advocates to support the voices, experiences, and leadership of all families and communities harmed by the abuses of the child welfare system.

The Child Welfare System Is More Appropriately Understood as the Family Regulation System. Because the system routinely fails to advance child wellbeing, and frequently undermines child wellbeing by focusing its resources on traumatic, harmful interventions, we believe that the term “family regulation system,” better describes the system that we work to change. Nevertheless, because this understanding is not yet broadly understood, we continue to use the term child welfare on this website as we look forward to a time when more policymakers across the political spectrum understand the system as we do.