CACF Blog

On April 12, 2010, the Coalition for Asian American Children and Families (CACF) joined Citizens’ Committee for Children (CCC), Council Members Annabel Palma, Charles Barron, and Letitia James, and other child welfare partners for a press conference on the importance of preventive services in preserving child safety.  Preventive service programs help families access vital support services that can strengthen the family and help prevent the placement of children in foster care.  Parents, service providers, advocates, and others assembled on the steps of City Hall to protest reductions in slots and proposed budget cuts that would seriously undermine the City’s ability to provide these services.

Wayne Ho, Executive Director of CACF, highlighted the need to support preventive agencies in providing linguistically appropriate and culturally sensitive services for immigrant families: “The proposed cuts to preventive services could not come at a worst time.  As families struggle to recover from the financial crisis, they need these support services more than ever to improve family stability and keep their children safely at home.  Immigrant families in particular face unique linguistic and cultural barriers to accessing these services.  With fewer slots for families and reduced funding for service providers, vulnerable immigrant families and their children will fall through the cracks.”

CCC also released their new report, The Wisest Investment: New York City’s Preventive Service System, which documents the need for more resources to support the preventive service system.  According to Stephanie Gendell, Associate Executive Director of CCC, “The over-arching recommendation from our three year study of this system is that preventive services must be valued as a core child welfare service by the federal, state and local governments, the child welfare providers, advocates and the city’s communities. If the preventive service leg of child welfare is not adequately funded, it will falter and the entire child welfare system will collapse—the children of New York City deserve better from all of us.”

To access The Wisest Investment online, please visit: http://www.cccnewyork.org/publications/CCCwisestinvestment10.pdf

For further coverage of the press conference, please visit the New York Non-Profit Press: http://nynp.biz/April1310.htm.

Help CACF fight budget cuts to preventive services!  If you have benefited from preventive services, please share your story with us.  Contact Kalaivani S. Duane, CACF’s Child Welfare Policy Manager, at ksduane@cacf.org or 212-809-4675, ext. 109.

Wayne Ho, Executive Director of CACF, speaks at preventive service press conference.