“We hope this forum on Faith Communities and Child Welfare will catalyze faith-based action in the foster and adoptive care realm and beyond,” said Rev. Starsky Wilson, president and CEO of the Deaconess Foundation, while introducing William C. Bell.
Bell, president and CEO of Casey Family Programs, spoke at a public forum convened at the Deaconess Center for Child Well-Being on August 21.
Bell said there are hundreds of thousands of children who live separated from their families every day. “On average every 24 hours, 2,000 children are confirmed as victims of child abuse and neglect,” Bell said. “On average in this county, every 24 hours 700 children are removed from their families and placed in foster care.”
Casey Family Programs – founded by Jim Casey, founder of United Parcel Service – offers free consulting services designed to help provide sustainable responses to the needs of the most vulnerable children, families and the communities where they live. Its mission is to provide and improve – and ultimately prevent the need for – foster care, by working with individuals, groups, systems and policymakers to ensure that all children can be raised in a safe and permanent family.
“Contrary to popular belief, family separation didn’t just start at the border,” Bell said. “There may still be over 300 children who were separated from their families at the border and who have not yet been reunified because many of their parents have already been sent back from where they came from – the children are sitting here, in trauma that you cannot possibly understand,” Bell said. “But, there are over 400,000 children – many of them going through family court right across the way – who live separated from their families every day in America, and they are American citizens.”
Over the past decade, poverty rates have risen on both sides of the Mississippi River for the over 650,000 kids in the eight-county grant-making footprint of Deaconess Foundation. Poverty hurts children and families.
“On average every 24 hours, more than 7 million children in this great America wake up in homes where their families of four are trying to live off the average of $8 a day per family member,” Bell said. “Our government calls that ‘extreme poverty,’ as though trying to live off of $10 a day per family member wouldn’t be so extreme. If we don’t do something – those of us who can – if we don’t take what we have to help those who have not, it will continue.”
He said on average every 24 hours in the U.S., 13 young people under the age of 25 are lost to homicide, and almost as many to suicide.
“On average, every 24 hours across this great nation, with all of its riches and all of its wealth and all of its opportunity, we lose 12 young people under the age of 25 to suicide – making the statement that one more day of life as I know it is not an option for me – death is a better proposition,” Bell said.
“We have to decide: Is that our America? Is that the land that we hope for? Is that the ‘land of the free, home of the brave’ – or do I choose to do something about it?”
Bell, who is also an ordained Pentecostal minister, said that “the time has come for the church” to address this crisis. “If you are a member of the people who just want to do God’s will, then hope demands that you take up the challenge,” Bell said.
Electing leadership to address and change existing obstructionist policies is needed to reduce the need for foster care, Bell said. His historic example was ADC – Aid to Dependent Children, government funds that went primarily to white women with children in the 1930s-50s – even if a man lived in the house. He said around the time when women of color began applying for ADC, in 1961, the program changed to AFDC, Aid to Families with Dependent Children.
“When AFDC was created, part of the construct was, money that is incorporated into AFDC is allowed to be utilized to pay for out-of-home care for children who have been removed from AFDC recipients under the premise of the policy that the home is unsuitable. So, there was family breakup, removal and placement into foster care, government money to pay for foster care in place as a part of policy in 1961,” Bell said.
“The challenge for us is: How many other policies that we live with today have beginnings in the auspices of ‘You don’t deserve what we have,’ ‘I need to control your behavior,’ and ‘I just don’t like you’? Until we stand up and demand through our collective impact that things must be different, they will not be different, in all likelihood – they will get worse.”
The forum was one of a series hosted by the called the Just for Kids (J4K) Community Conversations. The series is designed to catalyze change to improve conditions for kids in the region. Upcoming J4K forums: September 20 with Manuel Pastor, University of Southern California, on “Equity, Growth, and Community,” and October 23 with Leslie Crutchfield, Georgetown University McDonough School of Business, on “How Change Happens.” Find out more at https://deaconess.org.
