Saturday, July 17, 2010

It's time to plan for action. Collective action.

A little more than a year ago, I set up a Facebook account and started a cause on Facebook called "Getting Child Protection Right."  Over the intervening months, almost four hundred Facebook users from the US and abroad have joined that cause.  Some of those have made contributions to the cause's dedicated non-profit organization -- the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform www.nccpr.org ,  an organization that has done more than any other I have found to influence policy makers in a position to effect positive change to a system that, while well-meaning, often does far more to harm children and families than to help them.  That certainly was my family's experience.

Today I sent out an email bulletin to all of the members of the cause, asking them what individual actions they have taken or thought about taking in order to change things for the better. I realize, of course, that some of those who have joined the cause are just now newly involved in "the system" and may only be thinking about how to get their children back home and how to end their involvement in it.

Nonetheless, I think that it is important for all of us, those whose involvement is in the past and those presently in the system, to put on our thinking caps and come up with a collective plan of action.  Commitment to such a plan can only help to move us all from a position of powerlessness into one of strength.

I have asked for ideas and have proposed one myself.  Now I must pause and be patient, await responses and then figure out how to respond to them.  In the meantime, I shall continue to formulate my own ideas, which presently range from how to provide better and more comprehensive investigation, how to enhance real due process in dependency court, how to increase the availability of in-home, wrap-around services to keep children from being needlessly removed from their own homes, and how to make the entire process more transparent and honest.

The research and papers published on the NCCPR website are among the most helpful I can imagine.  So as a first collective action, I have proposed that every member of Getting Child Protection Right contribute one dollar or whatever they can afford to that organization on the day that we grow to 400 members, and I plan to propose that we do the same each time we acquire 100 new members, thus increasing our contribution by $100 each time we hit that milestone in growth.

I know that we can do more, but this is a start.

 

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