Transcript of Plenary Session IV
Collaboration Works! Ten Years of Progress in Improving Outcomes for Children and Families
The following is a transcript of Plenary Session IV, including keynote speaker the Honorable Stephen M. Rubin.
Catherine Nolan
I’m Catherine Nolan, and I’m the Director on the Office of Child Abuse and Neglect in the Children’s Bureau in Washington, D.C. Before we begin our plenary session this morning, I just wanted to make an announcement. Today has been declared a national day of mourning for all the students and families that were affected by the Virginia Tech incident, and it is being designated as “Hokie Pride Day,” and we have apparently all been encouraged to wear the colors of Virginia Tech, which are orange and maroon. At Noon today, which is Noon East coast time, which is 10 minutes ago, we’ve all been asked to maintain a moment of silence in remembrance for all who were killed or injured at the Virginia Tech incident. So if we can just take minute right now to just maybe reflect, before we begin our morning session . . . . (Pause)
Thank you everyone. Kind of a painful reminder that we must never fail and never cease to do the work that we do to prevent violence in our country, whether it is within a family
or within a community. And it just makes me appreciate even more all of you here today, and the work that you do, and the work of our colleagues here on the stage with me this morning. That being said, let me go ahead and introduce the folks who are up here on stage with me.
For those of you who are here this morning for the first time this week (apologies to the rest of you who have heard my spiel every morning, but I just feel so strongly about this that I want to say it again), the Office on Child Abuse and Neglect within the Children’s Bureau has felt very strongly for many, many years that the problem of child abuse and neglect is very complex and cannot be solved by one person, one agency, or one discipline. And a lot of the work that we do in OCAN has to do with reaching out to our colleagues in all of the different agencies and across the disciplines to work together to collaborate and to coordinate our efforts—to have a coordinated response to the problem of child abuse and neglect. So every other year, when we host our conference, we always invite various members of our national planning commission, representatives of the different disciplines of the different national organizations, to be up here on stage with us in solidarity around this whole approach to solving this problem. And so we invite members each day to sit here to make that statement, but also—for us—it’s a way to acknowledge them and to thank them for the work that they do. So this morning again, as I’ve done each evening and morning of this week, I’m very pleased to be able to be able to introduce to you our platform members.
To my left, the Honorable Stephen Rubin, Lead Judge of the Pima County Model Court in Tucson, Arizona and our keynote speaker for this morning; Joan Ohl, Commissioner of the Administration on Children, Youth and Families, Administration for Children and Families, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services; Terry Cross, who just came back from his national conference on child abuse and neglect. We are very glad that you are here today. Terry is the Executive Director of the National Indian Child Welfare Association, commonly known to us as NICWA. Karen Rich Askew, a long-time partner as well, Executive Director, National Exchange Club Foundation for the Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect; Stephanie Stafford who is the State Coordinator for The Children’s Justice Act of Oregon. And for those of you who may not be familiar, the Children’s Justice Act is a program that is administered out of my office. So we are glad that you can be with us today, Stephanie. To my right, Emily Cooke, Special Assistant for Court Improvement, Children’s Bureau, Administration for Children and Families and I’ll say more about her in a second. The Honorable Dale Koch, President of the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges and also Presiding Judge of the Multnomah Circuit Court, and we appreciate you being here today representing both the local folks as well as the national organizations; Nancy Miller, who is the Director of Permanency Planning for the Children’s Department of the National Council on Juvenile and Family Court Judges; Cynthia Thompson, Executive Director of the Children’s Trust Fund of Oregon; and finally, Kevin Dawling, Executive Director of Care’s Northwest, and Care’s Northwest again has been a local agency that has been extremely involved with our local planning committee. Without its work, this conference would not be as successful as it has been. We are glad you are also able to join us this morning, Kevin.
And now I’d like to turn the podium over to Emily Cooke, who will preside this morning. We fondly call Emily our “attorney in residence” at the Children’s Bureau. She is an attorney, and she’s done a wonderful job over the years in really bringing the Court Improvement program to a level of sophistication that we really have never seen before. And she’s a wonderful friend and colleague. Please welcome Emily as presider for this morning.
Emily Cooke
Good morning, everyone. Thank you, Catherine, for that very generous introduction. I, too, would like to welcome you to this magnificent city and this marvelous conference, and to extend warm greetings from the many organizations, volunteer groups, and staffs who have worked with the Office on Child Abuse and Neglect to make this week a reality. During this week, many, many volunteers from the Portland area have been sharing their time and talents with us. I hope that this educational event has allowed you to learn from one another, to learn and be inspired by our keynote speakers and other presenters, and to share your experience and expertise with others. I also hope that you have found opportunities to expand your horizons, learn new skills, and network with friends and colleagues in both formal and informal ways.
This morning we are focusing on the relationship between the child welfare and the court systems. Many of you may be aware that we have established greater involvement of the courts as one of our top priorities for the second round of the Child and Family Services Reviews, what we call the CFSRs. Through our NationalResourceCenter on legal and judicial issues, we have reached out to the highest level of the courts in each state to make them aware of their state’s CFSR and to bring them into the process. It is clear our efforts are beginning to take hold through the preliminary findings of the national evaluation of the court improvement program presented at this conference and directly from the court improvement program coordinators at their annual meeting earlier this week. We’ve learned that an increasing number of judges and court personnel are becoming involved with the CFSR process, including development and implementation of the program improvement plan. I trust that the information we will provide this morning will assist you in enhancing the court and child welfare system collaboration in your state or locality as well.
We are delighted to have Terry Cross, Developer, Founder and Executive Director of the National Indian Child Welfare Association, join us at this conference. The National Indian Child Welfare Association has been a regular national co-sponsor of our national conferences on child abuse and neglect. The National Indian Child Welfare Association is dedicated to the well-being of all American Indian children and families. The organization works to ensure that every Indian child has access to community-based, culturally appropriate services that help them grow up safe, healthy, and spiritually strong, free from abuse, neglect, sexual exploitation, and the damaging effects of substance abuse. Terry Cross has at least 32 years of experience in child welfare, including ten years working directly with children and families. He served on the faculty of Portland State University School of Social Work, our local host agency. Please join me in welcoming one of our most respected colleagues, Terry Cross.
Terry Cross
Thank you. Thank you, Emily. It’s really a pleasure to be here, and I want to welcome you all to Portland, and I want to welcome you to Indian country. Most of you probably don’t know that right here in Portland, in the metropolitan area, there are 38,000 American Indians and that this area has become a vibrant center of Indian life. There are several Indian organizations headquartered here. It’s a regional center, it’s a national center, but also it’s the center of trade, historically, for tribes all over the northwest. So you are on sacred ground in this location—a place where our people gathered from time immortal for trading stories and for meetings among tribes. And I want to share with you that in this very facility every New Year’s Eve, our local tribal community, our urban Indian community here in Portland, hosts a celebration of sobriety. It started about 25 years ago with a handful of people who came together on New Year’s Eve looking for an alternative to drinking. This year on New Year’s Eve, in the hall that houses the exhibits, 1,500 straight and sober Indians gathered to celebrate the New Year. You are in a facility celebrating life, celebrating tribal culture, so we are pleased to have you join us in our facility. (Applause)
I want to thank the organizers for the involvement of our tribal communities and for the workshops that were planned, and we are proud to be co-sponsors of this event. I also want to bring you greetings from our event. I just came back from the 25th Annual National American Indian Conference on Child Abuse and Neglect. We were in Oklahoma City, and we had 550 participants from all over the U.S. and Canada. The theme of our conference was, “Truth and Reconciliation in Child Welfare.” It spun off from some work that’s happening jointly between the Child Welfare League of America, the National Indian Child Welfare Association, the Child Welfare League of Canada, the First Nation’s Child and Family Caring Society in Canada, and the Center for Excellence in Child Welfare at the University of Toronto.
In the fall of 2005, we had an event at Niagara on the lake on the Canadian side of the Falls, and we brought 200 people, half Canadian, half U.S., half of them Non-Indian, half of them Indian. We invited indigenous people from around the world to facilitate this discussion of healing and reconciliation, and our guides were from South Africa first and foremost who taught us about this process of reconciliation. Why, might you ask, would we have to have this conversation around reconciliation? Is that just churning up the past? Well, the past is still with us today. We have a project funded by ACF in the Children’s Bureau on customary adoption—helping tribes implement laws based on their own traditions—that allow adoptions without termination of parental rights, because in our ways when you are adopted, you simply get more family, you don’t have to lose your family. But we’ve found that even in order to accomplish this, before people can even have that conversation, they have to grieve the losses—the losses from the trans-racial adoption period, the losses from the pre-ICWA period [Indian Child Welfare Act], the families who’ve lost children, the women who were sterilized by the Indian Health Services as late as 1972 as their children were being removed from them. These are the things that have to be healed before people can even have the conversation—do you want to be an adoptive parent, do you want to be a foster parent? So yes, we do have to tell the truth, but it’s too late and too important that we fight about it. We shouldn’t—we can’t fight about it any longer. We have to join together. We have to find a new path together, and we are dedicated to finding that new path. Part of our work in Oklahoma is to celebrate those people who will stand with us, who will be our partners, empowering our communities to express our sobriety.
American Indian tribes are the forgotten jurisdiction in child welfare. We are the jurisdiction that cares for our children and yet there are those who still fight us to care for our own children. I don’t know about you, but I wonder sometimes, when did it become a problem for people to want their children and want to care for them? What we see today in child welfare, the serious problems with disproportionality, are the legacy—the living legacy of the racism of the past. We are recruiting everyone who will join us to undo that legacy with us, to be our partners.
NICWA is a membership organization, and members are tribal workers, tribal programs, non-Indian programs and organizations, professionals, governments, and anyone who will join us to help us protect our children. We thrive on collaboration. At this point, we have collaborations with over 83 organizations to some degree. I want to thank Judge Rubin for the collaboration we have had with the National Council doing technical assistance (through the National Center on Substance Abuse and Child Welfare) for tribal communities that are blending their courts with child welfare and substance abuse programs and, most recently, for helping us to develop a collaboration for the implementation of the new requirement for court improvement programs to collaborate with tribal courts. We are very pleased to have that collaboration. We welcome you to Portland, to Indian country, and I welcome you to join us at the National Indian Child Welfare Association, along with all the sponsors here, for the protection of the well-being of all children. Thank you. (Applause)
Emily Cooke
Thank you, Terry, for that important message. We are very fortunate to have JoanOhl, Commissioner of the Administration on Children, Youth and Families, with us this morning. Those of you who attended the opening session will remember Joan’s warm welcome and her remarks, which focused on improvements in the child and family welfare system. Joan was nominated by President Bush, confirmed by the U.S. Senate, and sworn in as Commissioner of ACYF in February 2002. As Commissioner, she oversees the Children’s Bureau and the Family and Youth Services Bureau in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Prior to joining the Bush administration, Joan was West Virginia’s Secretary of Health and Human Resources. She’s held numerous positions in higher education, including Vice President of the Independent College Fund and of the Association of Independent Colleges and Universities in New Jersey. Joan brings a valuable and unique perspective to her work at the Children’s Bureau. During her tenure as Commissioner, she has spent much of her time in efforts on strengthening the collaborative work between child welfare agencies and other key players in the broader child welfare system. She’s given particular attention to the work of child welfare agencies within the courts. She firmly believes that the courts and child welfare agencies have a responsibility for some of the most critical decisions that will ever be made on behalf of the children we serve and, if they do not work in partnership, we will not be able to accomplish the positive outcomes we seek. We at the Children’s Bureau see Joan not only as a boss, but also as a good friend, and I just want to say, personally, it has been a delight to have Joan work with us and work with me, where she very generously shares her enthusiasm and her outreach to the courts. So please join me in warmly welcoming a woman who, throughout her professional career, has made significant contributions in all areas of child welfare practice to the well-being of vulnerable children. (Applause)
Joan Ohl
Thank you, Emily, for that really warm introduction. I’m pleased to be here today and to have an opportunity to address this group again, and it’s a wonderful day. Maybe it’s a national day of mourning, but I got an email from a colleague and she said, “You just wouldn’t believe the number of vehicles with Virginia Tech flags, people dressed in maroon and orange all over, and she said it just brought tears to her eyes. It is a time of healing across the country and, in addition, the sun is out here today for the second day in row and that’s a good sign! I see here assembled today a leading group of researchers, administrators, and leaders from professional organizations across the country. Over the years, all of you have played a distinct, important role within the court and child welfare reform, and I thank you for your continued devotion to this field and to the work that you do on behalf of America’s children and families.