The MJCF-Coalition
P.O Box 8744 Denver
Co 80210
info@mjcfcoalition.com
For Release:
Thursday, September 7, 10:30am
Creating a supportive and healing community for children,
parents, and kinship of those affected by system involvement. This includes
therapeutic support groups, emergency
financial assistance for young adults that have “aged out” of the foster system
(including food, clothes and rent), and legal representation for extended
family members fighting “child welfare”
agencies to keep their family members
placed with them, and not adopted by strangers.
Decades of research has proven that the Child Welfare System continues to create more harm in leading to not only the death of a family units by imposing the termination of parental rights, but also undermining entire communities and creating generational trauma. The MJCF:Coalition is asking the State of Colorado to END (what amounts to) Legal Child Trafficking , and the destruction of Black , Brown , Indigenous, and Impoverished communities by policing vulnerable populations and criminalizing poverty.
The report released today by the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform confirms that, bad as these problems are nationwide, often Colorado is worse. Colorado uses the worst form of foster care, group homes and residential treatment at a rate above the national average, uses the least harmful form of placement, kinship foster care, at a rate below the national average, and holds Black children in foster care at a rate nearly triple their rate in the general child population in Colorado.
The MJCF: Coalition endorse the report’s call for real change, including abolishing mandatory reporting, replacing anonymous reporting with confidential reporting, expanding high-quality family defense to all families who need it including kinship family members. Phasing out residential treatment and banning the use of “predictive analytics” algorithms in “child welfare” – algorithms that have been shown to be racially biased and which reportedly are under investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice for discrimination against the disabled.
