Safe families

Safe Families for Children has served over 40,000 families!

In addition to being an executive coach and consultant, my entire professional life has held a high value of eradicating social isolation.

For over 40 years, I grew professionally as a non-profit leader and a clinical psychologist working in foster care, adoption and group homes. Children needed a home to live in because their family had become caught in the cycles of abuse, homelessness and great despair. The child welfare system was the United States  version of orphanages in the 80’s and 90’s. Foster care has not produced the positive results needed for families in crisis.

These families belong to you and I. For these families are our neighbors.
These are the families that we serve in Safe Families for Children. We serve families who are definitely on the river with inevitable consequences of destruction ahead unless help is given.

With all the heroics of foster parents, the bravery of adoptive parents, excellently trained staff, and gifted social workers, time and time again I witnessed the heart wrenching process that a child’s trauma of losing their parent was unrecoverable. 70% of children in foster care were removed from their families because of issues of neglect that were related to poverty and lack of support systems. Many of those parents DID have capacity to get back on their feet, but were unable to manage the shame of their crisis, and the complicated child welfare system. Through the safe families model, we know that when a volunteer neighbor comes alongside the mom or hosts a child and offers the mom or dad a break, children return home. Families can then stay together at double the rate of when a child goes into foster care.

Historically, in the spirit of protection, our systems separated children from the very people who have the best chance of keeping them safe…their parents. I never met a child or teenager that didn’t want to have their family back.

Professionally it became clear to me that we had to move farther upstream before a family went ​​over the waterfall of abuse, neglect, homelessness and disintegration. We had to find a way to prevent families from losing their children because the alternative was destructive for all.

I like to explain that in our safe family movement, if there is an orphan in our story, the orphan is the young parent, the single mom, or the struggling dad who is out of work, or homeless, or struggling with an addiction…who while in this crisis is unable to provide care and safety for their child. These children have a parent. The problem is that the parent is alone. They are socially isolated and do not have anybody to catch them when they are down.

Who do these families belong to?

I imagine that Safe Families is Orphan Prevention

Did you know that in our country, we have a system called Child Protective services where mandated reporters call when they suspect that a child is being harmed? 70% of the child abuse calls received do not even qualify for state intervention because the child has not YET been abused. It is a tragedy that abuse has to occur before a family qualifies for help.

Where does a family belong who is farther up the river and has not yet gone over the waterfall of abuse to the level of state intervention?

These families belong to you and I. For these families are our neighbors.

These are the families that we serve in Safe Families for Children. We serve families who are definitely on the river with inevitable consequences of destruction ahead unless help is given.

In addition to being a successful executive and a natural entrepreneur I am known for my commitment to helping strengthen families, knowing that strong families will have the greatest impact and most effective change for our communities and for our children. My greatest passion is my commitment to catalyze and engage in collective impact initiatives in our global neighborhoods. I have a passion for taking complicated issues such as child abuse, poverty and homelessness and developing systems of simple, practical strategies of engagement. These strategies always include deep and rich relationship-based models of care.

• Safe Families for Children has served over 40,000 families!
• On average they had a stay under 40 days, but each stay birthed a relationship that remained for years to come
• These are very young families. 75% of the children are under 5 years old, and 50% are babies under 1 year old. And the parents are young as well.
• Parents maintain their full custody and are the ones asking for support.
• With these circles of volunteer support, children reunify with their parent at a 92% return-home rate which is double the reunification rate of foster care.

My own mom was a single mom who had her 4th Child at age 21. Living in poverty, she abused alcohol to survive the days and pills to make it through the night. These were her means of coping. I had a mom. I was not an orphan, but my mom did not have a safety net. It wasn’t till a neighbor offered my Mom a place to stay with reduced rent, as well as a daily friendship, that my Mom began to believe that she could be our Mom. She needed a safe family. Another family believed in her for a little while, until she could learn how to believe in herself, and learn that she was capable of being our Mom.

It is now 55 years later. She experienced her own vintage, original story of Safe Families. She did get on her feet and enjoyed a long, loving marriage, 6 children, 27 grandchildren and 24 great grandchildren.

WE are evidence that her legacy depended on someone moving farther up the river and believing in her before she and her children went over the waterfall into irreparable trauma.

My entire life has been intertwined through this story. Along with being a clinical psychologist, I also developed many well-known child welfare initiatives including Project Independence, START, TFC, Lay Counseling, and Life Options. My life’s purpose is to eradicate social isolation through the healing power of family.

If you would like to join Karen in being a part of this movement consider giving… Consider how you or your organization might want to financially invest in this great movement.