Community Possibilities
Community Possibilities
Transforming Child Welfare Through Preventative Legal Advocacy: Meet Emilie Cook
Preventative legal advocacy is reshaping the future of child welfare, and Emily Cook is at the forefront. As a Senior Staff Attorney at the Barton Child Law and Policy Center, Emilie Cook shares her journey from traditional legal practice to becoming a champion for systemic change. This episode explores how neglect, often rooted in poverty, not abuse, constitutes a significant issue within the child welfare system. We unpack the racial disparities faced by marginalized communities and how preventive measures can address these injustices by offering legal support early on, tackling social determinants of health, and redefining systemic approaches for a more equitable future.
We discuss the effectiveness of the current child welfare system, highlighting the unnecessary trauma caused by child-parent separations. Emily shares insights into the barriers families face, such as housing and resource instability, that can perpetuate involvement in the system. Our discussion is a call to action for community and nonprofit leaders to embrace community-based solutions, fostering resilience and stability rather than perpetuating cycles of trauma and poverty. Emilie's work in Georgia and around the country exemplifies the power of collaboration, as she builds networks to advance preventative advocacy and support families before they reach crisis points.
Emilie's transformative work isn't just theoretical; it's a practical approach to reimagining support systems that serve families better. We explore her efforts in creating a learning cohort dedicated to preventive legal advocacy and discuss the importance of evaluating program outcomes to secure sustainable funding. With a focus on effectiveness, Emily's initiatives demonstrate how legal interventions can address systemic issues like housing instability, proving that change is not only necessary but also achievable. Join us for an episode rich with insights and strategies that challenge the status quo and advocate for a more just and supportive child welfare system.
Guest Bio
Emilie Cook is Senior Staff Attorney at the Barton Child Law & Policy Center at Emory University School of Law in Atlanta, Georgia, where she works on projects to promote and protect the legal interests of children involved with the child welfare, juvenile court, and juvenile justice systems. Through her work in the preventive legal advocacy space, Emilie works with interdisciplinary legal teams and advocates across the country to promote and support the provision of high-quality legal advocacy and upstream support services designed to address the
social determinants of health and protect against the effects of poverty, systemic racism, and other forms of discriminatio
Like what you heard? Please like and share wherever you get your podcasts!
Connect with Ann: Community Evaluation Solutions
How Ann can help:
· Support the evaluation capacity of your coalition or community-based organization.
· Help you create a strategic plan that doesn’t stress you and your group out, doesn’t take all year to design, and is actionable.
· Engage your group in equitable discussions about difficult conversations.
· Facilitate a workshop to plan for action and get your group moving.
· Create a workshop that energizes and excites your group for action.
· Speak at your conference or event.
Have a question or want to know more? Book a call with Ann .
Be sure and check out our updated resource page! Let us know what was helpful.
Music by Zach Price: Zachpricet@gmail.com
Hi everybody. I have a question for you before we start the show. Have you ever heard of preventative legal advocacy? Well, I hadn't either, until a few months ago when I met our guest at a statewide conference on child abuse prevention. So EmilyE Cook joins me today. So Emil Cook joins me today. She is the Senior Staff Attorney at the Barton Child Law and Policy Center at Emory University School of Law in Atlanta, Georgia. Emily works on projects here in Georgia, but all across the country to promote and protect the legal interests of children.
Ann Price:Through her work in the preventative legal advocacy space, Emilie works with interdisciplinary legal teams and advocates across the country to promote and support the provision of high-quality legal advocacy and upstream support services to these children and their families. And you know, here, on Community Possibilities, we are all about upstream support. What is that? That really means working on those social determinants of health, things like poverty, systemic racism and other forms of discrimination and oppression that harm families and lead to unnecessary child welfare system involvement.
Ann Price:I am so excited to have Emilie on the show. I know you are going to learn something new. Be sure, and give me a shout out. Let me know what you learned. Let me know, do you have preventative legal advocacy in your community and be sure and connect with Emilie. And one last thing folks, as always, be sure and like and share the episode with someone that you feel like could learn from the episode. All right, let's get started. Hi, everybody, Welcome back to Community Possibilities. So joining us today from Fort Collins, which is not where you are from but where you went to school, is Emilie Cook.
Emilie Cook:Hi, such a pleasure to be here. Thank you.
Ann Price:Yeah, welcome Emilie. So thank you so much for coming on the podcast. We were just kind of chit-chatting before I hit record and I was remembering that we just met a few weeks ago for the first time at the Prevent Child Abuse Conference and you did a session and I'd never heard of this kind of work. So I am super excited to talk to you about it and have our listener and most of our listeners, just so you know, are community coalition leaders, community nonprofit leaders, so folks who are really embedded in communities. But before we get into all that, why don't you just start by telling us a little bit about how you came to be who you are?
Emilie Cook:All right. Well, I feel like that's a long and winding story. So the work I do now? I'm a senior staff attorney with the Barton Center, which is part of Emory University. So I am based out of Atlanta, though I am taking a little four-way into Colorado this week. I was here for the APHSA conference and that has been great, but I was presenting for that.
Emilie Cook:But how did I come to this? My background I started with the Barton Center as a preventive legal advocacy fellow, so I actually took a position researching the type of programs that I'm going to talk about today and programs in the pre-petition what we consider the pre-petition representation space. That fellowship was sort of born out of a national collective of sort of thought leaders in the space and they decided that they really needed somebody who could dedicate themselves to that work. And I was sort of a non-traditional fellow because I came out of 10 years, as I already had 10 years as an attorney, and I spent about seven of that in private practice doing parent and child representation dependency work on a contract in Baldwin County, that area of Georgia, so pretty rural, a couple hours outside of Atlanta, that's where I live. And yeah, I did that, plus some probate work and other things, but that was the work that I really enjoyed that I was doing in that dependency space. But eventually I had a contract as the circuit guardian ad litem and I had a tremendous caseload in doing that and that had really become the predominant focus of my practice and was where all my time was being spent.
Emilie Cook:And, frankly, I began to burn out and I got very frustrated with the system and sort of what we were not able to do for families and I made the decision that I would wind down my practice and make a switch and I wanted to get on the system side and learn more about kind of the policy pieces and how the sausage was made, so to speak, right and how we got to where, what I was experiencing on the ground and working with families and the decisions that went into that.
Emilie Cook:So I think it was very fortuitous and serendipitous that this position became available around that same time and when I saw it I felt like that was like it was designed for me.
Emilie Cook:It was where I wanted to be and what I wanted to be focusing on and I frankly had to like Google preventive legalizing to see when I saw the position and I thought what is this? And as I read more about it, I got really excited because I thought it was addressing exactly the shortcomings of the system as I saw them and as I experienced them in my work. So, yeah, that's how I got to Barton and I did that fellowship for two years. That was a two-year contract and then my executive director, melissa Carter, was kind enough to give me the opportunity to stay on in a senior staff attorney position and I am fortunate in that, while my work does focus some more so now on Georgia, I still get to do this work with the cohort, which I'll talk about, but still supporting efforts in the preventive legal advocacy and pre-petition space, which is why I was there presenting when we met at the recent conference.
Ann Price:Yeah, and I have a similar signature story. I thought I wanted to be a clinician and I did that for a number of years and kind of like you got really burnt out. Didn't quite make sense to me that why can't we prevent all of these like mental health issues and substance abuse struggles that people have and I was mainly working with adolescents ahead of the game, right? You know? Why can't we get ahead of that before people are struggling? And it sounds like you kind of had a similar experience.
Ann Price:Yeah, I wanted to talk to you because people who know me know that families and kids engaged or involved or tangled in the foster care system that might be a better word is just near and dear to my heart. So when I heard about or heard your talk on preventive legal advocacy and what is this thing, what is this thing? So do you want to say anything more about the Barton Child Law and Policy Center at Emory Love, emory, great place. I don't know if you want to say more about that work or if you're ready just to kind of dive in into the PLA.
Emilie Cook:Yeah, I could just note for those that aren't familiar with the center. So our mission is on promoting and protecting the legal rights and interests of children, and that would be children that are involved primarily in anything dealing with juvenile court. So both the child welfare side and the youth justice system, and that's directed by Emory Law faculty. We have clinics, so we have students that on the criminal justice side work and represent children in cases on the DJJ side, and then we have the policy and legislative clinics on the child welfare side, so our students get involved in the legislative process, involved in sort of the policy design and implementation area. So it's exciting. I love the work that we do. And then we work on a number of different kind of projects nationally, this preventive legal advocacy and pre-petition space being one of them.
Ann Price:Yeah, I appreciate you sharing that background for those folks who don't know. And I kind of want to start now digging into your area and the quote that you shared. Oh my gosh, that has just stayed with me. I got to share it with everybody because this has been a topic among some of my colleagues like can we really measure systems change? It's always a challenge in community Like what is systems change? But there've been some folks in my circle who feel like, yeah, we can't even measure that. That's just kind of a thing that you know happened. But I think PLA is a great example of systems change. But the quote you shared is every system is designed to get the results it gets, and it's attributed to Dr W Edwards Deming, so that really just hit me to the core Every system is designed to get the results it gets. Can you talk a little bit about what this quote means to you?
Emilie Cook:Yeah, it sounds simple, but there's a lot to unpack there, right? I love beginning my presentations with that because I think it's a call. I hope in a way it's a call to action. I think the idea is is, as we sit around and I think we talked about this before but as we sit around and talk about systems and the experience of families enveloped in those systems, I think we have to acknowledge that we have designed it to get the results we're getting. That's the reality right.
Emilie Cook:The design is part of the issue there, and so I like to start with that, and then I go into a discussion of the outcomes that we do have and the data and statistics that we do have in the child welfare space, and my hope there is to challenge people to say, okay, so if we want to address these outcomes, these issues that we're seeing, we have to look at system design right.
Emilie Cook:We have to acknowledge that we got here with intention. There's a lot of time and energy that is put into designing the system and what's it going to look like, and there's a lot of good thought there. But the reality is, if we are having poor outcomes, then we need to rethink the design, and that's what I'm always sort of, that is, in space of preventive legal advocacy, is approaching a re-envisioning of what it means to support families and to serve families and to promote well-being within our communities and build community resilience, and it is different. So that is always my sort of call to action, challenge to where we're starting from yeah, exactly, and some of those outcomes that we see.
Ann Price:You would probably know this number better than I would, but I think at any given moment there are about 13,000 kids in foster care in Georgia, something like that, in and out of around that number, if I'm correct.
Emilie Cook:That sounds about right. I know it's. I think we're around 600,000 nationally, like coming in contact across the board. So yeah, the national statistic is shocking.
Ann Price:So that is an outcome all in itself, just that number and the fact that it seems to go up, but it certainly doesn't go down, and the idea or the assumption right. So systems are built on assumptions. So we have made an assumption that most families have been referred to the child welfare system because of abuse. So can you speak to that assumption for a moment?
Emilie Cook:Yeah, I mean I'll start off the bat with that's a flawed assumption. I think, as anyone who works in the child welfare system knows, that that's not actually the case. But that is the common understanding, right? I think? If you ask most people off the street their impression of families that are involved in child welfare or have child protective services cases, they think abuse. And the reality is and this differs a lot between from state to state, but I think nationally we're still upwards of 60% of cases are neglect. They are not physical abuse cases, they are not sexual abuse cases. They stem from neglect and so we have to dig in.
Emilie Cook:And of course, neglect is defined differently across jurisdictions, but broadly speaking, neglect is usually a conflation of issues that stem from poverty. I mean, that's what we're talking about, right. Lack of resources, poverty I mean that's what we're talking about, right. Lack of resources, often housing food, just income, insecurity broadly. So yeah, I think that fundamental. I think if more people were aware of this distinction between neglect and abuse, that's sort of step one in changing some perspectives on the child welfare system generally.
Ann Price:So the system is designed to do what it is designed to do. What kind of disparities result because of that design?
Emilie Cook:Well, I think, in theory, the system is designed to protect children, right. That's the idea. But the way in which we do that is interventions right, interventions into families, and our most common historically intervention has been separation right, so that in and of itself that's kind of the starting place. The idea has always been that we intervene and we separate and then we begin to deal with the issues. And I'm sorry, what was I?
Ann Price:I feel like just talking about, like the disparities in the system right Our disparities who gets, for example, who has a case open. Somebody calls and makes a referral like who does that happen to? Versus right? Who actually gets separated.
Emilie Cook:Yeah, we see tremendous racial disparity and of course it differs different levels of that across jurisdictions, but tremendous racial disparity as to what happens next, right, when that call is made, we know that Black and Brown and Indigenous families tend to be separated at much higher rates.
Emilie Cook:Cases involving those families tend to be substantiated at higher rates than ones dealing with white children, and that exists and stems across the board. It doesn't matter what jurisdiction you're in, you tend to see that disparity. Now, often people point to that and they say, well, okay, but that's because of a myriad of factors. Right, it's not necessarily racially motivated, and I understand that, but I think it's part and parcel of stemming from issues dealing with poverty. Right, we have, we know that traditionally we have massive portions of the population that are in underserved communities, that have lack of access to resources, and it is because of that and the conflation of that with neglect is why we see, plus other issues of racial bias, right, and discrimination. But all of that kind of is entangled together and results in this, this disparity across the board so that I think that's where pla comes in right.
Ann Price:The preventative legal advocacy comes in to kind of address some of those disparities. So why don't we dig in? Why don't we start by just like a definition and then go from there?
Emilie Cook:Yeah, sure. So when we're talking about preventive legal advocacy, we are talking about upstream civil legal advocacy targeting social determinants of health right and looking to provide for family stability by addressing those issues that we know commonly lead to child welfare system involvement. And then, while we're on the language front, that is pre-petition. Representation is a part of that. I sort of think of it as a subset of preventive legal advocacy and that is again upstream civil legal representation. That is again upstream civil legal representation. But that is where that legal representation intervenes at the time of sort of initial contact with the child welfare system or the first call to CPS is ideally. And that facet of preventive legal advocacy is targeting basically CPS investigation defense, so providing representation at that time of that first contact with the state.
Emilie Cook:As I talk about preventive legal advocacy and pre-petition, I think it's important for listeners to understand that traditionally, across nearly every state, parents will have a call, they will undergo an investigation, they may work with the agency for months, with the agency trying to stabilize them before court intervention. But it is only at the time of petition filing. The time that there's actually a court case filed is the first moment that that family may have access to counsel right, access to an attorney to provide legal guidance or advice or even begin to untangle the issues that have led them into the court. And that was one of the things that was very frustrating to me as a practitioner was that I walk into court in the morning and there may be four new cases on the calendar. I am, that morning, assigned to those cases. Maybe my client is out in the hallway. I have four minutes to go talk to them before we go into a preliminary hearing. There is absolutely no way for me to defend that case right. I have had no time to prepare, no time to get a handle on what's actually happening.
Emilie Cook:Usually my only insight into the circumstances comes from the caseworker. That is not a good situation. That's not how you provide good legal representation and, more importantly, that's not if housing was one of the issues that led us here, if drug use was one of the issues. We have lost so much time to assist with any of that right. We are now at this critical, acute family separation phase and the question I think that preventive legal advocacy presents is what if we were there sooner? Right? I think attorneys who represent parents have. I'm sure. I think all of us have had those cases where we think, man, if I had been involved two, three weeks earlier, you know, a month ago, we could have done something about this. We could have offered the guidance, we could have held some hands and alleviated some of the fear and helped this person navigate all of this. And so that's really the work of preventive legal advocacy. Is, what can we do differently further upstream so that we don't get to this critical point where there needs to be a removal?
Ann Price:Yeah, because I'm imagining on the state side they had more than four minutes to prepare.
Emilie Cook:Yeah, absolutely. In most cases they've had months, right, they've been working with this family and, if we best case scenario, the caseworker which isn't usually the case, but let's say the caseworker has a reasonable load and time to spend and has spent hours interviewing and talking to people and trying to get a handle on the situation and truly preparing a case against the parent. And I'm not saying that they're always coming from that, but that's the reality. In a court situation, this is a case that the state is going to prosecute, right? So, yeah, I mean you are walking in the deck is stacked against the family and even those of us that are there to represent that family. Our system isn't set up for meaningful, robust representation. It's just not the reality because of how we're appointed and when we're appointed and how that all plays out. And that stems from some biases, right, longstanding embedded notions, again, that the parents that are there have done something wrong. Right, that they are bad parents, they come from abuse, and so we don't prioritize robust defense. But all of that, whatever your views are on that, the reality is is there is a lot that can be done for families.
Emilie Cook:I often think with poverty, it's a snowball effect, right, our families don't experience one problem at a time. It is usually maybe it's. The loss of a job means that you then lose transportation. Now the kids aren't getting to school reliably, right. Now you're like running into child care issues and then maybe benefits get cut off. And it's just this one thing after another and at various points in that there is an opportunity to come in and deal with the triggering issues so that we don't get to the point that the kids were left alone for three hours and somebody turned on the stove. You know we don't have to the point that the kids were left alone for three hours and somebody turned on the stove. You know we don't have to get there if we can provide some support and assistance early on. Right.
Ann Price:Yeah, and the we in the sentence a few sentences ago when you said if we could intervene earlier, not just the side that is defending the parent, but the all of the we right, well, I think of you know the state represent that would be. Is that the DA on the other side?
Emilie Cook:I don't know what the In Georgia it's a SAG, so it's a special appointed attorney general, an attorney that has a contract with the state to represent the state in these cases.
Ann Price:That's that's a very fancy term, right, so that you know the school social worker, the, you know pediatricians, right, Like all of the possible we's if you think about, like a system of care or a wraparound situation where it's not just you being the parent representative, that is the we, it's everybody. What can we as a community do to wrap around these families, to provide that you know, that real support that they need?
Emilie Cook:Yeah, and that's an important point. So when we talk about I haven't really gotten into kind of the hallmarks of preventive legal advocacy, but the first one is multidisciplinary representation. So what I mean by that is traditionally preventive legal advocacy teams are comprised of an attorney, a social worker and like a peer partner with lived experience. So and successful preventive legal advocacy requires community partnerships, and so it really is. It's not like traditional law. Usually, when a client comes into my office, I don't want to know all about their life, I want to know about the legal thing that we need to address and I want to know what you want in your contract and I want to get it done. That is not what preventive legal advocacy is. It is taking a holistic approach to family's needs. And so, yeah, when I talk about we, I think in theory we try to put funding and resources into early interventions and sort of traditional models of family support.
Emilie Cook:But by and large, the vast majority of funding in this space flows through our state agencies. It flows through the department, through DFACS in Georgia's case, and so they have the purse strings, georgia's case and so they have the purse strings, and and that's. There's nothing wrong with that, except that the the end of that road, the end of that agency involvement, is this resort to foster care and family separation and all of this. So what we've done is we've lost the ability to like focus on building community resilience. All the money goes through the agency, so the interventions tend to come from the agency.
Emilie Cook:The agency has a perspective, you know they represent one perspective and one sort of method of approach, and they have contracts with service providers and they put in referrals. But that's the system, right, you're sucked into that. And what we're seeking to do with preventive legal advocacy is to say you can have access to that sort of holistic support outside. What if we unstrap that from the system and we say you don't have to get sucked into it to have access to the kinds of things that you might get, best case as part of a case plan, right, or as part of a safety plan? Or the state spends a lot of time telling families what they need. What if we listen to families and say, hey, what if we ask them what do you need? Right? And we try to do that in a way that is proactive, up front, before you have to rely on the traditional child welfare system to facilitate any of that support welfare system to facilitate any of that support.
Ann Price:Yeah, that makes me think about some of the examples that you gave in your session. I'm wondering if you could share one of those briefly so people can really get an idea of what PLA really looks like in action and how that difference from it's different than social work, because you actually are using your legal expertise.
Emilie Cook:Yeah, I think I'll have to figure out how to do this in a more abbreviated fashion, but I think one of the examples.
Ann Price:It was such a good story. You told a couple of good ones.
Emilie Cook:You pick. Yeah, one of our programs tells a great story about one of their client families. This was a mom with three kids and one of the children had pretty severe autism. This was English, was the family's second language, so you know. They were living in an apartment and it was small single parent home and what was happening? They got involved with CPS because we think the school probably made the report.
Emilie Cook:Medical providers in schools, just broadly, so everybody knows, tend to be your vast majority of reports nationally come from medical providers in schools. So what was happening is due to behaviors which really weren't being addressed appropriately under an IEP within the school. The school was constantly sort of sending the child home right and mom was having a really hard time without the support. There weren't good therapeutic services. The physician had sort of dropped the ball on their obligations. The school wasn't doing what they were supposed to do Because the child was always being sent home. Mom had lost her job.
Emilie Cook:A report was made and when the CPS investigator came out they essentially determined that the home was just very chaotic, that it was in a messy condition. There was food on the wall, they just felt like it was hectic and chaotic and out of control and they hadn't made the decision to remove yet. But they were headed in that direction and what ended up happening here is a referral was made. So there's a system in place with this particular program where the agency can make referrals. And so the agency made a referral to the preventive legal advocacy team and the social worker and the peer partner came out and met with mom and actually spent a couple of hours in the home and really started to untangle like what's going on, what supports are needed, and what they found is okay, we need a referral for education law, right, we need to whip the school into shape on this front, because if the school was doing what they're obligated under the law to do, we wouldn't have these situations where he's being sent home all the time. And they said we need some Medicaid advocacy here. There's some Medicaid systems in place that should be providing differently for this child's special needs. So they got on the ball with that.
Emilie Cook:They sat and held mom's hand through making those phone calls and sort of coached her in how to advocate for her son effectively, informed her of her rights, right, and they started reframing the narrative to the agency. One of the big things that they kept harping on was the condition, the messiness of the home. I'll note too, the landlord was threatening eviction in this case because of, like, the loud disturbances from the child when he was at home and also with the condition right. So they were working that piece as well, getting some space and breathing room from the landlord. But they just looked at all of these factors and started providing those supports and being present with mom and I was talking about reframing the narrative, one of the things they found in being present, in by being present and being there with mom and being a real support, they were able to learn these things.
Emilie Cook:And they went back to the caseworker and they said hey, did you know? You talked about the messiness of the home. This isn't a lack of effort or not doing what should be done or an inability to care for the kids. This is truly because mom lacks all these other supports, right, all these other safety nets that should be in place. That's why things are chaotic. She's actually going above and beyond. She's actually it's actually very impressive all the things she is able to do, right. It's actually very impressive that she is managing a situation that most of us would find incredibly untenable.
Emilie Cook:And so in reframing that narrative you could see the case notes changed right, the caseworker began to think about it differently, began to look at it differently. And the caseworker didn't walk into that home I don't think with ill intentions, of throwing mom under the bus or what, but we have to understand that we are trained through our own lenses, right, and so there's a specific perspective coming into play when that caseworker walks into the home. And sometimes we miss those details, right, we miss the narrative, we get it wrong. I think that happens a lot in child welfare. We frame things incorrectly. I think there's a tendency to do that and so this preventive legal advocacy team was able to dramatically change things for that family.
Emilie Cook:In the end, mom had learned an incredible amount about self-advocacy skills right, she was able. She became like the bane of that doctor's office existence because she got so skilled at calling and advocating for what was needed and making things happen for her son calling and advocating for what was needed and making things happen for her son. The school changed their approach. With some pressure from the attorney's office, mom finally felt supported and they began kind of building a bench for her, so to speak, of support within her community and all of that was happening outside of service authorizations from the agency.
Emilie Cook:The only thing the agency had put in place on their own in that was actually counseling. They had made a referral for counseling for the not the child with special needs, but one of the other children in the home. They felt like they could use some counseling and so if that case had gone to court, reasonable efforts would have been we met with mom, we put counseling in place for the other child, okay, and so you know, and then the kids get separated and I think about that case kind of heartbreaking because I think about that playing out and I think so. Then the child with special needs ends up, let's say, best case in a good therapeutic foster home and I can just see the narrative would be they begin to thrive, right, we're coming back to court reviews and it's talking about how well they're doing in this therapeutic foster placement because those people are skilled right At how to deliver those services and they're getting all of these referrals from the agency. And all of a sudden it becomes about the children are thriving because mom was failing, and you can see how that case starts sliding towards termination. Right, we miss a few visits don't work out because of transportation or whatever. And now we're talking about how the kids are bonding in their respective homes and it's just this snowball that the reality is is we never address the problems right.
Emilie Cook:We didn't get to the triggers. The trigger was what the school wasn't doing. The trigger was mom having lost her job and could have used some advocacy on the employment. The trigger was the instability and threat of the housing eviction. None of that would be addressed in that case. None of that. We'd be looking specifically at what was needed as far as services for those kids. So, yeah, there's a lot of powerful examples like that of how we do it differently.
Ann Price:Yeah, and in the example you just gave, like I love the idea of reframing. That brings me back to my, you know, my clinical training. But you know you kind of told the fairy tale version of what the story we tell ourselves about. We're doing this for the good of the child and you know so. Surely a foster care situation is a better situation.
Ann Price:But we also know, if you look at the outcomes for kids involved in foster care, they're pretty atrocious, right. Less likely to graduate high school, more likely to end up on the street, less likely to go to college, you know, more likely to get pregnant, all of the things. And then you add up a child who is on the spectrum or has some kind of, you know, disability, whatever it is. They are more likely to I've got to do air quotes here disrupt their placement, right. There's no guarantee that that child, even if it was in a therapeutic foster care situation, would do well. Likely they probably wouldn't do well because they've lost that attachment, that bond, not only with their parents but also with their schoolmates, their siblings, all of the things. So there's also not to be a negative Nellie. But there's another scenario here where it doesn't go well.
Emilie Cook:No, I mean, I think it's putting it lightly to say that it may not go well. The data suggests that. I mean the data suggests that the chances are it will not go well. Right, correct.
Emilie Cook:I mean that's what our outcomes tell us is that it is poor outcomes. We have no excuse anymore to believe that. I think for a long time we didn't consider the trauma of separation. We looked at what we were protecting children from in terms of the neglect or abuse and we thought, as long as we are protecting them against that, we are quote unquote succeeding. Right, the calculation. You cannot ignore the fact that the data definitively tells us that that trauma of separation must be brought into the calculation. We have to consider what that is doing in and of itself when we think about what we're protecting them against. Right, because there's a harm, there's a necessary.
Emilie Cook:We know that it is harmful to remove children from their parents, I don't care what parent it is. We know that that is a traumatic remove children from their parents, I don't care what parent it is. We know that that is a traumatic experience. We don't parents have issues, and it may be even even with really flawed parents. A lot of kids are going to suffer trauma from being separated from them and so maybe that is still appropriate, absolutely. There are circumstances where that is still appropriate, but we have to understand that that trauma exists regardless, right, or even in spite of that, and if we were getting these wonderful outcomes and children were flourishing and succeeding in foster care, I would feel differently. But the statistics show us they are not. I have had cases where the state references my client's former involved the fact that my client was a foster care youth and is suggesting that they are using that as evidence of part of the reason why they lack capacity to parent. That's in the same case where they're asking for custody of their child right Like something is wrong here.
Emilie Cook:If it worked so well, we wouldn't see multi-generational foster care involvement right. We wouldn't see tremendous levels it's above 60% of incarceration right. 60% above general population for former foster youth. We wouldn't see less than average graduation rates, teen pregnancy. We wouldn't have all of these issues if it was working so well and to the same degree.
Emilie Cook:I always felt like it's one thing to bring a family in in the name of supporting them and fixing the family right, to bring them into the system. But what was frustrating to me was we would pull a family in and then I'd be in court and I'd say, okay, so who's got the housing voucher for mom? Who's going to secure the apartment now? Who's going to get housing? Who's going to get her a job? Who's going to provide the transportation? And the agency didn't have those answers. They didn't have those resources. So it's what are we doing if we are sucking people into a system and not giving them solutions? We didn't have those resources. So it's what are we doing if we are sucking people into a system and not giving them solutions? We can't fix the problems that we're bringing them in for we don't have that capacity and we know that bringing them into, it is causing harm. So like shouldn't we maybe reevaluate whether this is the best way to protect kids Right?
Ann Price:And then if I'm not, I might be incorrect in this, so correct me if I'm wrong. But there isn't not true that sometimes families that are involved in foster care are, then there's fees involved with that that they're going to. They might owe some. There's a cost involved for having their child in foster care. Am I wrong about that?
Emilie Cook:No, you're correct. Well, georgia has since changed its laws, so in theory, georgia is no longer so. What you're talking about here is there were child support payments. For a long time, child support would be levied against families whose kids were in care to reimburse the state for part of the cost of care. There has been some news stories on that. Various groups have done an excellent job of sort of highlighting that issue. The law has since changed and I believe that the state is no longer levying those fees once your child is in foster care. But they did not wipe out the back pay that was already in place. So there are still a lot of families across the state that are being required to repay the state for those services, and it certainly is happening nationally still in a number of states, and people are starting to take notice.
Ann Price:Yeah, and you know it's different from state to state, jurisdiction to jurisdiction, I know that. But it's just kind of mind-boggling when you think struggling family separate and let's just make it, let's help you dig that hole a little deeper.
Emilie Cook:It does right Again. And it would be one thing if your child was removed into foster care. You got a case plan and then the state gave you housing and then the state gave you how to work program where you immediately could get employment, if you could solve those issues, if you were fixing that. But instead you're giving parents case plans that make it very hard to hold a job while doing that right, because you have to go to counseling, you have to go to drug treatment, you have all these things, court. I mean I have a lot of clients who are like I can't keep taking off work for court, I'm going to lose my job. How will I ever get my kids back if I lose my job? If I lose my job, I lose my housing.
Emilie Cook:We also have a system where by and large anybody that's in public housing that's usually tied to having children in the home. So I think a lot of people don't realize when your kids are removed, those families mom then loses, mom and dad then lose the housing voucher because they don't have custody of their kids. So they no longer qualify and then we're in a catch 22. You can't get the housing voucher back without custody of your children. The state won't return custody until you have stable housing, right.
Emilie Cook:That happens a lot and delays reunification, and it's those kinds of things where it's like we are we're pretending here, right, we're pretending like we have solutions that we don't have, and it begs the question of what are we doing? And so we say let's stop running it all through the state on this side. Let's get back to like community resilience. We can do this. The community can come together and support within itself. We've also, in a big way, stripped communities of that ability by placing so much emphasis on the state is the protector of children. The state is how we protect children. It's state intervention we have. Well, what about the churches? Right. What about the community organizations? What about our nonprofits? What if they were the response instead of CPS? What would that look like?
Ann Price:Yeah. So what does PLA look like in a community? How prevalent is it? I mean, I think that's part of your job is to kind of, like you know, sound the horn. This is an alternative. We should do this. So let's dig into it a little bit more about. What does that look like? How common it is kind of what, what? What? Tell us your your dream for what this looks like.
Emilie Cook:Well, I'll. I'll start with what it looks like now. There's been tremendous growth over the last couple of years in the preventive legal advocacy space. There were some early programs. I'll say I've got to give a shout out to Vivek Sankaran. He had kind of the first model, which was the Detroit family Clinic and that was back in kind of the early to mid-2000s. They ran a pilot program and they did this sort of upstream support what if we put law practice in as a child welfare prevention method? And from his work and the great writing he did, from that and the study and evaluation they did, we started to see new programs come online and at this point I think I've identified 57 programs across just over 30 states.
Emilie Cook:If I run a cohort, it's really like a learning collective of stakeholders who are interested in this space, who are working to develop and implement new programs. It includes all of those existing programs that I've identified and we come together and sort of study what's working, what's not, what's the experience, what happened here and how is it being done and what's proving effective. And so because of that resource that has really assisted stakeholders in developing new programs and so we have new ones. It's exciting every month, because I do introductions at the beginning of our monthly meetings and I get to put a new dot on the map when I identify a new state with a new program that's coming online and it's been exciting to watch that expansion. So that's where we are and I spend time talking to and providing some assistance to commissions in various states and different committees from the state side, where people are looking at it and saying, hey, we want to get into this, this looks like it's working. What can we do? And I always tell people start small, you know, start with a pilot. That's manageable.
Emilie Cook:And the beautiful thing is these programs all look different. No two programs look the same because they can be very specifically tailored to the need. And in terms of identifying the need, what we're looking at is what are those cases in your community that we can do something about? What are the ones that really didn't have to get there, didn't have to get to court, right? The ones that we can do. An intervention would have changed the narrative, would have changed the landscape for that family. So maybe in some places that's housing, maybe in some it's substance abuse, but figuring out what that big trigger, that turning point, is in a given community and then looking at what resources are available. So, because preventive legal advocacy is so reliant on effective community partnerships, we have to look at like it is harder in rural communities, right, because there's less community partnerships to leverage. But at the same token, a lot of our programs are very skilled in the advocacy space and so they do a great job of creating new resources because they work with families. They identify a need they say if only we had, and then they go out and they advocate to get the thing right, to get the thing that's needed.
Emilie Cook:First Clinic in Washington is a great example of that. They work with mothers who have given birth to substance exposed newborns. They have really succeeded in reshaping the trajectory of those families' cases in their area. It used to be that if you were I want to say they're out of Tacoma, I don't want to misspeak on that, but it used to be that if you were in their area of Washington and you had a substance exposed, you gave birth and tested positive at birth.
Emilie Cook:There was an immediate removal of that infant from that mother's hospital room. That is tragic. We know that that is incredibly harmful to mom and child and thanks to the work of the first clinic. They now put their own safety plans in place and present them to the agency. They've trained doctors on that mandated reporting They've been able to work with. They actually were able. What they found is a lot of a gap was happening where there would be a referral for that mother to go into a rehab facility, right, and what they found is the rehab facility required so many days clean and the hospital was only keeping the parent for like, let's say, 48 hours or whatever. And so there was this gap where there was a release from the hospital before you could get a bed at the rehab facility. And in that gap we're losing a lot of people, right?
Emilie Cook:Because imagine the trauma, you also just had your infant taken from you. Not a great moment for somebody who's struggling with addiction. It's like your lowest point ever.
Ann Price:What do you think is going to happen in that 24 hours? Yeah, add hormones on top of that and all the things that happen. Yeah.
Emilie Cook:So but they, they realized that and they worked with the hospital and they, that was a that was just a hospital policy change and it was possible under Medicaid to provide an X additional time for coverage, and so they were able to set up a system where now the parent can stay in the hospital until that bed is available. That is a simple right, that's an advocacy move. It takes some logistics to sort it out, but what a tremendous difference. And they also were able to find beds so that the baby could go with mom. Huge, right, right, we've just prevented separation. We've made it possible for people to get clean more effectively because we've, like, met them where they are Right. That's a big thing. So, and again, that's looking to the community. That wasn't looking to the state for the solution. It was looking to the rest of us.
Ann Price:So it sounds like, Emily, are you kind of the host of this cohort and bringing all of these great minds together.
Emilie Cook:I am yeah, I do that on behalf of Barton Center, so we host, we're sort of the seat, the home for that cohort Again, the cohort is a learning collective all kinds of stakeholders. We're sort of the seat, the home for that cohort Again. The cohort is a learning collective all kinds of stakeholders. We have judges and court improvement project personnel, just attorneys, guardian ad litems, all across the board, advocates from peer partner support groups and et cetera, et cetera. So anybody is welcome to come and join us and learn about this space and hear what programs are doing we focus on. There's a website which is placohortorg. That's where you can learn more about the cohort. There's a join now button. That is a little finicky so it's best to just reach out to me via email and I can add. I can plug people into the cohort, but that's a great first step. There's a resource library on that page. There is a program map if somebody just wants to sort of see.
Emilie Cook:We don't really have robust preventive legal advocacy in Georgia yet. I am working on that. We have a number of groups across the state that I'm working with. Hopefully I will, in one year's time, be able to say that's very different. We have multiple. Now I'd love to put another new dot on Georgia. Very different we have multiple. Now I'd love to put another new dot on Georgia. But it's a great resource. We do a different. We focus on a different topic that is relevant to this practice area of PLA and pre-petition work. Each month Anybody can jump on those Zoom calls If I just add you to the listserv and then you can kind of be in the loop. So and again, it's to share and understand and the idea is is it's helpful if everybody is not reinventing the wheel each time? By building a network to share the information and resources we have, I think I like to believe we have facilitated much broader access to these types of programs by making that process easier these types of programs by making that process easier.
Ann Price:So is part of what you're doing in the cohort like kind of evaluating your outcomes I know everything, every you know PLA is different Is that part of what you're doing is trying to kind of cull what outcomes you're experiencing? Yeah, so we talk about we certainly talk about outcomes anecdotally and like what programs you're experiencing.
Emilie Cook:Yeah, so we talk about we certainly talk about outcomes anecdotally and like what programs you're seeing. More broadly, though, we do training and discussions on evaluation, how to do that effectively. What kind of metrics we want to track? We spend time looking like we've dug in, we've had sessions and that's through like session-focused topics. Right, we have invited evaluators to come talk to us about best practices.
Emilie Cook:We have dug into legal services LSC, legal Service Corporation, keeps a huge, robust collection of outcomes that they measure. So we borrow in a big way from the existing sort of legal aid legal services frameworks to study that, to see what we can take and how to measure. On our side, evaluation and outcomes are difficult because what everybody really wants when I talk to stakeholders, especially legislators in other states, what they want is data that shows that this program worked with this family and if, but for that legal services intervention, the family would have had a removal and the legal services intervention cost this much and the foster care removal would have cost this much. And here was the state saving. That is very hard, right. We talked about data from the outset of this. You might. I think we started with that right.
Emilie Cook:The reality is, data is useful. It is not perfect. We can't. There are things we can't effectively and efficiently measure. The but-for analysis of these kinds of interventions, I think, is one of those areas that it's very hard to prove that. But we do our best and so we look at okay. So if we can't do that, what can we do and how do we build the narrative and make our case? It's very much a bunch of attorneys a lot of times sitting around thinking how do we make the case for this field right and how do we make it sustainable from a funding, and we've found a lot of success in that. But it's work. Shifting a system is hard. Well, you know.
Ann Price:I always introduce myself that I'm a community psychologist and evaluator, so I had to ask the evaluation question, right, and because I'm a community psychologist, I'm really interested in all these complex like messy things. And no, we cannot tease it out exactly and maybe we can't do an ROI like just yet. And systems change is hard and it's a long game, right, we're not going to, like you know, move a widget and see you know, necessarily like immediate outcomes when you have so many systems that you're trying to change, but I'm quite sure it's possible and necessary.
Emilie Cook:It is. It's doable. We have about half a dozen, I think, evaluations now of programs, pilot projects, and so that's really helpful. Every time like that's gold to me Anytime I can get my hands on a new kind of hot off the press evaluation. It's great because there's such an appetite for that, both in encouraging stakeholders to launch new pilots and, even more importantly, in existing successful pilots getting sustainable funding right. That's what it's reliant on. I feel like it shouldn't be that hard for people. This is where I'm gonna get my soapbox. I feel like it shouldn't be a hard sell to say and you probably heard me say this in the presentation but it is a hell of a lot cheaper to address mom's housing instability issue with the intervention of a demand letter. You know on her behalf and some and a couple of weeks with a pla team, that that is a lot more cost-effective than three kids in foster care for 18 months. I don't feel like we need data to tell us that, but that is the world we are in, right?
Ann Price:Yeah, well, yeah because we had that whole conversation. We know what the outcomes are for the children. We need to talk about outcomes for parents, right, Exacerbated mental health and substance abuse and all those other things. But we know what the outcomes are for kids and we know what the outcomes are for their kids, so you're right, To me like it's a no-brainer. And I got to ask you how much do you love your job?
Emilie Cook:now. I love my job. I absolutely love my job. I can see it in your face. People listening can't see it, but your face is just lit up. I can just tell it feels like mean. I'm incredibly fortunate to be able to do this. It was a strange, pivot and, just like I said, a very serendipitous thing to be in this space, but it is an incredible privilege to get to spend my days working with thoughtful community partners and stakeholders who are committed to envisioning a different way and are looking at how do we make this work.
Emilie Cook:It is hard work. It can be discouraging. It's hard when we have a good program that doesn't get funded for a round two. That's painful, right, Because it feels like a shame, but I do wake up every day and feel like I'm fighting a good fight. I'm contributing and meeting some amazing people along the way and creative people such as yourself, who are doing a good job. To like create platforms for us to think about these things. We need to think about it critically. There's not for a long time, there hasn't been enough questioning of the system is what it is and we might be evaluating it and looking at the outcomes, but why are we not saying how can it be different? How, like you know, and that's where the abolition movement comes in they're saying wipe the board clean right.
Emilie Cook:Throw it all out and let's start over. And I think there's. I understand that. I understand. I can understand that urge and that position, and preventive legal advocacy isn't always aligned with that. But I think it is it's about a re-envisioning right Until it's off the table.
Ann Price:Let's think about how we can alter it. Right, well, that was a great pivot. That brings me to my favorite question when you look to the future, what community possibilities do you see?
Emilie Cook:I would love to see this kind of robust, organized legal advocacy in every community, you know, at least regionally across our state. I would like to see some of the funding shift. I don't think it's always being used effectively on the child welfare kind of court post-court intervention side. I would like to see more to the 501c3s and the little organizations that are doing their niche thing and more network building, you know, plugging them in so that there's this alternative response.
Emilie Cook:I think we put a lot on the state and I'll give it to the agency right, I can sit here and be critical about interventions and when something goes wrong, they're the first to be blamed, right, when a child is injured or something, it's always about where were you? Why didn't you get involved sooner? And at the same time we say get out of families' lives, why are you all up in somebody's business? Right, and I understand that that's a double-edged sword. So we have to.
Emilie Cook:If we want to change that, we have to start placing some of that responsibility for well-being on the shoulders of the rest of the community. The state needs to give us that opportunity, right, but we also have to take responsibility and pick that load up and say we will care for our own. We have this ability. It doesn't always have to be the state that takes coordination and network. That would be. My hope is that we can come together in spaces like this and really think about how do we all come together to do this differently? We can prevent the things that lead to child welfare system involvement. They are very preventable, but I don't think we need the state to do it. We've got to do it ourselves.
Ann Price:Emily, I'm so glad I went to your session. I'm so glad we had the opportunity to get to know each other and I really appreciate you coming on the podcast.
Emilie Cook:I appreciate the opportunity, anne. It's been such a pleasure. What a great platform and I am so glad you were there and asked me to do this, and I'm excited. It's been fun to catch up on your past episodes and hear all of the great things that others have going on, so I hope people will reach out too. If you'd like to learn more, you can make my email address too. Just plug it out there. Everybody emails me.
Ann Price:Oh, perfect, I was just about to ask. I neglected to ask you how can people get in touch with you?
Emilie Cook:Yeah, email's perfect. I would love to chat. I'm always available to do presentations to other groups too. I try to help kind of sell this. You know concept, provide context, so excited about it. Thank you again and it's been great. Yeah, I appreciate it, thank you.
Ann Price:Hi everybody, thank you so much for joining me on today's episode of Community Possibilities. Please like and share the episode. Share it with a community leader you know and love, or just someone who needs a little boost today. If you could take an extra minute or two and leave a review, that would be so helpful. Now I just want to remind you that my course, powerful Evidence Evaluation for Non-Evaluators, is live. We are offering a 50% discount as a pilot. Thank you to the first 10 folks who register for the course.
Ann Price:It is designed for non-profit and community leaders who really want to build the evaluation capacity of their organization and maybe it's just not in the budget to hire an evaluator or a consultant. No worries, this is going to get you started. Your organization is going to learn practical insights and strategies to collect, analyze and interpret and share evidence in ways that's really going to demonstrate the outcomes of your organization. And, of course, we wanted to inform your strategic decision making. Evaluation at its best is all about making the world a better place. It includes seven modules, including one bonus module where I really give you some tips and tricks on how to share data in a compelling way. It includes five plus hours of guided video content and a beautiful 80-page workbook that walks you through, step by step, the evaluation process. Please reach out to me if you have any questions, and thank you so much for enrolling in Powerful Evidence. It is meant just for you, my friend. See you next time. Thank you.