Making Children a Priority

Many national and state organizations advocate for children and youth, but budget and policy setbacks in child and youth services show that advocacy, while important, is not enough when children’s needs run up against more powerful special interests. A necessary companion strategy is to make children and youth a priority during the election cycle, not just after. Children and youth issues are much more likely to gain political attention when office seekers believe that they can gain public approval by supporting pro-children policies. We employ a multi-pronged, non-partisan approach for raise the visibility of children and youth issues in elections.

Office of Strategic Initiatives

The Office of Strategic Initiatives (OSI), focuses on advocacy and public education that creates and influences public policies, programs and systemic improvements to help children and families overcome a variety of life crises including abuse and neglect.

Tennyson Center's Office of Strategic Initiatives (OSI) has been operating since October 2007.  OSI currently focuses efforts in three primary areas:

• Tennyson Center‘s Policy Presence including internal projects, policies that directly impact or serve interests of Tennyson Center such as legislator education, lobbying, public education, and research.
  
• Every Child Matters Colorado Campaign, in which Tennyson Center hosts and directs the Colorado chapter of Every Child Matters, a non-partisan campaign to make kids a political priority locally & nationally by educating and engaging voters and public while simultaneously educating policy makers around children’s issues.
  
• Other community contracts and projects for systemic improvement which promote larger systemic changes and improvements that directly benefit vulnerable children and families in Colorado.

OSI’s Guiding Principles and Considerations for 2010:

1. Colorado’s child welfare system is in a state of crisis, and should be a policy priority for state leaders. 

2. Colorado’s abused and neglected children are falling through the cracks of a fragmented and disjointed system.

3. Low-income children and families are especially vulnerable in Colorado’s current economic climate, and their well-being should be prioritized by policy makers.

4. Despite efforts at systemic improvements, 179 Colorado children lost their lives to child abuse and neglect between 2000 and 2007.

5. There is a significant and quantifiable cost associated with the current preventable failures within the child welfare system.

6.  Until improvements are made, we support an independent Office of the Child’s Ombudsman as well as a crisis call line.

7. We ask the community to step up and join us, as government alone cannot and should not provide all the solutions.

Here’s Why:

According to the 2009 Joint Budget Committee briefing on child welfare,
• In FY 2008-09 Colorado’s 64 counties received about 76,000 reports of child abuse or neglect.
• On average, counties conducted an assessment (investigation) in response to about 1 in 3 reports received. Following an assessment, a county is required to provide necessary and appropriate child welfare services to the child and the family.
• About 22 percent of county assessments result in the county providing child welfare services, which may include in-home support or court-ordered placement in a foster care home or 24-hour child care facility.
• Of the 41,918 children who received child welfare services in FY 2008-09: 19,016 (45.4) percent remained in their own home; 10,560 (25.2 percent) were children who had been adopted out of foster care but whose families continued to receive support from county departments; and 12,342 (29.4 percent) were in foster care.
• Appropriations for child welfare programs for FY 2009-10 ($425.5 million) consist of 51.4 percent General Fund, 31.1 percent federal funds, and 17.5 percent county funds and various cash fund sources.
• In May 2007, the State Audit on Colorado’s foster care system found that 84 % of children in foster care did not receive the expected monthly face-to-face visit from their county caseworker.
• In 2006, the federal government cut 30 billion Medicaid dollars nationally, resulting in major cuts in Colorado’s residential treatment services. This changed the funding structure for these services in Colorado, resulting in a reduction of residential placements. The children who would normally qualify for residential treatment are now being placed in foster care, which is technically a lower level of care. Foster families are not trained to handle children with higher levels of risk and need, thus children are moved through multiple placements more frequently.
• According to a 2007 report from the University of Maryland regarding payments to foster care providers, Colorado would need to increase payments to foster families by 76% to 100% in order to meet the minimum cost of raising a child.

A 2007 report from the Pew Foundation and the Jim Casey Youth Opportunities Initiative documents the challenges former foster youth face once living independently, including the following statistics:

• 1 in 4 will be incarcerated within two years of leaving foster care;
• 1 in 5 will become homeless;
• Approximately 58% will have a high school degree by age 19 (compared with 87% of a national comparison group of non-foster youth); and
• Fewer than 3 percent will receive a college degree (compared with 28% of the general population).

To learn more, visit the following Colorado resources:

Colorado Children's Campaign
Report: Childhood Poverty in Colorado

Colorado Fiscal Policy Institute
Issue Brief: December 2009 Revenue Projections

Stimulus Dollars in Colorado

And you can visit these national resources:

Every Child Matters

National Center for Children in Poverty

The Urban Institute

Children who are abused and neglected don’t care about political parties or funding streams. They don’t have time to wait for more panels and more recommendations that end up on shelves collecting dust.  They don’t want to go to bed afraid and they don’t want to move to yet another foster home. They have one childhood and in too many cases, it’s being lost to child abuse. 

We can do better.