Joyce McMillan

After a 50-year legal career, Martin Guggenheim's critiques of child welfare have more widespread support than ever as he retires.

JMacForFamilies is soliciting applicants for its spring internship program, which trains promising young people with lived experience in the child welfare system in the skills to help advance themselves and their community.

Thursday marked a raucous day of hearings in New York City, with parents protesting the overreach of the child welfare system.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) vetoed legislation late last week that would have expanded due process safeguards for parents accused of abusing or neglecting their children. The bill would have significantly reduced the time parents’ names must remain on a state database of child abuse and neglect claims.

A statehouse hearing on child welfare last week began with Brooklyn Assembly member Latrice Walker (D) comparing the Trump administration’s family separation policies at the nation’s border to New York’s foster care practices.

At around nine o’clock on a Tuesday morning, two days after giving birth to her second child, Vanessa left a hospital in Queens, New York, and boarded the subway. She was headed to the borough’s courthouse on a mission: to regain custody of her newborn daughter.

Amid tired lawmakers reportedly flinging rubber bands back and forth, New York’s Senate and Assembly passed a major two-pronged reform to the child welfare system before the end of a frenzied 2019 legislative session last week.

New York State lawmakers approved legislation this week that would allow judges to order contact between parents and children, after the court severs the parent’s rights due to child abuse or neglect.

Joyce McMillan, driving force of New York City’s Child Welfare Organizing Project, known as CWOP, resigned from the organization this week. McMillan, who began leading the nonprofit as program director in February 2016 and helped author the foster care task force report released earlier this year for New York City Council, told The Imprint she’ll be opening a for-profit entity called Credible Messenger Consulting.