CENTER FOR FAMILY REPRESENTATION

Programs: Interdisciplinary family defense teams: our mission is to help families raise their children safely and prevent or minimize the time any child spends in foster care. We defend 3000 parents annually and have defended nearly 8000 parents since 2002, against charges of neglect or abuse in manhattan and queens family courts. Our successful model combines an attorney, a social worker, and a parent advocate- a trained professional with first-hand experience of losing their children to foster care and reunification with their family. By combining legal and social work advocacy with parent mentoring, we consistently keep half our clients' children out of care and significantly reduce foster care stays. We save millions in tax dollars and more importantly permit children to grow up in their own families.

home for good: cfr families often face several challenges in addition to a family court case and often need assistance in the areas of housing (to prevent eviction and obtain stable housing), immigration (to achieve legal status and access culturally competent services), public benefits (to secure and sustain important benefits like medicaid), and in criminal court (to defend allegations that are related to their family court case). Challenges in any of these areas can lead children to enter, remain in, or re-enter foster care. Our home for good initiative gives families an efficient one-stop solution to provide them with needed advocacy in these other areas and so keep their families stable. Our civil legal services team, immigration team, and criminal defense team have already helped over 500 families keep their children home for good.

training, technical assistance, and policy: annually cfr provides training and ta to more than 500 professionals across the country, including judges, on our approach to advocacy for and support of impoverished families facing foster care and related legal challenges. To date, we have worked with over 10,000 practitioners in 20 states, who hope to replicate some or all of our nationally recognized interdisciplinary cornerstone advocacy model. Cfr senior staff regularly present at national conferences and sit on advisory boards and work groups directed toward legislative and policy reform to promote the dignity, opportunity, and preservation of indigent families.