The nonprofit is credited with pushing for changes that helped to steer the precipitous drop in the number of children in city foster care, now at about 9,000 from about 50,000 in the early 1990s.
Parents staged protests and made their presence felt at hearings in Albany and at City Hall. Two of the group’s proposals were approved this year by the New York state Legislature. And two former employees now hold key positions in the Administration for Children’s Services, the city’s child welfare agency.
But now the group is on the brink of collapse.
The New York City Council declined to fund the nonprofit this year. A city investigation is looking into the group’s expenditures, including a trip to Fiji taken by the former acting executive director, Ayo Haynes, to see motivational speaker Tony Robbins.
Board members say the nonprofit, once heralded as a national model, is regrouping; former employees say it is only a few thousand dollars away from disappearing altogether.
The collapse of the organization has sparked a larger discussion and an examination of race, gender and class within the close-knit world of child welfare agencies.
It also underscored how difficult it can be to maintain continuity, let alone accomplish growth, in a group in which parents with little to no managerial experience were entrusted with making policy decisions and had to collaborate with the larger child welfare universe.
At the heart of the group’s demise were internal disputes about the nonprofit’s mission and how best to achieve it. The tension peaked in August 2018, when Haynes changed the locks at the office in Harlem and prepared a letter to employees to let them know they would be furloughed.
Joyce McMillan, then the director of programming, showed up on a Sunday and got a locksmith to let her in. After McMillan called Haynes from inside the office, Haynes notified police. McMillan said she was frightened by the experience. She soon resigned.
“I’m not sorry they are closing,” said McMillan, 53. “I will deliver the eulogy at their funeral.”
The nonprofit’s origins began in 1994, when David Tobis, then the executive director of the Child Welfare Fund, decided to try to increase parental involvement in the child welfare system.
With the financial help of a wealthy friend who wanted to remain anonymous, Tobis helped to create the Child Welfare Organizing Project. Recruiting parents was, at first, slow going, said Terry Mizrahi, a professor of social work at Hunter College, who was asked by Tobis to find parents.
But the climate changed drastically in November 1995, after the horrendous case of Elisa Izquierdo, a 6-year-old girl killed by her mother; child welfare workers had failed to intervene despite repeated reports of severe beatings. Suddenly, low-income parents were given more scrutiny, and there was a rise in the number of children placed in foster care.
The nonprofit organizers held a child welfare summit in Harlem in January 1996, on a day when snow blanketed the city. Parents nonetheless packed the venue.
“Three hundred people on a snowy — a blizzard — day,” Mizrahi said. “That was really the start of knowing there was a constituency for us.”
Through their advocacy to keep families together, the group “proved to the child welfare community that parents not only could be heard but they could organize to bring about a coherent message,” said Jeremy Kohomban, the former treasurer of the nonprofit’s board and executive director of the Children’s Village, a foster care agency in Westchester County.
The nonprofit initially tapped activists like Mabel Paulino, whose family had been affected by child welfare, to take the helm, Mizrahi said. Then the organization turned to Michael Arsham, then a 40-something social worker. Arsham, who would go on to serve as executive director for 15 years, said the group was at its best when it acted as a friendly foe of the city Administration for Children’s Services.
“Not just to stand outside their house and throw rocks at them, but to be at the table,” he said.
Arsham left the nonprofit in 2013 to join the city child welfare agency as director of the Office of Advocacy, which serves as a sort of ombudsman fielding concerns and complaints.
With his departure, there was an opportunity to reset the nonprofit as a parent-led organization, and the board hired Sandra Killett, 57, who was the board’s chairwoman and a parent advocate at Children’s Village.
Killett stood apart from her predecessors; she had a long personal history with the city’s child welfare system: Her sons had been removed from her care years earlier. She is also black; Tobis, Arsham and Mizrahi are white.
In New York City, black children make up about 23% of the child population but more than 53% of the children in foster care. Still, the power structure remains mostly white and male. Four of the six commissioners who have led the Administration for Children’s Services since it was created in 1996 have been white men. Few women or people of color lead the foster care agencies with the largest contracts in the city.
The power imbalance was one more strain for women who were already going through the worst periods of their lives, former employees said.
“There were these women of color and all of these men with so-called stature,” Killett said. “The women would do what the men said. I had to tell them, ‘Don’t tell me he knows better. No, you’re the expert.’”
But she said she got pushback when she wanted parents to be more aggressive with the city. “They thought I would come in and fall in line,” she said, adding later, “I started thinking this is not for me. Every day I wanted to quit.”
The nonprofit lost a bid for a city contract, beginning a downward financial spiral. The board fired Killett in 2016.
“I’m not sure she got enough training or accepted enough advice,” Mizrahi said.
The organization once again had to reshuffle, and McMillan, a longtime parent volunteer, became director of programming. Eventually, Haynes, a board chairwoman and a mentor to McMillan’s adult daughter, became acting executive director.
Haynes, a real estate broker and an actress, was an adoptive parent and had a master’s degree in business administration. “I was just coming from a place of someone who wanted to help,” Haynes, 51, said.
In some ways, Haynes was an unusual choice. She had no experience in child welfare, professionally or personally. And some of her ideas to boost morale raised concerns.
In 2017, she took the staff to Newark, New Jersey, see Robbins, the motivational speaker, in a session that cost the group about $2,600. She also took a trip to Fiji to see Robbins, for additional training for herself.
“It was team building,” Haynes said, adding she had accidentally used the group’s credit card instead of her own to pay for the Fiji trip. “The cards look incredibly the same.”
Records show that she repaid $2,134 for her overseas trip.
Haynes described an organization that could turn parents’ personal trauma into tangible gains in child welfare. She said McMillan, who is facing accusations that she harassed other employees, had “good ideas about policy.”
But she said that carrying that pain could also become a burden. The most effective parents are able to build some distance between their personal experiences and their professional lives, she said.
“They’ve worked through their trauma. They’ve had therapy. They don’t explode,” Haynes said.
McMillan and Killett are now working as child welfare consultants; Haynes is a broker with Halstead Manhattan.
The nonprofit is exploring merging with another group, Mizrahi said. But with the group sidelined for now, two bills passed by the Legislature earlier this year are in danger of dying if Gov. Andrew Cuomo does not sign them.
Tobis, 75, who wrote a book about the nonprofit’s influence called “From Pariahs to Partners,” allowed that perhaps the group had run its course.
“Movements start, they rise, they have influence, and then they abate,” he said. “Parents are parents. They are not administrators.”
Killett said parents are capable of both, but she said that leaders of child welfare agencies should not confuse a need for support with a relinquishing of autonomy. “You don’t have to follow their lead,” she said.
This article originally appeared in
.