Newsletter
Summer 2025
June 20, 2025
An Anti-Racist Approach to Shrinking New York City’s Child Welfare System and Promoting Black Child, Family, and Community Wellbeing
Welcome to the Narrowing the Front Door newsletter! Here you’ll hear about events, resources, and information.
Recent Accomplishments
Launching an Accountability Council
Establishing an Accountability Council is a key recommendation from our community report. The Accountability Council is envisioned as a community-led group charged to study, report on, recommend, and monitor corrective actions to end the harms inflicted by child protective services and related government agencies; redress past harms; prevent future harm; and facilitate access to necessary and beneficial resources and supports.
We are collaborating with the City’s Commission on Racial Equity’s (CORE) to establish the Council. CORE is an office recently enshrined by a resolution to the City Charter to increase community decision-making and hold government accountable for delivering quality and responsive services that respect families and communities. CORE has the mandate to address racial inequity and the authority to hold City agencies accountable and its board and leadership are independent of City Hall, making it an ideal home for the Accountability Council. Under the leadership of chair and executive director Linda Tigani, we have developed a proposal for a Council that will be homed at CORE and charged with documenting the harms caused by the family regulation system, holding city agencies accountable, and informing city investments and changes in policy and public service delivery.
We presented the model to the community at an event on May 22, 2025 and invited feedback. Some key takeaways: Participants emphasized that real accountability means acknowledging harm, committing to repair, ensuring transparency, and taking concrete action, especially for families impacted by ACS. There was strong support for the Accountability Council to be led by those with lived experience and for the council to have real authority. Overall, the event highlighted a shared vision for shifting power and resources from punitive systems to community-led support and solutions that honor the dignity of impacted families. We will share more information about the application process to serve on the Council in the coming months.
In keeping with the recommendation in our report to divest/invest, ACS has committed funding for Council staff and CORE will contribute towards community engagement costs. We are currently seeking private funding to support the compensation of Council members and additional community engagement expenses.
Proposed Resolution from the City that Acknowledges Harm
We are also collaborating with CORE on a City Council resolution that acknowledges the racism and harms caused by the child welfare system and other government systems in current practice and going back to chattel slavery. Council member Althea Stevens is sponsoring the resolution and introduced the measure to the Council on June 11. The resolution culminates with:
Whereas, It is clear NYC ACS needs a change in its policies and procedures to rectify the harm done to Black and Latinx families and to prevent future harm; and whereas, the first step of healing is to acknowledge the harm that has been done to Black and Latinx families, especially those who are experiencing poverty; now, therefore, be it resolved, that the Council of the City of New York calls upon the City of New York to recognize institutional and systemic racism and generations of harm embedded in today’s child protective services (CPS) systems.
We expect a public hearing to take place later this summer or early fall. The hearing will be an opportunity for individuals to share their testimony and make their voices heard. Stay tuned for more details.
The New York State Legislature recently passed a bill banning anonymous reporting. The new law, if signed by Gov. Hochul, will ban anonymous reporting of child abuse and neglect and require callers to the State Central Register (SCR) to provide their names and contact information. The State Central Register has been used as a weapon to harass and make false reports against families -- by hostile landlords, abusive former partners, and others. Under the new law, persons making reports will be required to provide identifying information, which will be kept confidential, thereby serving as a deterrent for malicious and false reports.
Shalonda Curtis-Hackett, Narrowing The Front Door Committee Member, Lived Experience Expert & Community Outreach Coordinator and Policy Associate, Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem expressed, “Today is a joyful and deeply emotional day. The Legislature has taken a meaningful step toward ending one of the most harmful loopholes in the family policing system. The Anti-Harassment in Reporting Act moves us closer to a system that is just, culturally responsive, and willing to confront its own harm. My family was pulled into this system through an anonymous report—a call that upended our lives. That experience changed everything for me. I joined other families and advocates who refused to let our pain be ignored. We organized, we testified, and we pushed for a day like today. We’re not done. We won’t stop until Governor Hochul signs this bill into law and stands with every family who’s ever been silenced, surveilled, or harmed under the guise of protection.”
The anti-harassment legislation was one of several bills supported by advocates including Family Miranda, Maternal Consent, and Preserving Family Bonds. Joyce McMillan, founder and Executive Director of JMAC for Families and Co-Chair of Narrowing the Front Door has been at the forefront of organizing Black and Latinx parents through the Parent Legislative Action Network (PLAN) which is a statewide coalition of impacted parents, young people, advocates, attorneys, social workers, and academics collaborating to effect systemic change. Through powerful rallies and testimony at public hearings, she continues to lead the charge to protect families from false reports and unnecessary separation while working to ensure that every child remains safe and connected with their parents. “This is a long time coming, this is a protection that every family deserves,” said McMillan.
Propublica reported on the passage of the bill.
The Reckoning-- One year later
NTFD partnered with three social service providers on The Reckoning, a series of events led by social service agencies to examine their role in a system that has harmed families. The lead agencies include Graham Windham, Good Shepherd Services, and New York Foundling.
Graham Windham CEO Kimberly Watson and the other agency leaders have led a brave “reckoning” with the harm that they have caused and are exploring how they can transform their operations to be more supportive of families and communities. The agencies have begun to re-train their staff and examine bias, made changes in the programs and policies, such as making visitation policies more accommodating, and other operational practices. Other agencies have also started to join this conversation and take action. Watson recently marked the one year since the launch of the public Reckoning events with a written statement that included:
“Graham acknowledges and is taking steps to end the harm that we cause or perpetuate as part of the ‘family regulation system.’ In our strategic Vision 2029, we have committed to identify alternatives to foster care that provide helpful help and support families in order to avoid family separation.”
UPDATES
Call to Action: Push Back Against the Backlash
Recently, Narrowing the Front Door put out a Call to Action to address the recent attacks on The Administration for Children Services (ACS) and Commissioner Jess Dannhauser by the New York Post. The Post’s op-ed promoted misinformation about child welfare in NYC and called for more surveillance and removals of Black and Latinx children. Those attacks falsely pit protecting children against providing support to families and calling attention to racial disparities in the system. Narrowing the Front Door and many others, including system leaders, have pushed back against the notion that ensnaring more families in surveillance and disruption is the way to eliminate child abuse. Thank you for joining our call in support of policies that prioritize the safety of children and families and support access to community resources.
What Experts Are Saying:
Can ACS stand up to foster care panic?
Reports
The Center for New York City Affairs annual Watching the Numbers report monitors trends in the child protective system and the latest edition includes six years of data ending with City Fiscal Year 2024. Included in this year’s report is data on CARES (Collaborative Assessment, Response, Engagement, and Support), an alternative investigative approach that ACS adopted in 2013 and that now makes up 22 percent of its caseload.
5 Year Trends: NYC Child Welfare Trends 2019-2024
This 5-Year data report from the NYC Family Policy Project provides an overview of major child welfare indicators from 2019 to 2024—and uses detailed data from 2023 to examine their drivers. The data reflects the direct impact of legislative, policy and practice changes. The data also provides new evidence of the need for further legislative and local action to sustain NYC’s progress in both keeping children safe at home and protected from system overreach.
Reclaiming Safety for Children of Parents with Disabilities
In the report, Reclaiming Safety For Children of Parents With Disabilities, Charisa Smith, Author and Professor of Law at City University of New York (CUNY) School of Law applies an abolitionist framework to examine and challenge traditional ideas of safety and well-being for children of parents living with disabilities. Angela Burton, Attorney and Co. Chair of Narrowing the Front Door and Alan Dettlaff, Scholar, Author, and Abolitionist of UpEnd Movement were editors on an introductory essay to the series, Reclaiming Safety, they committed to using an abolitionist lens to imagine and work toward a world without family policing, where all children and families have the resources they need to be safe and thrive within their homes and communities, and where a government system that tears children from their parents is so inhumane it becomes unimaginable.
The Wound is Still Fresh
On June 3, 2025 the Bronx Defenders released a groundbreaking Report revealing how ACS systematically discriminates against Black and Latine families residing in the Bronx.
Through a series of powerful first-hand accounts from Black and Latine families impacted by ACS, the report shows how ACS’ racist practices have caused deep harm to children, parents, and entire families. It also exposes how ACS routinely disregards its own policies, violates court orders, and over surveills these families and communities. The Bronx Defenders wrote “ACS’s racist practices have done grave and lasting damage to children leading to brutal physical and psychological harm. The report chronicles children being so traumatized as to lose the ability to regulate their bowel movements, suffer bed wetting and sleep disturbances, struggle in school, and are scarred by intense fears of abandonment and loss of self-worth.”
Revealing Family Separation’s Deep, Long-lasting Costs
Courtnie McMillan joins the Center for New York Affairs as a visiting fellow and in this piece she describes her lived experience and agenda for the coming year. This work is deeply personal for Courtnie. From a young age, she experienced firsthand the devastating impact that the family policing system has on Black and Brown families and children. For families like hers, the emotional toll is profound and enduring. She describes the separation, surveillance, and fear as a mark that never fully fades. Her work will focus on mental health impacts, the experiences of both children and parents, and the complexities of family bonds and relationships. See Urban Matters.
Recent Events
Stolen Children’s Month
June 2025 has been declared the first annual Stolen Children’s Month: a time to center and uplift the voices of children STOLEN by the family policing and adoption systems, the ICE detention and deportation machine, and the prison-industrial complex. The observation of Stolen Children’s Month is intended to raise awareness of the trauma experienced by children stolen from their families and the enduring grief of parents forced to live without them. It is also a counterpoint to National Adoption Month which romanticizes and normalizes the forced separation and dismantling of families.
To learn more visit the website, sign the Proclamation, and donate to show your support.
Still Taken: The History of the Separation of Black Children from Their Parents
Thank you for joining Narrowing the Front Door and The Commission on Racial Equity (CORE) on June 18, 2025 for a discussion on the harms to Black children of family separation and to identify ways we can work together to end this crisis. Together we can create a future where Black children are free to live and thrive, with their families.
Our speakers provided vital information and offered an in-depth look at the challenges Black families face due to separation. They traced the historical roots of family policing back to slavery and connected this to the ongoing impact that the family policing system has on Black families and children today.
Town Hall on Establishing An Accountability Council on Child Welfare
Thank you for joining us on May 22, 2025 for an impactful Town Hall focused on the Accountability Council, described earlier in this newsletter. We were grateful to share space with so many of you as we introduced the Council, outlined its purpose and structure, and explored its role and responsibilities.
Stay informed about our work to critically examine and reform New York City's child welfare system
