Mission Statement

New York City Narrowing the Front Door Work Group

Anti-Racist Approach to Shrinking New York City’s Child Welfare System and Promoting Black Child, Family, and Community Wellbeing

(December 2021)


Mission: The New York City Narrowing the Front Door Work Group will critically examine the existing approach to protecting children and strengthening families to identify what is working, reveal what is not, and make recommendations aimed at ending arbitrary, abusive and unwarranted government disruption and destruction of families, establishing effective mechanisms to ensure accountability for past and ongoing harms of the family regulation system, and instituting anti-racist public approaches to repair, heal, preserve, and strengthen Black families in New York City.


WHO: The New York City Narrowing the Front Door Work Group is comprised of youth, parents, and family members directly impacted by New York City’s child welfare system; community activists; lawyers for children and parents; academics; state and local government employees; and leaders in philanthropic and non-profit organizations who are committed to eliminating the destructive impacts of the child welfare system.


WHAT: We have convened to identify and advocate for government and philanthropic investment in family and community strengthening approaches that cultivate and support New York City's children and families' safety, health, well-being and happiness, specifically Black children and families who are disproportionately targeted by the system.


WHY: The child welfare system consists of laws and policies put into practice by government entities and private contractors that regulate private family life on the premise of promoting children’s well-being by protecting them from maltreatment by their parents and caregivers. However, there is increasing recognition that the system operates primarily as a “family policing” or “family regulation” system that disrupts economically disadvantaged families and Black, Brown and Indigenous families through investigation, child removal and/or the threat thereof, and through high levels of prosecution, surveillance, and monitoring by “child protective services” (CPS) and the family courts.


Thousands of families are subject to investigations by CPS and the vast majority are not found to have committed abuse or neglect. Misguided accusations of child maltreatment results in unnecessary involvement with the child welfare system and punitive and destructive impacts with long-standing, traumatizing consequences. This is especially true for Black parents, who are less likely to receive supportive services, more likely to have their children removed, and more likely to be permanently separated from their children.


We assert that investigatory interventions have compounded the stressors of extreme poverty faced by families, saddling parents with quasi-criminal records that limit their access to gainful employment and opportunities decades after claims of abuse or neglect have been resolved. While recent parent-led reforms have successfully challenged and changed some of these policies by raising the standard for an extra-judicial, CPS agency determination of maltreatment and limiting how long some records can operate as a barrier to employment, more work is necessary. Meanwhile, too many families experience a persistent economic struggle to make ends meet while living in places where current and historical racist policies limit access to safe and affordable housing, reliable transportation, excellent schools, green space, well-paid jobs with good benefits, and much more.


The members of the Work Group agree that children’s safety and well-being are enhanced when families have access to basic necessities of life. However, rather than ensuring concrete resources to alleviate conditions of poverty and culturally responsive, individually tailored services to reduce pressures resulting from inadequate access to the basic necessities of life, government often responds to families in need with unwarranted disruption and destruction of intact and viable families, particularly Black families. For some families, this has resulted in multi-generational family devastation and trauma, where children removed from their parents’ homes lose custody of their own children to the very system that raised them. This means that there are people, disproportionately Black people, who have spent a majority of their lives in some form of contact with the child welfare system. Counter to unstated yet normalized, racist beliefs about the inefficacy of Black parenting in particular that support multi-generational family regulation, our Work Group explicitly affirms that Black parents are capable of raising their children.


VISION: We envision government and philanthropic approaches and funding choices that:


  • shrink and ultimately eliminate mechanisms of surveillance, reporting, investigation, prosecution and punishment of families, particularly on the grounds of poverty framed as neglect;

  • prioritize a truth and reconciliation process that investigates the active role the family regulation system has played in the thinning and stressing of naturally existing supports within Black families and communities, with the aim of healing, repair, and disruption of future harm;

  • highlight the existing adaptations, strengths and fortitude within Black families and communities that are raising children who must contend with systemic racism in the larger society;

  • enhance the ability of Black families and communities to determine for themselves what child safety and child well-being means and that strengthen the ability of Black families to care for their children and that preserve family bonds;

  • provide financial and capacity building support to community members and supportive, restorative and healing organizations as the primary responders to family crisis; and

  • promote child and family well-being, including but not limited to universal access to:


  • adequate, safe, and affordable housing;

  • guaranteed basic income;

  • paid parental, family and sick leave;

  • affordable and high-quality child care;

  • quality and accessible public education;

  • affordable and accessible health care; a child allowance; meaningful access to food; and

  • other resources that create conditions and environments that allow all children, and particularly Black children, to thrive within their families and communities.


The New York City Narrowing the Front Door Work Group offer these shared perspectives as a foundation for New York City to chart a better course for its children and families going forward. While not all members of the group agree that the current system should be abolished in all respects, we have found common ground in the belief that the pathways into the system must be greatly narrowed.