By Lynn
Sygiel, editor, Charitable Advisors
A decade ago, Marilyn A. Moores, then a presiding judge of the Marion County Juvenile Court, was concerned about the disproportionate number of children of color coming before her.
She wasn’t the only one. Cindy
Booth, the chief executive officer of Child Advocates, felt the same way. She recognized
that the percentage of African American children served by her agency was
nearly double to that of the overall African American population in Marion
County.
At the time, the same concerns
were being expressed on the state and national levels. In Indiana, a disproportionality summit was commissioned by General Assembly,
and nationally, the Annie E. Casey Foundation was championing court-based training, research and reform
initiatives to combat the problem.
At the direction of the National
Council of Juvenile and Family Court judges, Moores opted to go a step further
and formed the Courts Catalyzing Change Committee, and charged it with a simple
agenda – to do something. She appointed
Geoffrey Gaither, a magistrate in the Marion County Juvenile Court system,
and Jennifer Hubartt, then the
director/regional manager for Department of Child Services-Marion County, to
chair the 31-person group.
One member of the group, Andrea
Manning-Dudley, worked for Child Advocates as the guardian ad litem
supervisor and attended a training given by
People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond. Emboldened by what she learned, she
told Booth that this powerful training might be perfect for DCS staff. By
coincidence, Booth and Gregg Ellis, the Child Advocates chief program officer,
attended a national CASA conference and an overview of the same workshop that
Manning-Dudley was talking about.
Suddenly, pieces were beginning to fall into place.
Booth decided Child Advocates could
take the lead and serve as the catalyst for change, and so she approached
Moores.
“I went to Judge Moores, and I said, ‘You want to do something with
the courts to catalyze change. I’ve just been introduced to this workshop. If
you let me raise the money, will you tell people they have to come to this? If
I tell them, they’ll just go ‘thank you, but no.’ But if you tell them as a
judge, they’ll come.’”
“This was like a godsend because as
a committee we were struggling about how to institute change,” said Gaither,
who has presided in Marion County Juvenile Court since 1995 and was introduced
to disproportionality in an article that Judge James Payne shared on the topic
in the late 1990s.
That first workshop was offered 10
years ago and would be one of four convened that first year.
Gaither’s reaction to the training
was similar.
“I used to consider myself an
expert on being a black man, but I was blown away by what I did not know and
what I learned on those two days. I thought the information was explosive,
powerful and life-changing. At the end of the two days, once your eyes are open
they can never be closed again, at least in theory,” said Gaither, who speaks
at the beginning of most workshops.
Now, nearly 65 Undoing Racism trainings
later, the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond has trained over
2,800 Indiana DCS employees, judges, police, teachers and others. Officials considered the differences in
treatment of blacks, whites and Latinos so serious that Booth said they’ve
invested roughly $600,000 in grants and donations to train people who work in
those systems.
The New Orleans-based national organization’s two-day training
analyzes the history and effects of the racial divide in the U.S. in order to share how
those translate into the disparities that exist today.
Last year as demand increased, Child Advocates upped its offerings,
conducting 14 Undoing Racism workshops. While much of the training has remained
the same, many of the attendees have changed. Now, Child Advocates service
providers, as well as other nonprofit organizations, are among the participants.
Last year, the entire staff of the Central Indiana Community Foundation invested
time to attend. Based on its experience and with increased demand beyond the
initial DCS audience, CICF offered a $100,000 grant to expand the program.
Child Advocates has continued to lead and added Jill English as the
initiative’s co-director along with Diana Dunn. Dunn, the widow of the co-founder
of the People’s Institute and a core trainer and organizer of the institute
from its beginning in 1980, moved to Indianapolis last year to work with English.
“What we’ve seen happen is it’s
branched out now to more service providers that touch the children that we
serve. It can be the mentors, the therapists, it can be those doing the
visitations for children, home-based counselors. The effect trickles down to
the children we serve,” said English. “We also have been very surprised, we
have been getting a lot of nonprofits in the community that have come through
and continue, including organizations like the Indianapolis Symphony and
multiple school districts.”
Last year as a refresher, DCS
invited English and Dunn to present 90-minute intro sessions for DCS cohorts. And
while DCS has been a constant supporter, the agency has considerable attrition,
so those individuals trained 10 years ago may not still be employees. Typically,
10 DCS folks attend the 40-person trainings on a complimentary basis.
Along with other enhancements, Dunn and English are developing a
cadre of 10 local trainers and working to revamp the local workshops based on feedback from participants, making
it more interactive and the history more Indiana-centric.
By the end of the
year, they plan to add Indiana history. “What was the history of the Klan in
Indiana? When we talk about red-lining, we ask: What was happening in Indiana?
We just had a case come down recently where somebody was still red-lining. What
we are learning from our local community group advising us is that we really
need to include a lot more Indiana history,” said Booth.
Child Advocates sees this work as core
to its mission to better support the children it serves.
Back in 2009, English said the
staff at her agency was concerned about the number of children of color who were
being removed from their homes or that Children in Need of Services (CHINS) filings
were not in proportion to the African American population. Initially, she said
the idea was to inform people how race affects the children that Child
Advocates serves. Today, for example, she said while Marion County is about 28
percent African American, the percentage of children Child Advocates serves is
about 48 percent African American.
“The organization hoped it would
make a difference by creating awareness of their treatment in education, the
courts and other agencies. I don’t think we knew as the ball started rolling
that it would become so massive in terms of people understanding how race
impacts the families in our community, which boils down to how it’s impacting
our children,” said English.
“There are no studies that show
that people because they’re male or female or because they’re Buddhist or
Catholic abuse their children more. There are no studies that show that people
of color abuse their children more, so why is this?
“If we’re the voice for children
in this county, and we’re ignoring it, then we’re not doing our jobs. Our
population of abused and neglected children that are represented by DCS in this
county should represent our population, and race allows us not to see that.
“We are leaving white children in
very dangerous situations because of race. And until we see it from all sides,
then we’re going to continue to leave children in dangerous situations. That is
what race has allowed us to do. Sometimes I refer to the Turpin
case that was in the news last year. I
say, ‘What African American family could have lived in middle America, multiple
states and abused and neglected those children for decades and nobody EVER had
alarm bells go off?’ That’s what race does.
“But I ask participants, do you
ever do the flip and think that these are all of our children. We know that
almost 70 percent of our county is white. Are you asking, where are those white
children?”
With Dunn coming on board, the
agency is able to offer debriefings and follow-ups for participants. She has
helped them process the workshop information and share what companies and
institutions have done in the past with her in-depth understanding of the
organization’s roots and history.
Child Advocates also recognizes
that many different fields send employees to training. One goal is to connect
people in the similar fields, like health care providers, so the trainings can
be more concise for, say RNs or epidemiologists, in order to be as productive
as possible.
Adding more workshops for young people is another goal. This past
spring break, Booth said that young people attended a session that included
adults and youth, with some from group homes.
“It was wonderful
and powerful. Youth held the adults accountable. I think it’s a natural
extension of what we do to reach out to youth and have them participate,” she
said. In a debriefing with the young attendees, their comments included: “We’ve never been listened to and given a
platform to talk about this the way we were able to and adults actually
listened.”
English said that
one of People’s core trainers has worked with youth all over the country, and
led the one over spring break. He’s kept in touch with several of the young
people from the session.
The effect
Marion County Juvenile Court Judge Gaither said
anecdotally, he’s seen improvement in the attitudes and understanding of
officials. He attributes that to the training.
“I recall a couple of years ago, a
case in front of another magistrate. The magistrate came to me and said there
was a recommendation made for a child and the magistrate openly wondered if the
child were another race, would that recommendation have been made. This was
after we started doing the Undoing Racism. And I marked that as a ‘wow moment’
because I don’t believe that magistrate would have had that conversation five
years ago or 10 years ago. These are issues that we openly talk about now, but
we never talked about in court back in the 1990s.
“So, there’s been change in how we
look at what we do. The first rung of action is awareness. It’s not a problem
to you until first there’s some awareness and then there’s acknowledgement.
Then there’s responsibility, then there’s action. So, I think we are at the
awareness and acknowledgement phase on this continuum. And I think this is
systemwide,” said Gaither. “Participating in this workshop is step one. It will
disavow you of all your previous thoughts and feelings about this issue.”
During the two-day workshop, there are regular check-ins to assess
the climate. English recalls this summer when several participants said, “I looked at the debate last night
completely differently. I never would have looked at it that way before. I
didn’t know what I didn’t know.”
English, who worked for DCS in the
late 1990s, said that she has also heard case workers say they can now read a report
and before getting to the part that explains the family’s race, they can
identify the child’s race by the language and words used to describe the
family.
According to Booth, it achieved some things that she didn’t realize
were going to happen, but it also changed her agency and helped staff be more
vocal about race and racism.
For example, it has helped them question when they see two cases
and the only difference is the color of the child’s skin to ask why one family is
getting this service and the other not.
“Has it changed the work we do? We did a study of 550 some
children,” Booth said. “We looked at when their advocate, whether it was a
volunteer or staff person, had the race equity training and then looked at
factors in the child’s permanency: Did they go back home? Were they adopted?
Did they move less? Did they get placed with siblings? What we saw was that
after the advocate had training, outcomes for all children improved, but
particularly for African American children.
“I think that’s because those people were more aware of
all issues surrounding the child,” said Booth.
“It also fit into my view that our
organization should reflect the children whom we serve, not only in the staff
that we have but also in the principles by which we do our work. So that really
helps for accountability.”
Booth is encouraged by the effort
and the change that has happened with over 100 organizations having taken the
training.
“Whether it’s been somebody who’s
been sent or volunteered to go from their organization, either nonprofit or
for-profit, they are intrigued to learn more about race and racism. But I think
what happens is they’re there for work, and then they realize they need to
share this with somebody.”
The highest compliment she’s heard
is “I’m going to tell my family about this. I cannot wait to go home and talk
to my kids about this.”
For more information about Undoing Racism, contact Jill English at Child Advocates at jill@childadvocates.net.
Address: 8200 Haverstick Rd #240, Indianapolis, IN 46240
Phone: (317) 205-3055
