This chapter of the Routledge Handbook of Critical Social Work, written by David Tobis, examines an inspiring story of dramatic change in New York’s child welfare system and how parents whose children were in foster care contributed to those changes. It demonstrates how grassroots activism can be suggestive for critical social work. In New York City children are placed by Administration for Children’s Services in foster homes and group care that are operated exclusively by not-for-profit agencies. The Child Welfare Fund supported and helped launch other activist parent organizations in New York City: Voices of Women, a group of mothers who had been survivors of domestic violence. The chapter describes how the Child Welfare Organizing Project was able to become the most effective of the organizations that were created to help individual parents change, reunite with their children and to fight for policy and program reform of the child welfare system in New York.
