The Detroit Center for Family Advocacy (CFA) started with a simple idea to address an injustice being witnessed in child welfare practice—children being removed from their families because their caregivers do not have access to help with legal issues affecting the safety and permanency of the children in their care. In response to this problem, the Child Advocacy Law Clinic at the University of Michigan Law School, led by Professors Vivek Sankaran and Don Duquette, set out to prevent removals and expedite permanency by providing multidisciplinary services to at-risk families. It was believed that by providing such families with an individualized plan of legal and social work advocacy, it would reduce the number of children in foster care. The data from CFA's three-year pilot clearly demonstrates that it does.
