Families Together

Children do best when their parents have the time and resources to guide them through life’s inevitable challenges.

But the burdens created by poverty often drain parents’ capacity to provide that support: taking three buses to buy affordable groceries, spending hours to navigate red tape to secure health care, getting a child safely to and from a library for homework when home internet is too expensive.

Through Families Together, we help expectant and new parents ensure they can give their child a strong start and work with parents and caregivers who may be at risk of their child being removed from their home.

When we help parents overcome barriers, they can focus on helping their children thrive.

Our key strategies, include:

• Reaching Families Sooner: We work with Mamatoto Village, a community-based organization devoted to providing accessible perinatal support services for Black women, and are scaling up our partnerships with other prenatal care teams, family success centers and other organizations to help expectant and new parents give their children a strong start.

• Preventing Family Separation: To strengthen DC families impacted by poverty and prevent the trauma of family separation that often results from children entering foster care, we’re taking referrals from DC’s Child & Family Services Agency where resolving parents’ legal issues will help ensure children can thrive at home in their care.

We know that new parents face a number of stressors that could impact a family’s stability. Our partnerships with community organizations will allow us to expand our reach with targeted legal supports for new families.

– LaShanda Adams, Chief Legal Officer

In the first year of the Families Together program, we’ve:

Built a team of nine dedicated staff members, including attorneys, an investigator and a paralegal to provide tenacious advocacy and develop strong relationships with partner organizations to best serve DC families.

Reached more than 300 children and families, taking on over 150 matters and referring others to partner organizations with different areas of legal expertise.

And we’re planning ahead by identifying trends in the referrals we get from our partner organizations so we can continually adapt to meet the evolving needs of DC children and families.