Rising Voices For ‘Family Power’ Seek to Abolish The Child Welfare System

“This is one of the greatest injustices of our time, and one of the most overlooked,” said Lisa Sangoi, a recent Soros Justice Fellow and former staff attorney at National Advocates for Pregnant Women, who co-founded the Movement for Family Power in 2018.

The child welfare system, contrary to public perception, has vast and unparalleled government powers, her group’s report concludes, with “wide latitude to surveil and control families,” and remove children — particularly those from low-income Black, Latino and American Indian communities. Yet it receives far too little critical analysis when compared to the “criminal legal system, immigration system, or anti-terrorism enforcement.” 

Before launching the Movement for Family Power, Sangoi and co-founder Erin Miles Cloud both represented low-income parents in child welfare cases, Miles Cloud as a supervising attorney with Bronx Defenders involved in more than 1,000 parents’ cases for roughly a decade. 

They describe their mission as working “to end the Foster System’s policing and punishment of families and to create a world where the dignity and integrity of all families is valued and supported.” The group’s work involves supporting and connecting like-minded advocates, litigators and system-affected parents, and steering philanthropic funding toward community-based efforts to heal families and keep them together.”