Rise is a community of mothers who are dedicated to challenging the prevailing narrative about parents affected by the child welfare system, eliminating child welfare’s punitive and disparate impact on poor families of color and building a social support system that truly protects families.
Rise’s mission is to empower parents to be leaders and to create communities that invest in families and offer collective care, healing and support. We envision communities that are free from injustice, family policing and separation, and a society that is cultivating new ways of preventing and addressing harm. We imagine a radical commitment to ensuring that all families have what they need to live beyond survival and truly thrive.
Led by parents impacted by the child welfare system, Rise believes that parents have the answers for their families and communities. Our mission is to support parents’ leadership to dismantle the current child welfare system, eliminate cycles of harm, surveillance and punishment and create communities that invest in families and offer collective care, healing and support.
Founded in 2005, Rise builds parents’ leadership to dismantle the child welfare system, create communities that invest in families, and offer collective healing and support. At Rise, we build new networks of peer support to improve families’ health and wellbeing and reduce the overuse of unnecessary child welfare involvement. Led by parents impacted by child welfare, Rise builds parents’ power to self-advocate by providing critical information and peer support to thousands of parents facing child welfare nationwide. Rise also builds parents’ collective power to lead change by training parents as movement leaders.
We run three programs:
● Parent Peer Support: Provides parent peer support, information and connections to resources to parents to address family challenges;
● Parent Advocate Training: Prepares parents to work as Parent Advocates in preventive and foster care agencies;
● Rise & Shine Parent Leadership Program: Prepares 10-12 parents annually to become leaders in child welfare reform and aligned justice movements;
At Rise, we work to support family well-being in New York City by ending harmful cycles. Families under stress are fearful of a child welfare investigation and avoid seeking help, so health, mental health and other family challenges that could be resolved early are more likely to become crises. For 16+ years, Rise has operated as an informal hub for parents in underserved communities providing families with preventative resources, information, guidance and peer support to address family stress. Recognizing the need to expand this support within communities with the highest child welfare investigation and removal rates, we documented how families’ unmet health and mental needs lead to child welfare involvement. As a result, we developed a structured peer support model tied to schools and community-based organizations (CBOs) that can improve the health and wellbeing of low-income NYC families and reduce unnecessary child welfare interventions.
Project Description
Our parent-led, Peer Care Network program will prove Rise’s concept that providing community-based preventative care in vulnerable Black and brown low-income communities in NYC can increase families’ health access and outcomes and reduce unnecessary child welfare involvement. The Peer Care program is designed to fill a significant gap by improving the ability of schools and CBOs to refer struggling families to preventative parent-led support groups and peer support specialists who connect parents directly to community resources.
NYC’s lack of accessible mental and behavioral support for low-income families has put intense pressure on schools and CBOs to address family mental health crises. However, schools and organizations often do not have the tools or capacity to address these issues. Additionally, parents navigating school and behavioral health support systems often don’t know what community resources and services are available to meet their children's mental health and behavioral needs. This gap in knowledge and access leads to high levels of stress and isolation, deteriorating relationships, and ultimately, schools calling the ACS hotline to intervene. However, according to federal data, 90% of school calls nationwide do not meet the standard of neglect. When SCR calls are not found credible, the family is left without resources or support to address the initial issues they are facing. ACS itself agrees that the hotline is not an appropriate service pathway for these families.
Parents say that community peer support is what they need to prevent and manage mental health issues of toxic stress, anxiety, isolation and daily life challenges for themselves and their children. This is consistent with newly-released World Health Organization guidance that recommends alternative peer approaches and community-based mental health care supporting day-to-day living, such as linking people to housing, education and employment services. Parents often trust other parents from their community who know how to access services, share information and provide person-centered support. Research shows that peer support is an effective preventative approach to connecting people to the information, resources and services that improve their families' health and wellbeing.
