Online Video Education & Social Media Outreach

In conjunction with our grass roots outreach, we will continue to provide online video education and social media outreach to families. Families will be targeted based on predefined areas that represent the most need.

Grass Roots Outreach

Through years of data gathering we have identified markets where family services are under served to the community. Federal tax payer dollars are allocated appropriately but administered to locally elected officials who have failed to meet the communities requirements for social change. We will reach out to those families, letting them know we are a resources that is available online that can provide services they are looking for.

Communication Skills Building

Families can often struggle if a lack of communication and empathy is a common family practice. Sometimes families have great communication skills but have difficulty navigating through outside agencies that practice poor communication skills. With this program we will provide resources for those families to gain the skills necessary to navigate through a crisis with better communication skills.

Family Organizational Management

Organizational skills are often overlooked in the health of people. We will be partnering with local organization consultants to help families review lifestyle changes. We will provide any tools or products necessary in order to maintain those lifestyle changes. Consultations will be long term to ensure the best opportunity for success.

Family Counseling

Often times families struggle with or are required to participate in family counseling after a crisis strikes. We will evaluate family preservation oriented counselors and pay for counseling services. This program will be offered in conjunction with other well-being case management services.

Family Bonding Services

Current supportive services for families to either recover from a crisis or the help lift families out of poverty are designed to meet regulatory requirements. In an effort to properly manage tax payer funding, a lot of family supportive organizations and agency have left out the need to address the family bonding experience from a practical view point. Studies have shown for decades the importance of family bonding time. This program will utilize community partnerships and corporate sponsorships to provide families with opportunities and resources to experience family bonding.

Children's Rescue and Family Reunification Plan

American children are being unconstitutionally and unnecessarily separated from their families. Currently most states do not provide attorneys to children and families in family or juvenile court in child protection proceedings.  FPF seeks to fill this gap with legal aid services. Family Preservation Foundation desires to defend and foster constitutional support for these children and their rights through litigation by providing pro bono legal services from local trial courts all the way to the United States Supreme Court for all children.

Legal Assistance for Family Law

Our services can also extend to pro bono services to families. While families are going through legal challenges, often times families overlook attorneys who may not have their best interest in mind. We will work to evaluate attorneys and their practice to make sure families are:

1. Receiving representation from a family preservation oriented attorney (interested in the family resolving their legal issues over continuing services for future business success)
2. Being represented by an attorney that is fully competent and engaging in attorney best practices


To request more information or materials, please contact us: (866) 469-5777 or This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

 

What is Family Preservation

Family Preservation is defined here by Child Welfare Information Gateway and here by the National Family Preservation Network.

Quite simply it describes efforts to keep families together and prevent unnecessary out-of-home placement of children.

Family Preservation recognizes that children need protecting and society’s goal should always be to provide and ensure their safety.

Family Preservation seeks to have these goals met while respecting and honoring the inalienable right of every child born to remain safely with the mother and/or father who conceived and/or bore him/her whenever possible.

Family Preservation recognizes that the parent/child relationship is a sacred connection that should not be severed without due cause, for the protection and safety of the child, and only after all means of addressing the problems of the family unit have been exhausted.

Family Preservation seeks to uphold the constitutional rights of parents as well as expectant mothers and fathers to protect, care for and maintain a bond with their offspring. Family Preservation thus advocates that we treat every mother and father equally without judgment based on age, marital status, physical or cognitive ability, or financial status. It rejects exploiting parental weaknesses in order to commodify their child to meet a demand. It is about providing affordable health and day care to level the playing field.

Family Preservation is about helping families overcome crisis and remain intact by providing necessary opportunities, resources, options, and help to do so. Mothers and fathers in crisis need to receive objective family-centered option counseling and all the resources, referrals, and support needed to remain as an intact family and to be protected from fraud, coercion and exploitation which separates them from their child.

Mothers and fathers of a child requiring substitute care should be provided legal counsel to be fully aware of their rights and recourse. Such counsel should be paid for by a tax or fee paid into a general fund and not directly by anyone with an interest in obtaining custody of their child.

Family Preservation calls for extended family to be the first resource for children whose parents are not able or willing to care for them and for stranger placements to be a last resort that allow so that the child to may know all of their genetic/DNA contributors.

The History of Family Preservation

Family Preservation services and initiatives were developed and are promoted in response to an over-reliance on transient and often unsafe out-of-home foster care.

Use of the term Family Preservation can be traced back to 1890s and the negative reaction to the “orphan train movement.’  In the 1909 White House Conference on Children it was the top ranked issue. 

By 1966 the Casey Family Programs operated to provide and improve — and ultimately prevent the need for—foster care.

The following two organizations are devoted to preserving families in crisis, offering short-term services designed to assist families in crisis by improving parenting and family functioning while keeping children safe:

•The National Family Preservation Network was founded in 1992 to serve as the primary national voice for Intensive Family Preservation and Reunification Services (IFPS & IFRS) and a myriad of state programs, many affiliated with schools of social work.

•Lumos works to help the world’s orphans regain their right to their own family, in the face of high demand for children to adopt. Lumos finds that supporting children to remain in their own communities is more cost effective - in addition to being more humane - than funding institutions. They work with governments, professionals, communities and families to provide resources needed to prevent unnecessary, permanent family separations, such as medical care and education.

•National Institute for Permanent Family Connectedness (NIPFC) operates from the position that “every child has a family, and family members can be found when we try.” We owe our children in need, they say, no less than employing every effort to locate and contact any possible family resource for them, and to do so as quickly as possible. In addition to permanency, children in litigated custody also need and deserve expediency.

•Family Finding “identifies relatives and other supportive adults, estranged from or unknown to the child, especially those who are willing to become permanent connections for him/her.” Working primarily with young adults “aging out” of care the non-profit has successfully located no fewer than 40 relatives or other meaningful connections for each youth.

Why wait, however, to find resources for children in need of extra-familial care? Every state should be mandated to find all extended family resources for every child in their care at the onset of every placement, not when children are leaving care. Not only is it in the best interest and safety of these unmoored children, but will also save taxpayers money to have the children placed with family rather than paying strangers.

The Basis of Family Preservation

These important rights and protections are echoed by UNICEF which stated in a 2007 press release:

“Adoption should always be the last resort for the child. The CRC, which guides UNICEF’s work, states very clearly that every child has to the right to know and to be cared for by his or her own parents, whenever possible. UNCIICEF believes that families needing support to care for their children should receive it, and that alternative means of caring for a child should only be considered when, despite this assistance, a child’s family is unavailable, unable or unwilling to care for her or him.”

“Children have rights. These rights are laid down essentially in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child [UNCRC] and in the Hague Convention on the Protection of Children. Children and their biological parents have a right to respect for their family life.” 

“Adoption at what cost?” 2007 Terre des hommes - child relief, Lausanne, Switzerland

The rights of children in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) are as follows:

Article 7:
“The child shall be registered immediately after birth and shall have the right from birth to a name, the right to acquire a nationality and, as far as possible, the right to know and be cared for by his or her parents.”

Article 8:
“Where a child is illegally deprived of some or all of the elements of his or her identity, States Parties shall provide appropriate assistance and protection, with a view to re-establishing speedily his or her identity.”

Article 9:
“States Parties shall respect the right of the child who is separated from one or both parents to maintain personal relations and direct contact with both parents on a regular basis, except if it is contrary to the child’s best interests.”

Further, America”s Uniform Adoption Act of 1994 calls for the protection of “minor children against unnecessary separation from their birth parents.”

Additionally, the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights articles 12 and 16(3) address interference with family, stating that “the family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State.”

Article 25(2) states:
“Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance. All children, whether born in or out of wedlock, shall enjoy the same social protection.”

How it Plays out - or Doesn’t - in Practice

“Regrettably, in many cases, the emphasis has changed from the desire to provide a needy child with a home, to that of providing a needy parent with a child. As a result, a whole industry has grown, generating millions of dollars of revenues each year . . .”

The Special Rapporteur, United Nations, Commission on Human Rights, 2003.

Demand for children remains high.

Child protective services are poorly funded and understaffed. As with our legal system, the indigent, the marginalized, disenfranchised and working poor are at higher risk, unequally targeted, and far less able to defend themselves. Their children too often become commodities for more affluent foster and adoptive parents who are viewed as being able to provide a “better” home.

The privatization of American infant adoption has turned what once was a social institution for providing care for children in need - into a multi-billion-dollar unregulated industry run by untrained, unlicensed, unregulated practitioner/baby brokers and intermediaries.

While children need protection, there has never been evidence that the severing of all ties to one’s original family or falsifying one’s vital records is in their best interest. Such state-committed fraud that changes a child name, lists adopters as parents of birth and often changes the child’s place or even date of birth, benefits only gray and black market baby brokers and child traffickers, not adopted persons. Transparency - not secrets and lies - is sorely needed in every aspect of child protection. However, policies are made to protect paying clients and the attorneys and adoption agencies whose livelihood is dependent on the redistribution of children with non-related strangers.

Father Symeon,, BPS Orthodox Christian Conciliation Services Existential Life Coaching, Counseling, Consultancy Services Hermitage of St John the Divine Syracuse NY writes that he is not against adoption in principal but in practice:

“There is so much wrong with Child Adoption worldwide.
“I support its abolition being replaced with a three tier approach 1) Family Preservation: a healthy attempt to keep the child with the parents. 2) Kinship Guardians: a type of adoption by extended family. 3) Guardian Stewardship: a type of adoption by non-familial persons.”

Annette Baran, MSW, and Reuben Pannor, MSW, co-authors and highly regarded adoption experts also favor guardianship over adoption, as it is practiced in the U.S.:

“Relinquishment of children to a new set of parents, as a final, irrevocable act, severing all rights of the birthparents, must be discontinued....

“Instead, we propose a form of guardianship adoption that we believe would be in the best interests of all concerned, with special benefits for the adoptee for it would decrease the abandonment/rejection issue and permit the child to know the birthparents as real people who cared about him but could not raise him.”

Adoption as a humanitarian effort - domestically and internationally - falls pitifully short. There are more humane ways to help families in crisis, than removing children.

Many current American adoption practices are in direct opposition to these child- and family-centered goals. These include:

•Pre birth matching with expectant expenses paid directly from prospective adopters to expectant mothers, which engenders feelings of obligation indebtedness and creates false expectations for adopters.
•Worse still are pre-birth consents. Lawful in two states, they are banned elsewhere for violating the intent of baby selling.
•Presenting open adoption as giving moms-to-be control, inasmuch as promises of ongoing contact are unenforceable in most states.
•Putative father registries which exist to speed up adoptions in violation of the constitutional rights of fathers
•“Safe Havens” - aka legalized abandonment - deny mothers in crisis the opportunity of counseling and denies children any hope of finding the truth of their genetic heredity
•Denying adopted persons access to their authentic original birth certifictes.

Placing a child in the care of adults to whom the child is not related must always be a last resort option to be used only when there are no extended family members able and willing to provide care for the child related to them.

Children are not commodities, and adoption should never prioritize demand for children. No profit should be made by any individuals or agency involved in the placement of children in need. We need more Family Preservation and less adoption separation.

By: Mirah Riben

To request more information on save the children or materials, please contact us: (732) 377-2038 or This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

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A VOICE FOR CHILDREN
Advocating for change in Minnesota / New Jersey and beyond

At Family Preservation Foundation, our mission is to defend children who can be safely raised in their own families in order to help parents preserve their right to raise their own children. Our main focuses are Child Welfare systemic advocacy reform, addressing disparity, poverty, and addiction, building stronger families and communities, bridging divides, and building respect.

Saving children from unwarranted trauma! We believe the voice of children and their families should be heard.

The Family Preservation Foundation (FPF), is a not-for-profit, public interest, educational, and legal aid organization dedicated to the idea of preserving and empowering families, family preservation, and family first / extended family ideology. We strive to save children from the trauma associated with unwarranted parental separation, and restoring the respect for children’s rights that allow them to remain with their biological parent and/or extended family when it's safe to do so. 

Since the beginning, we have been advocates for better systems and supports to increase the well-being of children. Our work directly results in solutions that improve our communities where we live.

Our number one priority is to keep children out of the foster care system and with their families when safe to do so!

Currently, most states do not provide attorneys to all children. In the states that do, the child must be over a certain age, for example, 10 years old. FPF seeks to fill this gap and ensure that no person is denied their right to equal justice because of age or poverty by providing pro bono legal and reunification services for all children and their families.

Nonpartisan, FPF works through litigation, education, social service reunification efforts, and advocacy. FPF provides legal assistance in cases when it considers civil liberties to be at risk. For example, in Minnesota, over 55% of the children and their families go through the entire child welfare process without any legal representation whatsoever.

What is utterly unbelievable, and the most astonishing thing that we have learned by far, is a thief who steals a pack of gum or loaf of bread is legally entitled to legal counsel, evidentiary hearings, a jury trial, and has more rights than a child being placed in a foster care and the permanent severance of the parent/child relationship.

Only five of the 50 states require or permit jury trials for cases where the state is seeking to legally sever a parent-child relationship. The remaining states prohibit the practice, whether through statute, case law, or court rule. FPF feels that one of our countries greatest liberties, familial association, should not be exclusively placed in the hands of a single judge. 

Foundation Goals

FPF desires to create lasting, positive change for our country's children. We want to ensure children reach their full potential in a loving family environment whenever possible. 

Many longstanding problems exist for children and families in the United States. New solutions that transform the child welfare system require the work of the nation's leading children's organizations and public and private partners. 

In addition to litigating cases, FPF other primary strategic initiatives are:

• Establish multiple offices to coordinate pro bono child attorney efforts, legal aid clinics and family services.
• Provide Pro Se Legal Aid Educational Materials and Packets.
• Create statewide holistic service work centers hubs to focus on supporting all phases of a child welfare effort.
• Reinforce organizational culture by continuing to invest in the professional and personal growth of staff and volunteers. 
• Reclaim historical diversified income base by capitalizing on private funding and volunteer opportunities.
• Leverage, and enhance our position as a innovator, in the field of child and family services
• Being not an enemy, but a friend of the government by only seeking governmental excellence.  

Furthermore, FPF desires to provide Trauma and PTSD therapy free of charge to children and families relating to family separation which often threatens critical bonds of attachment and increases the risk of a host of negative, long-term effects on children’s mental and physical health. Currently, when the government reunifies a family, they do not provide any post-separation therapy to the children or their families.  

To request more information or materials, please contact us: 1 (866) 469-5777 or This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

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About the Family Preservation Foundation

Family Preservation Foundation is the first organization of its kind. One of our main priorities is providing pro bono attorneys to unrepresented low-income families who are treated unfairly by the state's child welfare and foster care system. In addition, our grassroots activities include reunification services and legal education.

FPF believes in supporting children and families who have entered the public child welfare system so they can fully realize their potential. When possible, our goal is to reunite parents and their children quickly and provide them the tools they need to be successful.

Ultimately our goal is to partner with families earlier to get ahead of problems before they occur at home. Our primary focus is on keeping families together, getting them the services they need, and keeping children out of the foster care system. 

Currently, we are concerned that children's and parental rights are slipping away in America. Children need to be raised by loving nurturing parents, and not the government. In fact, based upon the federally reported statics on foster care outcomes, the government has not done a good job at raising children. FPF believes a paradigm shift in approach and practice needs to take place. (Foster Care Statistics)

Each day we see that children's and parental rights are not being upheld in the courts due to a lack of legal representation. The less fortunate children from low-income families who cannot afford legal representation, are being unwittingly detained when there is no harm to the child. FPF views this as a systematic attack on the low-income, single-parent, and nuclear families, as well as the extended family unit.

Family Preservation Foundation works to preserve family rights through litigation, as well as community and professional education relating to child welfare matters, while advocating for state and federal policy legislation which respects the universal rights of the extended families like Grandparents, Aunts and Uncles.

Every child has priceless value and unlimited potential regardless of the circumstances of their birth. Children should be protected, and nurtured to their full potential.

To request more information or materials, please contact us: (866) 469-5777 or This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..