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Safe and Stable: Introduction

July 24 marked the beginning of the National Housing Week of Action. In recognition, Michigan’s Children is launching Safe and Stable, a guest blog series to shine a light on the systems and policies that keep foster-affiliated young adults from achieving safe and stable shelter. We will hear from fellow practitioners and from youth themselves to highlight how national, state, and local leaders can close the gap in housing need. Our first guest blogger is J. Thomas Munley, who has worked as a Court Appointed Special Advocate for foster youth and is the Coordinator and Life Skills Coach for Fostering STARS at…

What Do We Expect For Our Vote? Round 2

July 25, 2017 – Here we are again, getting much less out of our elected officials than we deserve.  This time it is with our members of Congress, but similar thoughts run true to what I’d blogged about back in May related to our state Legislature.  My earlier list of what we expect and need to demand for our vote for those who represent our best interests in Lansing or Washington, DC included:  1. An ability to share our thoughts and concerns; 2. A path to understand the actions of our elected officials; and 3. A voice in important decisions…

Advocacy Matters: State Budget Foster Care Wins

June 26, 2017 – Many legislators love nothing more than being able to leverage state investment with other funding to increase the reach of the limited dollars in our state coffers, especially those involved in the state budget process that just got wrapped up last week.  Of course, the largest leveraging that we do is with the federal government, and we rely heavily on those leveraged funds.  Many programs in Michigan get just enough state funding to be able to draw down federal funding allocated to our state – child care assistance, foster care and other child welfare services, and…

Meet Bobby, our Newest Staff Member: Ready to Serve

June 23, 2017 – Whenever possible at lunch, I like to enjoy my sandwich along Lansing’s Grand River river trail, a couple blocks from our office but, beneath shady trees on our stuffy summer days, a world enough away. The breaks help me re-focus and re-center myself for the afternoon grind. These first couple of weeks at Michigan’s Children have been busy, but they’ve hardly felt like work. It’s just so darn exciting to be here! It’s a real privilege to begin my career at an organization with such experience and authority on children’s issues, and even more of a…

What Do We Expect For Our Vote?

May 12, 2017 – We live in a representative democracy — a republic.  We put a few things up to a full vote of the people, but those things are few and far between, and typically only happen if proposed change requires that we adjust our State Constitution.  Otherwise, we vote for people to represent our best interests, and as I’ve said so very many times before, we then work to make sure that they understand what is in our best interest and how their actions support or fail to support those things. I’m not entirely sure why this year’s…

Volunteer Your Time and Your Voice for Action

April 24, 2017 – National Volunteer Week is being acknowledged this week to celebrate the people who volunteer their time to make their communities better places to live.  Primarily, when people think about volunteering, they are thinking about connecting directly with someone or something – reading to a 3rd grader, mentoring a teen.  These things are important, and I do these things in my volunteer time too.  They change the circumstances of individual children, youth, families and communities – critically important work. However, everyone who has done these things, read to a 3rd grader or mentored a teen, has also reflected…

Child Abuse Prevention Awareness and Action

April 10, 2017 – During the month of April, in honor of National Child Abuse Prevention Month, people across the country come together to raise awareness about the need to better focus resource and initiative on child abuse and neglect prevention. Child abuse and neglect are two of the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) identified by the CDC as contributing to a variety of poor outcomes including costly future health problems. Get ready for the brain science segment of this blog. When young children experience adversity or trauma, their brains make more neural connections in the areas of the brain that…

Keeping Family Voices in the Budget Conversation

April 5, 2017 – Michigan’s Children helped to facilitate two FamilySpeak opportunities at the State Capitol in February, continuing our long tradition of helping policy makers learn directly from the experiences of youth and families. Families spoke about their need to improve their basic literacy and other skills in order to be able to help their children successfully navigate education and life.  Another group of families came to share their heart wrenching experiences trying to care for children and youth in the child welfare system. I admire the people who speak about their experiences and cannot thank them enough for…

Reading and Parenting in March

Wow, I have rarely seen so many legislators embracing March as National Reading Month as I have this year. I have seen lots of their newsletters highlighting their trips to their communities’ pre-schools and elementary schools to take the time to read to young children. At Michigan’s Children, we are thrilled with the focus on making sure every child can read, and are glad that so many members of our legislature are having direct, impactful experiences with their constituents focused on this issue. Appropriately, March is also Parenting Awareness Month – what an amazing intersection. Parents continue to be children’s…

Democracy is not a one-way street. Unhappy? Start talking about it.

The Center for Michigan released their most recent community conversation report this week, which evidenced some pretty extreme distrust of the public sector and public systems intended to work for the people of Michigan. Of course, this result is heightened, and should be, by the tragedy in Flint, where there was such a horrendous failure of local, state and federal public systems that thousands of people were poisoned – the ramifications of which we will not truly know for many years to come. And, we just lived through the kind of election season that I hope we don’t live through…
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