To a child, family is everything. Family is where children learn to love and where they are nurtured.
The evidence makes it clear that children do best with their families. But what do we mean by family?
How each of us defines family is highly personal – you can be born into family or create your own. As an agency, how we define family is extremely broad and reflects who children feel close to and who they consider to be their family, blood ties or not. This is extremely important when it comes to supporting Indigenous families who are deeply connected to their communities and the Land.
Making sure families have the support they need matters now more than ever as we strive, as a community, to build back better. We want to create a more equitable, caring community where every person belongs and can thrive. Part of this is making sure that no matter what happens, children are connected to their families and their culture.
Families are the experts in their own lives and they know what they need. By engaging families in equitable ways we can address the root causes of child maltreatment. Our work is to empower families, looking not at where they are, but what is possible.
Here to Help
Over the past 21 months, the cracks in our community have split open. Families are facing multiple factors that make day to day life extremely difficult and compound the risk factors for child maltreatment. These factors include anti-Black and anti-Indigenous racism, a profound lack of affordable housing in Waterloo Region, increased demand for mental health support services, lack of high quality affordable child care, and income and food insecurity.
It’s a lot.
We can’t fix all those things on our own or as quickly as we would like but we are working on it with our many partners in the community. In the meantime, when families are in crisis, we are here to help.
But, we are also here to help families before something bad happens.
Family & Children’s Services Investigates about 80% of the calls we receive from community members worried about a family. Often there are struggles and concerns but in the majority of these cases, the family’s needs are simply not being met. This shows up as poverty, hunger, housing insecurity, a lack of full time work, and a lack of health care, including mental health care. Instead of making sure the family gets what it needs, we investigate them.
But a child welfare investigation is not a solution for the complex issues facing families and in fact, can worsen things for them. This is especially of concern for Indigenous, Black and Racialized communities who are already subjected to disproportionate surveillance. However, the worry is that without a child welfare intervention, something really bad will happen. So the question isn’t “do we investigate this family or not?”. The question should be:
What programs and services can be offered to reduce the stress parents and families are experiencing?
The Best Way to Help Families
Much of the work of child welfare is driven by community members’ fears of what might happen to a child if they don’t speak up. And that is a legitimate worry.
If people are worried about potential harm, then the best to way to insure that doesn’t happen is to invest in the programs and services that prevent harm and to ensure those programs and services are available where and when needed.
Since 2017, investing in prevention in Waterloo Region has contributed to a 35% reduction in the number of families investigated for child abuse and neglect and families receiving ongoing service with the Agency.
While prevention programs remain seriously underfunded by government, they are in high demand because they work!
This is where we need you.
We can’t do this alone
Family & Children’s Services Waterloo Region and the Foundation are committed to building relationships with families and communities for the well-being and safety of children and youth.
We want to focus on meeting the needs of families before something bad happens. We want to nurture strong social support networks and help parents care for their children safely. We have learned so much about the importance of keeping families together. And now that we know better, we need to do better.
This is where your support makes a difference, providing prevention focused programs and services that are reducing the risk factors for child maltreatment.
How is this happening? By building resilience – in children, youth, families, and communities. Resilience is key to prevention. It grows through simple experiences and actions that, while small in scale, are deep in meaning. Resilience gives individuals and families the ability to move beyond the chaos and trauma they have experienced or are experiencing. It allows them to overcome adversity and to move forward in their lives.
These families benefit from resilience-building programs and with the increasing challenges facing families, demand for these programs has increased. These programs create opportunities to:
- Build relationships
- Encourage self-esteem and skill development
- Feel a sense of power over one’s own life
- Develop a sense of belonging
- Promote equity and social justice
- Encourage connection to culture
Most of all? These programs offer hope.
Help Today for a Better Tomorrow
A gift to Family & Children’s Services Foundation will give children and families the support they need. From practical supports for families, supporting youth through unemployment and food and housing insecurity, and helping parents to access the mental health supports they need, your gift will have a lasting impact in our community.
Right now, we are serving 1000 families across the Region.
Many of these families need support with practical everyday needs but also the supports that will let them move forward. Whether it is support for rent or access to the Internet or dental care, your support will offer families the opportunity to move beyond just surviving and reduce the stressors that can lead to child maltreatment.
Youth remain one of the groups we worry about most. As housing affordability becomes a bigger concern, youth are finding it harder and harder to find housing. When they do, the costs are so high there is little left for food or other necessities. Many suspended their education during the pandemic but are returning now. Your financial support for a youth attending college or university can help them break the cycle of poverty that has been a fixture of their family for generations. It can also keep them housed and fed, extremely important given that 43% of youth from care experience homelessness.[1]
And for those raising children – an already demanding and difficult job – the pandemic has increased their stress dramatically. Your support will allow parents to access mental health supports including counselling and respite when possible, and participate in programs that help them connect and bond with their children. Even if they didn’t have a loving parent, they can learn how to be one. Individuals and families will heal, grow closer, and learn what it means to belong.
Your gift now will ensure that instead of investigating families, we are investing in what they need.
You can be someone’s possibility.
Doing Better, Together
So much has changed since the spring of 2020. We better understand the layers of inter-connectedness that impact people in their day to day lives. We understand that problems are complex and so are the solutions. And perhaps most of all we understand we just can’t do this alone. We need each other.
Children and youth, and their families, need us to advocate for and support the programs and services that can meet their needs in an equitable and just way and prevent harm.
Prevention requires that our community believe in the possible and ensure families have the skills and support they need to move forward.
Together, we can make sure that we are building a caring community where children and their families can thrive and prevent child maltreatment from happening in our community.
[1] https://www.homelesshub.ca/solutions/systems-prevention/transitions-child-protection