In Our Backyard Children’s Campaign

The In Our Backyard Children’s Campaign is actively collaborating with individuals and organizations across the country to bring about a re-envisioning of foster care in America.

We are building a national movement to inspire a new era of engagement that benefits children who experience foster care in America. In Our Backyard is a campaign that honors the lives of children with no power and no voice. It is a campaign that builds foundations, connections, and futures. Join us as we embark upon a national re-envisioning of foster care.

Imagine
An America where people of all ages unite and take responsibility for our children’s futures. An America that invests in the lives
of our most vulnerable citizens. An America that believes all lives have equal worth. An America where we embrace all of the children in our backyards to ensure that each one has the opportunity to live a healthy, productive life.

In Our Backyard Vision
In Our Backyard represents a vision – Invite people of all ages to become engaged resources to children who experience foster care. Create a trained national service corps to support that engagement. Give them an array of innovative year-round program models to get involved with. Surround our country’s vulnerable children with great role models and resources. Re-invent the way we care for the 800,000 children who have been placed in our nation’s public foster care system.

Root Cause
Every year as many as 25,000 young people experiencing foster care turn 18 and “age out” of the public foster care system in this country without any enduring family relationships or community connections. Suddenly, after a childhood spent in a system that has made every important life decision for them, they are on their own with no one to count on.

There is a disconnect between children experiencing foster care and the majority of Americans. Why?
Currently most Americans think that there are only two ways they can support a child in the public foster care system:

1. Become a foster parent
2. Adopt a child from the foster care system.

This is too much to ask of most people. The outcome: hundreds of thousands of potential people resources walk away from the children who need them the most. The end result: 25,000 young people who are at risk for homelessness, incarceration, unemployment, early parenthood, and lives of poverty….. lives of poverty “age out” annually unprepared to live outside of the foster care system. Americans continue to support them with their tax dollars rather than celebrating their transition into a productive healthy young adulthood. The In Our Backyard solution: Surround each child in foster care with family and community members who are invested in their life-long success and well-being. Create a broader pool of potential family and community connections through new programs that invite volunteers in to form healthy relationships with kids on the front end of their foster care experiences rather than waiting until they turn 18.

The In Our Backyard Solution
Create a compelling Menu of Engagement Options to better serve our country’s most vulnerable children – exciting new programs that invite people of all ages to participate, connect, care, and take an active role in our country’s re-envisioning foster care process. Programs that In Our Backyard’s visionary leader, Judy Cockerton, has already begun: Treehouse Communities, the Big Red Barn Animal Therapy Program, Treehouse Arts & Learning Project, Sibling Connections, Community and School Garden Programs.

Cockerton has more program designs in the works. Her idea is to gather a stellar multi-disciplinary team of social venture capitalists and out of the box thinkers together to complete the Menu and then launch a multi-generational trained service corps to assist in its implementation nationwide.

In Our Backyard proposes a transformation of the way Americans support children who experience the foster care system as well as an expansion of service opportunities for people of all ages and from every socioeconomic group. The IOB campaign will help instill a culture of engagement with children experiencing foster care and provide opportunities for Americans to serve our most vulnerable children throughout their lifetimes.

In Our Backyard Strategies for Re-Envisioning Foster Care
Key Strategies for the campaign include:
• Launching and sustaining new replicable program models.
• Expanding menu of engagement and service opportunities.
• Engaging students of all ages – elementary thru college.
• Partnering with colleges and universities.
• Offering In Our Backyard on-line courses.
• Cultivating non-traditional public-private partnerships.
• Educating Americans about the everyday realities children who experience foster care face.
• Inspiring Americans to re-think and re-design our approach.
• Encouraging Americans to think out of the foster care box.
• Providing America’s elders with opportunities to serve.
• Funding innovative programs and practices.
• Replicating promising programs and practices.
• Measuring outcomes of expanded service delivery and citizen service opportunities.
• Taking a collaborative multi-disciplinary approach in order to create lasting social change.

The campaign aims to make serving children who experience foster care a new norm. The stigma and disrespect that children in the public foster care system typically face will be replaced with responsive and humane programming as well as life long family and community connections.

Foster Care: The Upgrade

How do we create a foster care system that we can actually be proud of? A more intelligent and humane approach of caring for our vulnerable youth in all 50 states – one that invites us all to participate and empowers each of us to be the change.

The Obama campaign certainly provided us with a template for how to upgrade the system, using technology and community organizing techniques that brought new definition to the term “old school”. The Obama Team’s brilliant engagement strategy married technology and entrepreneurial spirit with the social change process and look how many people jumped on board the Hope Train.

At its core was a transformational vision that calls for an informed and involved digitally actualized group of people to become an integral part of the solution. As Marshall Ganz of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government said after the election, “You don’t just put that genie back in the bottle. There are millions of people across the country who were part of this campaign, and they aren’t just going to disappear.”

That’s just what we need to upgrade the way we as a country approach child welfare. We need those millions of people, who were active in supporting President Obama, to take all of that fabulous Yes, We Can energy and aim it at the public foster care system. Imagine what a difference that would make to the lives of 800,000 stigmatized young people who are typically considered unworthy of our time and investment. It will be a piece of cake if we use the brilliant new electoral model that the Obama Team and engaged Americans co-created.

Check out the February issue of San Francisco magazine. In an article titled, Democracy: the upgrade. It describes how the Bay Area’s news-breaking bloggers, visionary VC’s, Web 2.0 geniuses, and ordinary citizens helped Obama remake U.S. politics. As a native of the Bay Area who moved to Boston in the 1970s, I read about my west coast counterparts with pride. They are thinking and acting out of the box, that’s for sure. Just look at Craigslist, Google, Salon, Moveon.org, Facebook, Next Agenda, Barackobamaisyournewbicycle.com and all of the other smart tools and engagement options.

We all know that it takes a thoughtfully crafted idea, a good strategy, clear vision, a passionate leader, and an experienced management team to successfully begin to bring about social change. It also takes dedication, determination, and a willingness to walk in the desert upon occasion. I have certainly felt that hot sand underneath my feet over the past 10 years!

As venture capitalist Andy Rappaport says in the February San Francisco magazine article, “So what are we going to do to change that? If you’re here in the Silicon Valley, the answer is, you try a bunch of experiments. Then you invest in the ones that work, scale them up, kill the ones that don’t. I’ve just described venture capital to you. So a few donors and activists – some here and some elsewhere – figured let’s throw a bunch of money and energy and ideas at the problem and see what we can come up with. Let’s see, for example if we can figure out how to get young people engaged.” Ah, Andy Rappaport, you are my kind of philanthropist. A man who is willing to take a risk to bring about the kind of change this country needs. Look what you helped transform…. Please contact me so we can create a dynamic team to transform our approach to foster care.

While we move forward to solidify our funding options for this endeavor, here are some key actions we need to take:

• Create a synergy between online and offline engagement options.
• Communicate our core values and ideas again and again.
• Encourage freewheeling, interconnected social networking.
• Tap into the creativity of artists, musicians, actors, educators, the advertising world, writers, philanthropists, and entrepreneurs
• Fuel citizen journalism to educate the country and promote participation.
• Use innovative technologies and web applications.
• Use multiple social networks.
• Get America blogging about foster care solutions.
• Circulate hope, new ideas, and inspiration.
• Promote a spirit of empowerment that doesn’t require anyone’s permission.
• Generate a cascade effect: use online organizing to break through old ceilings.
• Create a local and constantly connected Re-Envisioning Foster Care campaigns.
• Work outside the system to enhance the work of child welfare.
• Partner with the system to support change.

Thanks San Francisco magazine for making my day. Great article!

Because of you, John

The February 2nd issue of the New Yorker magazine reported that after he was sworn in as 44th President of the United States, Barack Obama honored John Lewis – Georgia’s eleven-term representative, and the only surviving speaker from the March on Washington where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his eloquent “I Have A Dream” speech.

“After absorbing the thudding roar from the Mall, Obama glanced to his right. He spotted there on the steps, a few feet away, John Lewis ….. “Congratulations Mr. President,” Lewis whispered in his ear. Obama smiled at the sound of that and said, Thank you, John. I’ll need your prayers.” “You’ll have them, Mr. President. That, and all my support.”

John Lewis’ caliber of support is legendary. He led the march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Alabama. The state troopers on the other side of the bridge used whips, a hose wrapped in barbed wire, horses, and nightsticks to punish Lewis and his colleagues who crossed the bridge that day. The first nightstick came down on John Lewis’ skull.

The Civil Rights Movement was lucky to have John Lewis as one of its leaders. The Foster Care Re-Envisioning Movement needs someone of his caliber to help usher in a new era for children in this country – a bold visionary who believes it is time to erase the stigma of a foster care placement and makes it happen.

Lewis has said about our country’s current problems, “…the problems are so big. None of them can be solved in a day or a year. That’s the way it was with the civil rights movement. We play our part and fulfill our role.” Let us each find our parts and play our roles – for our children and our country.

The New Yorker says that “At the luncheon following the swearing-in ceremony, Lewis approached President Obama with a commemorative photograph and asked him to sign it. The President wrote, “Because of you, John. Barack Obama.”

Thank you John Lewis for the part you played in moving our country forward. May thousands of Americans follow your outstanding example and take the necessary steps required to ensure that our nation’s children live with dignity.