Our Mission
Movement for Family Power works to end the policing and punishment of families and to create a world where the dignity and integrity of all families is valued and supported.
The Problem
The United States is the family separation capital of the world.
As of 2021, nearly 400,000 children languish in the foster system. Every day, children are forcibly taken from their parents—the vast majority of which are removed for allegations linked to poverty and substance use. The family regulation system does not protect children nor puts the wellbeing of children first. Instead of supporting and meeting families where they are, billions of dollars are pumped into a system that surveils, punishes, and controls families.
The system isn’t broken. It was built this way.
The child “welfare” and foster system is a troubling extension of the United States’ long history of systematically removing children from the arms of their parents. From the brutal and inhumane practice of buying and selling children away from their parents during chattel slavery to the orphan trains that called immigrants the “dangerous classes” and shipped children to white families, to the forced removal and cultural genocide of tens of thousands of indigenous children torn from their parents and placed in institutions. However, the family regulation system is presumed to be a benevolent or necessary exercise in state power—despite its history and indisputable evidence that shows otherwise.
The anti-Black racism and white supremacy embedded into the foundation of the system fuels the racial disproportionality that exists today. As is the case with policing and criminalization, BIPOC and low-income families are subjected to more surveillance, are more likely to encounter biases that result in more reports to the family police, and are therefore more likely to be investigated. In the last 20 years, the risk of termination of parental rights has doubled for many systems-involved families–with the highest rates for Black and Indigenous parents; and for many this risk of family dissolution starts during pregnancy through draconian and punitive child “welfare” drug policies that entraps pregnant people even before birth.
Safety begins when family policing ends.
We must abolish this harmful system and build a world where families and communities can thrive.
Our Areas of Work
Founded in 2018, Movement for Family Power (MFP) uses movement lawyering principles to center directly impacted people and grassroots activism.
Our work focuses on:
1. Building out a loving, healthy community with and amongst people working to abolish the family regulation system (FRS).
We believe that building power with impacted people and communities is critical to creating meaningful, lasting change in the fight to abolish the family regulation system. We do this work in various ways, including technical assistance and capacity-building support to organizers and hosting convenings to break isolation and build alignment.
2. Raising social consciousness around the harms of the family regulation system to support the reclaiming and reimagining of safe and healthy families.
We believe it is vital to shift narratives and combat propaganda from the system that tells us it is necessary and a force for good. We expose the harm and boldly reclaim and reimagine family safety by publishing reports, translating research into plain language, supporting impacted people in writing about the system, facilitating trainings, social media engagement, and working in coalition with aligned movements.
3. Disrupting and curtailing pipelines into the system, reducing the level of harm inflicted by forced family separations.
We believe in reducing the harm enacted by the system in a way that gets us closer to a world free from family policing. We have helped launch and continue to support campaigns that aim to eliminate the invasive and needless practice of drug testing pregnant and parenting people and their newborns without consent, end mandated reporting, and stop the termination of parental rights, which is the civil death penalty for families.