upEND

The upEND movement works to create a society in which the forcible separation of children from their parents is no longer an acceptable solution for families in need. We do this through strategic alliances that foster anti-racist structures and practices to keep children safe and protected in their homes and communities.

• upEND identifies and describes racist policies, practices, and research that supports the current child welfare system and maintains racial inequities.
• upEND promotes reform efforts on an interim basis that move child welfare to limit the use of involuntary removal to better serve children and families in their communities while new (or even old, but ignored) anti-racist responses and interventions are designed and implemented.
• upEND is NOT about tinkering or modestly reforming existing child welfare systems but is focused on building social and economic supports that replace the need for child welfare intervention. upEND is about ensuring that child neglect and abuse are recognized as a societal failing, not a family’s failing. We must work together with families and communities to address the societal failings and upEND the current system.
• upEND promotes abolishing the current child welfare system as we know it today. Abolishing the current child welfare system means not making the need for foster homes and shelters obsolete but ensuring the presence, instead, of critical systems of support for families and communities. upEND is about child safety, well-being, and permanency, things that are elusive to children and youth within the current system.
• upEND joins with those working on responses to families that are based in communities, actually provide support, and keep families together. Ultimately, this is not the ending of care—this is the ending of foster care and institutional care. Families and communities become the first responders to crisis rather than state intervention. This is about prevention and care, from and within communities.
• upEND supports anti-racist policies and practices and joins with organizers working on adequate, safe, and affordable housing; guaranteed minimum income; paid sick leave; affordable and high quality child care; quality and accessible public education; affordable and accessible health care; a child allowance; meaningful access to food; and other interventions that create meaningful supports for children and their families.

Read the press statement here.