Monthly Archives: February 2012

In the System

Journalism for Social Change takes students and guests into the foster care system. 

During this semester of Journalism for Social Change, we have set up each of the speaker sessions to provide examples of the interplay of journalism, public policy and social welfare in the lives of foster children. Last week we explored juvenile dependency courts; the last stop before a child is cast into the tumultuous current of the foster care system.

This week, the class and its subject matter, will move exclusively into the realm of what happens to children once in foster care.

Please join Ken … Read more

California’s Foster Youth Saved From Losing Educational Support

Child welfare advocates in California are celebrating a reverse decision made by Governor Brown to keep Foster Youth Services, a program which provides educational support to youth in foster care, a categorically funded program. Under the initial proposed budget, discussed here in the Washington Times, FYS was in jeopardy of being classified as weighted pupil formula. This means that instead of the $15 million allocated for the program going to the 58 counties in California that run the program, the money would be sent directly to and divided among the over 1,000 school districts. Yet, as FMC reports in … Read more

The Media and Juvenile Dependency Courts

How can the news media promote the transparency necessary to improve foster care while protecting the best interests of vulnerable children?

Once a child is removed from his or her biological home because of suspected abuse or neglect, the most important decisions about his or her future become the responsibility of the juvenile dependency court. If that child is re-unified with parents or is sent into foster care is only the first of a series of decisions that sets the course of that child’s life.

Across the country, the media’s role in covering these important proceedings has been hotly debated. … Read more

Donate Pajamas to Foster Youth This Winter

On Friday, February 10 from 8am-2pm, the Fairmont San Francisco will be one of many Fairmont hotels collecting pajama and book donations in front of the hotel.

Fairmont Hotels & Resorts of the US West has partnered with the Pajama Program’s OPEN YOUR HEART Campaign to deliver warm sleepwear and nurturing books to children in need.  Celebrating its fifth year of participation, participating Fairmont properties which include the Fairmont San Francisco, the Fairmont San Jose, the Fairmont Newport Beach, the Fairmont Miramar Hotel & Bungalows, the Fairmont Sonoma Mission Inn & Spa, and the Fairmont Heritage Place, Ghirardelli Square (San Francisco), … Read more

FMC’s New Internship Program Just Around The Corner

Next week FMC’s new media internship program for current and former foster youth, Guardians of Social Change, kicks off and as the program manager, I couldn’t be more excited.

As a multimedia journalist for FMC I have the privilege of writing about a topic I’m not only interested in, but I know will help make changes in lives of children. Yet watching these fledgling journalists will inspire a new energy within me and this child-first movement because of the inside-out perspective they will bring to the four print stories and video project they create. Having been in foster care, … Read more

Removal: J4 Social Change Session 4

The Fourth Session of Journalism for Social Change explores the toughest decision a social worker will ever make: when to take a child out of his or her home and into the foster care system.

It’s a little after after 4 PM on an average Wednesday at Command Post, the nerve center of the Los Angeles County Department and Children and Family Services’ (DCFS) effort to cope with the relentless tide of child abuse and neglect. Jennifer Lopez, the Acting Executive Deputy Director of the Department, scans an email sent from one of her workers on the front line of … Read more

Journalism for Social Change: Covering Child Maltreatment

During its third session, Journalism for Social Change will delve into the media’s role in covering child abuse and neglect and then move into a substantive conversation about what we actually know. The class and interested members of the public will … Read more