http://www.nccprblog.org/
Part of his farewell message (see link for remainder):
Thanks for the 4,683 gifts
By all logic, NCCPR never should have been funded at all.
There’s the fact that we had to convince people that, just because we wanted to bring fundamental concepts of civil liberties to child welfare, we’re not a bunch of right-wingers who want to let parents do whatever they want to their kids.
Then there was the problem of convincing potential funders of the importance of changing the way media cover child welfare; or if they understood it was important, convincing them it could be done.
And finally there was the matter of persuading foundations, which tend to be genteel by nature, to fund NCCPR’s blunt-spoken approach to advocacy.
Given all that, it’s no wonder that it took eight years from our founding in 1991 to raise enough funding to hire a full-time executive director.
When I started, in June of 1999, it was with enough money to last eight months. I’ve been on this job for nearly 13 years. But logic, finally, is catching up.
Earlier this year, it became clear that NCCPR would not be able to continue in its present form much longer. So effective at the end of the day tomorrow, (March 30), NCCPR will suspend operations. This Blog and NCCPR’s main website, www.nccpr.org will remain online but, for the foreseeable future, they will not be updated. Starting Monday I will have a new job with an organization that does superb advocacy work in another field.
I leave NCCPR knowing that we have left child welfare a lot better than we found it. In 1999, on any given day there were 565,000 children trapped in foster care. Years of smears against efforts to keep families together and created a climate so hostile that some in the field seriously considered abandoning even the term “family preservation.” Today there are about 408,000 children in foster care – and family preservation is back. The progress has been amazing – and also not nearly enough.