Child welfare is often a fraught and politicized process.

Within this space, there are few opportunities for people with experiences, either as children or parents, in the system to share their stories. However, those reflections can be invaluable to help shape wider public understandings, perceptions, and debates.

For Court Appointed Special Advocates (CASA) for Children of Essex County, public history offers a methodology for collecting, sharing, and preserving stories in a way that strives to be non-extractive.

“Through this project, we are focused on both creating spaces for conversations between stakeholders and establishing archives and exhibitions that can have a lasting impact after this project is concluded,” said Jessica Earl, grants and policy analyst for CASA for Children of Essex County. “We are also invested in the kinds of communities that can be created through the process of building a public history project.”

The organization previously participated in NJCH’s Community History program, learning about the practice of community-based history and storytelling and developing the infrastructure needed to implement the project funded by the current grant.

“By taking a long view of the child welfare system, we are seeking to provide context for contemporary debates around the system and how inequalities within it have been produced and sustained over time.”

While CASA has been a nationwide service provider for children in foster care since 1978, there has been a growing disconnect between the community that comprises our volunteers and the community that we serve, Earl said. The organization hopes that this project will help them bridge that gap.

“The history of the child welfare system in New Jersey has been told largely without attention to the voices of people with lived experiences in it. While there is growing awareness of the racially disproportionate ways that this system impacts families in New Jersey, those perceptions often reify long-standing and misguided stereotypes about parents and children in the system,” Earl said. “We instead hope to foreground the way that the child welfare system is deeply interconnected to inequalities within a wider array of housing, food insecurity, and mobility systems.

“By taking a long view of the child welfare system, we are seeking to provide context for contemporary debates around the system and how inequalities within it have been produced and sustained over time.”