Greater Birmingham Community of Hope - Extended Network Gathering

About the Event

The Greater Birmingham Community of Hope (GBCOH) is a network of community leaders, system participants, and multiple sectors committed to empowering and supporting families. GBCOH aims to co-create with the community an infrastructure that strengthens families and helps prevent children from entering the child welfare system.

At our first event, we're excited to share updates on GBCOH's progress over the last three years, learn from some of the planning partners of GBCOH, and provide time and space for networking across organizations and backgrounds, in an effort to cultivate the existing ecosystem of family-focused services in Jefferson County. Whether you are a child and family professional, nonprofit professional, educator, community leader, or guardian, we'd love to see you there! Light refreshments to be provided.

Background and Community Context

Planning partners for GBCOH include Casey Family Programs, Community Foundation of Greater Birmingham, LeadEarly Birmingham, UAB School of Public Health, and Urban Ministry.

Through on-the-ground partnership, support, and data analysis in Alabama and through research and experience with child and family serving organizations across the country, we offer the following observations.

• Jefferson County has seen a significant decrease in the number of children in state care over the last few years. This is due to improvements in the number of children safely exiting care AND positive trends in the rate of children entering care.
• However, some children continue to enter care that may not have needed to if appropriate family supports had been available and accessible to the family.
• Current child welfare structures are primarily service based (i.e., assessment, time-limited intervention) targeting deficits in the family rather than focusing on strengths.
• Current child welfare system relationships may create power differentials (i.e., elicit fear, anxiety, and compliance) and models that underlie the child welfare system have historically been rooted in a mentality of rescue, racial superiority, and inequity.
• We support the City of Birmingham’s Mayor’s Office of Social Justice and Racial Equity’s vision to create a just and equitable Birmingham, including addressing community inequities affecting under-served residents through an equity lens.
• We understand that economic and concrete supports are at the center of family strengthening and successful prevention strategies.
• Many potential family-strengthening and prevention efforts are limited due to lack of capacity within available service array

In response, we ask ourselves, how might we work with community partners to define and co-create a system to support families with a robust community-based response (and proactive support) that engages and empowers families?

To this end, we hope to co-create with the greater community a child and family strengthening infrastructure based in a belief of equity and family strengths that will allow the local community to better leverage and develop a system of supports that will prevent children from entering the child welfare system.

This, we believe will result in increased community strengths leading in part to decreased screened in reports to child protective services, decreased foster care entry, and an increase in the use of “warm lines” and similar community-driven supports that prevent children from entering foster care.

This will be the Greater Birmingham Community of Hope. Not a place. Not an organization. But a network of community leaders, system participants, and multiple sectors that empowers and supports families in making decisions that improve their life outcomes.

Host or Publisher Community Foundation of Greater Birmingham events