Name: Anais Cornfeld
Social Justice Group: Child Welfare, Foster Care and Adoption
Date of Fieldwork: February 7, 2022
Name of Organization and person (people) with whom you met and their title(s): The New Alternatives For Children (NAC). Interview with Arlene Goldsmith (Executive Director), Carla Riccobono (Director of Foster care and Adoption), Bobbi Nathanson (Director of Volunteers, Student Internships & Community Relations), Carola Haberly (Senior Director of Prevention Services), and Paris Robbins (Foster Parent Recruitment Supervisor).
Type of Fieldwork: Interview
What I did and what I learned about my topic, activism, social justice work or civil and human rights work from this fieldwork?[:: :
Our Group Met with The New Alternatives For Children (NAC). We interviewed 4 people: Arlene Goldsmith (Executive Director), Carla Riccobono (Director of Foster care and Adoption), Bobbi Nathanson (Director of Volunteers, Student Internships & Community Relations), Carola Haberly (Senior Director of Prevention Services), and Paris Robbins (Foster Parent Recruitment Supervisor). This organization works through ACS and is working incredibly hard to be there for every child in need throughout the boroughs. Their organization was started over 40 years ago by Arlene herself after spending 25 years in social work, to focus on children living in hospitals for longer than they needed to because of disabilities they had. their parents were unprepared to take care of them themselves or didn’t know what needed to be done. We learned a lot of interesting facts, for example, we know that children cannot be removed from their family’s household until taking the case to family court. Removal must be deemed necessary by a judge. We also learned that the children that are hardest to place are teens. the program mostly focuses on kids with disabilities, and they noted that it is definitely a challenge to get children with more challenging disabilities with more special needs and attention adopted. because of this, it is also harder to keep siblings all together if there is a big family, or multiple or all of the kids have special needs. Housing can also affect this because it can be hard to find people who own a big enough space to take in many kids.
NAC works extremely hard to get children back with their birth parents as soon as possible, preferring to put foster children with Kinship parents. It is shown that children staying with relatives makes visiting their parents easier, and they generally have a better time with someone who is related. of course, not all children have relatives available to foster them. Non-kinship foster parents go through an extensive training process. Many of them already have pre-existing experience with medical or mental care.
I definitely learned a lot through this interview. there was one quote that I left with that really stuck with me: “statistically parents who pertain optimism succeed the most when fostering.” They don’t succeed because they think it is the right thing to do, or if it has anything to do with their religion. The foster parents that usually succeed are the ones that truly believe they can make a difference in their foster child’s life, and are willing to put in time and effort for their success and well-being.
