"It's a unique and rare moment," Vivek S. Sankaran said to the Community Collaborations to Strengthen and Preserve Families grantees at the Children's Bureau Annual Discretionary Grantee Meetings in August. "So many constituencies talking about primary prevention at the same time," he explained. The grantees, whose work focuses on mobilizing communities to support families and preventing unnecessary removal of children into foster care, nodded in agreement. The buzz and excitement surrounding this shift in focus was heard from just about every presenter at the Grantee Meetings, from Jan Shafer, the director of the Division of Program Innovation at the Children's Bureau, to Lynn Johnson (pictured above with grantees), assistant secretary at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families.  

Mr. Sankaran, a clinical professor of law at the University of Michigan Law School, continued that the message is not just coming from all levels of the child welfare field, but the legal community is discussing the critical role it plays in keeping children and families together and preventing child abuse and neglect.  

In 2009, Mr. Sankaran founded the Detroit Center for Family Advocacy, which was the first organization in the country to provide multidisciplinary legal assistance to families to prevent the unnecessary entry of children into foster care. The center focused on solving legal issues that could potentially destabilize families (special education, housing, etc.), while prioritizing relationship building with parents, the child welfare agency, the caseworker, and other related professionals. This collaborative approach paid off—none of the children from the families the center worked with (from 2009–2016) entered the foster care system.  

This is just one example of how providing families with legal assistance before a crisis occurs is a vital part of the prevention continuum. David Kelley, special assistant to the associate commissioner of the Children's Bureau, followed Mr. Sankaran and reiterated the call to action by urging those in the room to engage their local courts and legal community in their primary prevention efforts.