Funder Focus: Sheilagh Johnson and the Children's Aid Foundation
July 5, 2004
By Nicole Zummach
This month in our Funder Focus, we feature the Children's Aid Foundation,
which is committed to improving the lives of abused and neglected children
through education, enrichment, and prevention. CharityVillage spoke
with executive director Sheilagh Johnson about the foundation's
relationship with the Children's Aid Society, the many programs it has
developed to help fulfill its mandate, and how it is working to address
the cycle of poverty and its effect on children.
CharityVillage: The Children's Aid Society is a very well known organization in Canada. What is the difference between CAS and the foundation? Why was it established?
Sheilagh Johnson: The foundation was established 25 years ago,
and the reason it was established was to be an arms-length support to
the Children's Aid Societies. As you know, the Children's Aid Societies
- very similar to hospitals - receive their core funding from the government.
So the foundation is set up very much the way a hospital foundation
is set up, to fund things that the government is not required to fund.
In our case, the government will fund room and board for children that
are in foster care, but they do not fund any kind of extras. If a child
wants to play hockey or go on a school trip then that's the sort of
thing the foundation will pick up.
Also, the government will not put any money into education and the kind of children served by the Children's Aid Society are, for the most part, about two years behind their peers in school. Academics is usually a real problem for them, so education is a major piece that we fund. That includes early school readiness programs, tutoring programs, mentoring programs, and bursaries and scholarships if they move out of our system.
CV: Who develops and operates the education programs that you fund?
SJ: The programs were actually developed here at the foundation and then they are operated on a day-to-day basis by the Children's Aid Society. For example, a program like Read With Me, which is a literacy-based program, is something the societies operate, volunteers deliver, and we fund.
CV: What is the goal or anticipated outcome of such programs? Are you trying to bring children up to the same level as their peers or simply to support them at their own level?
SJ: Well, first of all, let me tell you about the kind of children
we serve. They are very high-risk children. They are children who have
come from backgrounds of abuse, neglect, terrific violence, and poverty.
The families usually have a history of drug and alcohol abuse, and generally
some mental illness issues. For the most part, none of the children's
parents would have completed high school and a very high number would
be illiterate.
So when these high-risk children start school in junior kindergarten
they tend not to be at the same level as their peers. They may not be
able to recognize letters or colours. Many of these children have never
had toys and they certainly have never been exposed to books. What often
happens is that as soon as they go into junior kindergarten they are
either moved into a special education class or into behavioural classes.
We find that at the time they reach the latency age they begin to really
slip behind. And often through elementary school the school system will
continue to push them up a grade even if they aren't ready. By the time
they get to highschool they can't cope and huge numbers or these children
are dropping out in grade nine or ten.
Our education program is multi-faceted. It's designed, first of all,
to prepare children to go to junior kindergarten in the first place.
It's designed to provide support to them once they are in the school
system. That may be various types of tutoring support. It could be one-on-one
tutoring, group tutoring, or intergenerational tutoring. It's a variety
of things to meet the needs of that child. Those needs may be cultural
needs, religious needs, or language needs because the children served
by the Children's Aid Society come from a wide variety of religious
and cultural backgrounds.
Then there is the issue of keeping them in school. Because we statistically
see such a high level of children dropping out in grade nine or ten,
we have various supports to keep them in school. Aside from the tutoring
we have various award programs to build children's self-esteem because
these are children who have really had no successes in their lives.
They are never the children who get the As. They are never the children
who get the ribbon. So our Stay In School program is designed to recognize
them.
CV: You also fund programs that teach parents how to love and respect their children. Is this something fairly new or have you always funded programs that educate parents?
SJ: Prevention is a major issue for us and that was really the issue that we were formed around twenty-five years ago. So we look at prevention programs that try to stop children from coming into the care of the Children's Aid Society. We call them primary prevention programs, and that includes a range of things. One of them is working with parents. We have a lot of very young parents, teen parents, or parents who are a little older but who never learned parenting themselves because they were never parented.
Some of it is just very basic parenting skills, such as learning how
to change a diaper, issues around nutrition, and watching for spikes
in a child's temperature. Some of the programs are designed for women
who are very isolated because a lot of the families we serve are single-parent
families, largely led by women working in very high-risk neighbourhoods,
often in large apartment buildings. So the programs can combine parenting
with nutrition, as well as perhaps some community links and trying to
bring groups of women together. All of these programs are focused on
prevention and trying to keep children out of the care of the Children's
Aid Society if possible.
CV: Tell me about your Foster Parent Recruitment and Retention Grant Program. Why is this program necessary? What are the current challenges facing the foster care system?
SJ: This is a program that we operate in partnership with the
Ontario government. There is a tremendous need for foster parents right
across the country. Here in Ontario we've experienced a great deal of
difficulty in retaining foster parents. Foster parenting is very, very
difficult work. In the major cities it's more and more difficult to
find families where one of the partners is at home during the day and
is able to take the kinds of kids we have into their homes. The program
was looking at the whole province and looking at how we could innovatively
and creatively recruit foster parents and what systems could be put
in place to retain them and make the job rewarding, because as you know,
foster parents are not paid.
A number of interesting things have come out of it. One of the things
we are doing in the far north, in the Hudson's Bay area, is we have
big billboards to recruit foster parents. When that idea first came
to the table a number of us from Toronto said, 'what would another billboard
do?' Then it became clear to us that in certain communities there was
no such thing as a billboard, so putting one up was almost a community
attraction. We've been trying to look at how to recruit foster parents
not by just a central model but by looking at every community and asking,
'what is the best way to reach people in that community? What will motivate
them to become foster parents?'
CV: Most of your funding goes to Children's Aid Societies but you also provide grants to community based organizations working in the area of child abuse prevention.
SJ: That's correct. We also provide grants to organizations working
in the areas of education and enrichment, and we do that right across
the country. For example, we have a large program running around recreation
and moving high-risk children into organized sports, which we feel is
very good for them. We also do granting to community-based organizations
for primary prevention. So our granting program is fairly diverse.
We have granted to breakfast clubs and to organizations that do after-school
programs for children in high-risk neighbourhoods. We've done grants
to Native organizations that are working with high-risk children on
reserves or in specific areas. There's quite a range of things that
we do.
CV: Although you do some national funding, are the bulk of your grants directed to organizations in Ontario and specifically Toronto?
SJ: It depends on the program. The bulk of our funding to Children's
Aid goes to the Children's Aid Society of Toronto. The reason for that,
and a lot of people don't know this, is that the Children's Aid Society
of Toronto is actually the largest child welfare agency in North America.
It's an organization that has a very rich history of innovation and
doing cutting edge work in terms of best practice in social work. So
when we fund the Children's Aid Society we look to fund programs that
can be replicated in other jurisdictions. We often use the Children's
Aid Society of Toronto as an incubation lab. We'll fund programs there,
test them and look at the outcomes, and then look at moving them across
the country.
CV: Since the foundation receives no government funding, you have to do your own fundraising and one of the ways you do that is through online donations and an online merchandise shop. What has the response been to these online fundraising efforts?
SJ: Well, it's interesting because we've really seen an increase in that over the last two years, and particularly in the last year. We're also looking at it demographically. We have various fundraising events and for those that are skewed more towards the 20- to 30-year-olds, almost all of our registrations are online. For our galas and golf tournaments, which are skewed to an older audience, we get very little registration online. Also, in some of the partnership programs that we do - we do a partnership program with one of the radio stations here in Toronto - almost all of the donations come in online. So we're definitely seeing a tremendous increase in that area and we'll continue to develop it as time goes on.
CV: Looking at the bigger picture, is child poverty the most pressing issue when it comes to child welfare?
SJ: I think that child poverty, and family poverty in general,
underlies everything that we do. Not to say that abuse is limited to
people living in poverty, I would never want to say that, but I think
that when you are in a situation where you are living on the poverty
line it is difficult to get the supports that you need in a family.
If you are a middle or upper class family and you have some issues within
the family you usually have either the intellectual resources or the
personal resources, or the networking resources to get the support you
need. So poverty is a huge issue for us.
The poverty we see is often third world poverty and I don't think Canadians
generally have any idea of the kind of poverty that people experience
in Canada. We see tremendous neglect of children, children who don't
ask 'what's for dinner tonight?' but 'is there dinner tonight?' These
are children who are hungry, who don't have the proper clothing to go
to school, and who don't have the proper supports to be in the academic
system. So yes, poverty is huge and we do support and fund various programs
that look at ways to eliminate poverty. Out of that comes such issues
as affordable housing and making sure that children being served by
the Children's Aid Society have the means to get education or training
so they don't leave the Children's Aid Society and go right back out
on the welfare roll.
We've been very closely associated with Campaign 2000. We also fund a huge community work program and the community workers that we fund tend to work in poverty communities, focusing largely on the issue of affordable housing. What we are trying to do is not just fund the problem but to look at the systemic issues that underlie them. So poverty is one, housing is another, education is a big one for us, and then enrichment and enabling the children who grow up in these high-risk situations to feel, at least some of the time, that they are like middle class children and can do things such as go to the prom or out to a movie, these kinds of things.
CV: What are the long-term goals of the foundation? Where
would you like to see things five years from now?
SJ: Well, it's interesting that you'd ask that question because we are in the midst of our strategic planning process, which will take us from 2005 to 2010. We've just reaffirmed that our three pillars - enrichment, education, and prevention - are so important and there is still so much to accomplish that these are areas where we really have to focus. We are currently looking at the issue of housing and whether we have the capacity to make a difference in that area. We certainly will focus on some sort of transitional housing for youth that are leaving the care of the Children's Aid Society, but whether we can take on anything larger than that is still to be determined as we go through our strategic plan.
Sheilagh Johnson has been with the Children's Aid Foundation for
nine years. Prior to that she worked at the Catholic Children's Aid Society. For more information about the foundation, visit www.cafdn.org.
