Today’s U.S. Senate Appropriations hearing offered a tremendous opportunity to engage key orphan-related policy issues and also spotlight the vital role that so many Christian groups are playing in caring for orphans worldwide.
In my remarks before the Committee, I desired to affirm that government can indeed play a vital role in child protection and survival…and yet also to express clearly the fundamental reality that government can never meet the deepest needs of unparented children on its own.
I sought to champion permanent family as the ideal for every child…while also affirming the need for a broad continuum of care for orphans, especially in the world’s most broken and hurting places. As expressed in my written remarks:
This continuum always starts with efforts to preserve families threatened with disintegration and to re-unify families that have been needlessly severed. When it’s clearly not possible for a child to remain safely with his first family, a loving second family is promptly sought—with relatives or caring neighbors in-country if possible, and via international adoption when local options for permanent family aren’t available. When finding a permanent new family is not an option, other home-based options become the priority, including foster care. Finally, when no home-based options are feasible, well-run residential care facilities provide an important alternative far preferable to an abusive home or life on the streets.
All in all, it was a privilege to join the other leaders testifying at the hearing, and to get to speak in a small way into the Budget process that affects hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign aid.
Of course, the hearing as a whole carried some of the government-speak inevitable in Washington. But I also felt it offered substantive exploration of the major U.S. investments in serving children in adversity…and how they can be improved.
You can view the entire hearing HERE on the Senate Appropriations website.
The first panel consists of U.S. government and U.N. officials
The second panel (beginning at 148:30) consists of private sector and academic leaders
- Dr. Charles Nelson of Harvard University (begins at 149:50)
- Jedd Medefind of the Christian Alliance for Orphans (begins at 155:12)
- Philip Goldman of Maestral International (begins at 200:35)
- Significant Q & A begins at 206:15
My written remarks as submitted before the hearing are below.
SENATE APPROPRIATIONS HEARING: Review of U.S. Foreign Assistance for Children in Adversity
Statement of Jedd Medefind, President, Christian Alliance for Orphans
Esteemed Senators and Senate Staff,
It represents America at her best that our leaders desire not only to aid vulnerable children, but to continually improve our approach to doing so.
Thank you for this opportunity to address you toward that end.
My name is Jedd Medefind. I have the privilege of serving as President of the Christian Alliance for Orphans.
This Alliance unites more than 145 respected organizations. Collectively, they serve millions of orphans and vulnerable children, both across the U.S. and worldwide. Their emphases range from foster care, residential care and adoption, to efforts to help keep struggling families together.
Through the Alliance, these organizations work together to both inspire and equip individuals, families and churches to care for vulnerable children effectively.
The majority of these organizations do not seek government grants. But all recognize that government has a vital role to play in the protection and survival of vulnerable children.
Among the most vulnerable of all groups worldwide are children growing up outside of parental care.
Currently available statistics are notoriously incomplete, and sometimes misleading, in diagnosing the scope and nature of the need
UNICEF estimates that 17.8 million children worldwide have lost both parents. Many of these children live with caring relatives. Many others do not. In addition, it is believed that tens of millions of additional children live on the streets, in orphanages, and other settings devoid of consistent, nurturing parental care.
Studies consistently show that children who lack the protection and nurture that parents uniquely provide typically lag far behind their peers in virtually every respect. They are highly susceptible to the worst ravages of poverty, disease, sexual predators, and human trafficking. They also offer opportune recruits as child soldiers, gang members and potential terrorists.
We see this vividly even in the U.S. Children that grow up in foster care without being adopted often struggle for the rest of their lives. By their mid-20s, less than half are employed. Nearly 70 percent of the women must rely upon food stamps compared to 7 percent of women overall. Among the men, 80 percent have been arrested, versus 17 percent overall. Experts report that between 55 and 75 percent of domestic human trafficking victims came out of the foster system.
These statistics are tragic. And we must also remember that children without parents in other parts of the world often face an even harder road—with far less access to private opportunities, public supports, and justice systems.
Little wonder that studies worldwide so often connect literal or effective orphan status with homelessness, suicide, depression, unemployment, violence, crime and all manner of other social ills.
In short, children that grow up without parents are continually threatened as they grow. And those that survive often become a threat to others as well.
So it is both compassion and self-interest that call governments and individuals to address this need wisely, passionately, and effectively.
But here is the fundamental challenge.
Governments and large NGOs can deliver many vital things on a large scale: food, medicine, shelter, and more.
And these elements are critical to enabling children to survive. But we must also affirm that these things are necessary but not sufficient to ensuring that children who lack parents can thrive.
Why? Because the deepest need of every child is for things that cannot be mass produced—things like affection, attachment, identity, and belonging.
And, as other witnesses here describe well, modern science now recognizes that these are not simply “fluff” elements of childhood. They are utterly essential to brain development, to physical and emotional health…and to virtually every other factor that grows a baby into a whole and productive adult.
Grasping this is vital if we are to address the deepest needs of children who lack parental care.
And yet, it leaves us with a daunting but inescapable conclusion: This is a mass scale dilemma that defies mass scale solutions.
We can marshal and deliver many things en masse…but nurture, affection and attachment are not among them.
This is why we must look beyond the capabilities of government alone if we are to truly help children that lack parental care to thrive.
This is not easy. All of us, regardless of our profession, tend to unconsciously limit ourselves to solutions that can be readily achieved with the tools we possess.
So it is only natural that government efforts would focus heavily, or even exclusively, on child protection and survival. This is what government and large NGOs can do—and often do so well.
But…what government cannot create on its own are families willing to welcome and care for children. It is much easier to buy food, medicine or shelter than to buy nurture and love.
So it makes sense that the need for permanent, caring families for children would often slip off the radar of government-led efforts.
But how can government cultivate solutions that it cannot create on its own?
Colorado offers a great example here. The state now partners actively with faith-motivated groups, houses of worship and non-religious civic organizations to find welcoming families for children in need of a home.
Colorado’s government has worked to be effective at what it can do—child protection and survival—while partnering to offer children those truly essential things government cannot provide on its own.
They have found large numbers of families motivated by their faith to welcome in children, including many of the hardest to place kids. They have also discovered that faith communities often provide vital support for families amidst the challenges that come with loving wounded children. Not surprisingly, the level of commitment and care provided by these faith communities often is much higher than families that foster primarily because of the payments they receive. Businesses, civic groups, and other non-governmental actors have also played vital roles in these efforts.
The result? Over the past several years, the number of children in Colorado waiting in foster care for permanent families has been steadily reduced–from over 800 to under 300 today.
Similar efforts are proving effective in many other states across the U.S., from New Jersey to Texas to Illinois to California.
This same basic approach is working around the world as well:
In China, where regional governments have partnered with the organization “Care for Children” to move 250,000 children from orphanages into caring families.
In Ethiopia, where organizations like Bethany Christian Services, Buckner International, and Kidmia are working to help keep struggling families intact and to place double orphans into local foster and adoptive families
In Rwanda, where Saddleback Church and other faith-based groups are working with the government and NGOs to shift children from orphanages into foster and adoptive homes.
In Costa Rica, where a group called Casa Viva has grown a network of churches that now welcomes children for both temporary and permanent family-based care.
Three primary principles are at the root of each of these successes:
First, Priority. We must clearly prioritize family as the ultimate goal for children that currently lack it. By naming “Family Care” as one of its three foundational objectives, the U.S. Action Plan on Children in Adversity helps point our global investments decisively in this direction
Second, Preservation. The very best way to guarantee a family for a vulnerable child is to ensure she doesn’t lose her family in the first place. On one level, virtually all effective foreign aid—from community development to health projects and micro-finance—do contribute to family preservation. But efforts targeting the most vulnerable families on the verge of disintegration are still vital.
Third, Placement. When preservation or reunification isn’t an option, a child deserve a permanent family as soon as is feasible—locally if possible, and via international adoption if not.
All of these are made possible by a fourth “P”: Partnerships that enable government to cultivate solutions that it cannot create on its own.
To these three principles, we can add three important caveats:
First, although healthy families provide affection and nurture that “systems” can never match, families can sometimes be the source of neglect, abuse or worse. Effective child protection systems are always necessary as a check against abusive homes.
Second, commitment to family-based care should always be complementary…not competitive to an equally firm commitment to child protection and survival efforts. We need not become partisans of either families or broad-based anti-poverty efforts. We can and should champion both.
And finally, even as we affirm permanent family as the ideal, we need not become ideologically rigid. Anyone who dares to engage the world at its most broken will sometimes be forced to make peace with imperfect solutions. We can simultaneously work towards the ideal of family…while also affirming the value of residential care in cases where family care is not currently a feasible option.
In all of this, we can continually affirm and seek to build a broad continuum of response to the needs of highly-vulnerable children.
This continuum always starts with efforts to preserve families threatened with disintegration and to re-unify families that have been needlessly severed. When it’s clearly not possible for a child to remain safely with his first family, a loving second family is promptly sought—with relatives or caring neighbors in-country if possible, and via international adoption when local options for permanent family aren’t available. When finding a permanent new family is not an option, other home-based options become the priority, including foster care. Finally, when no home-based options are feasible, well-run residential care facilities provide an important alternative far preferable to an abusive home or life on the streets.
Esteemed Senators and Senate staff, I believe that every American desires to see children not only survive, but to thrive. I know this is your desire also.
If this is indeed our shared commitment as Americans, it must be embodied through our global child welfare investments with the three “Ps.” Priority upon family. Preservation of struggling families. And prompt placement into permanent new families for children who need them.