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Date: 8/16/2022
NORTHAMPTON – Friends of Children, and organization that advocates for children and young adults impacted by foster care or juvenile justice involvement, recently relocated to Northampton and Boston for spatial and programmatic reasons. The organization is now located at 241 King St. in Suite 227 in Northampton and 112 Water St. in Suite 502 in Boston.
According to Debi Belkin, the Court Appointed Special Advocate (CASA) program director for Friends of Children, the move to Northampton from Hadley was more of a spatial and fiscal decision. “Due to the pandemic and more hybrid work, we haven’t had much calling for a large conference room, which was in our space in Hadley, and the rents were being raised post-COVID-19,” said Belkin. “There was an opportunity to come back to the Northampton side of the bridge in a space that was a little bit bigger office-wise, since our staff was growing.”
Friends of Children, which used to reside in Northampton before Hadley, is an agency that formed in 1990 to address the needs of high-risk children who are not readily supported by systems designed to protect them or encourage participation in society. To date, Friends of Children has provided child advocacy services to well over 15,000 children.
“We’re still very close to the juvenile court [Northampton Juvenile Court Clinic], which, for my program, is critical,” said Belkin, of the Northampton move. “We do have a fair amount of volunteers in Easthampton and Northampton area. It’s a fairly convenient location.”
The Boston move, meanwhile, is more programmatic, and involves the physical expansion of the organization’s FOCUS program, which is the mentoring program for the youth who have aged out of foster care with the state’s Department of Children and Families (DCF), the statewide organization responsible for providing support and services to keep children safe with parents or family members.
“It’s a program that matches community volunteers who want to be longtime mentors to these youth who are really not connected to family,” said Belkin. “We ask for two or three years of commitment from community volunteers who are willing to be matched with one youth, and a plan is developed with the youth around what they want to work on, and what kind of support they need.”
The move to Boston will also accommodate the growing number of families who need Friends of Children’s services. “We are now getting calls from everywhere – not just here in Western Mass.,” said Belkin. “We have a number of youth on the eastern part of the state who are calling asking for mentors, so it seemed really timely to bring that [FOCUS] program out.”
The other program Friends of Children operates is their Children’s Union, which is the organization’s policy development program. “It’s kind of our statewide advocacy,” said Belkin. “It’s all the issues we in our agency learn about through the young people aging out, through the families I work with at my CASA program … there’s a lot of issues around services and agency support to children and child welfare.”
For example, the Children’s Union and the organization’s policy director is advocating for a bill that would develop an independent foster care review process of children who are in custody of the DCF.
“Basically, DCF is monitoring themselves,” said Belkin, adding that the bill has been kicking around at the state level for four years. “Our bill proposes that that [review process] come out of DCF and that there be some more oversight with what’s going on, with an independent review agency.”
Despite these changes, Belkin said her CASA program will stay in the Western Massachusetts area.
To learn more about Friends of Children and what they offer, visit their website, https://friendsofchildreninc.org/.