January 21, 2026
In 2020, in the throes of the COVID pandemic, I led the charge at the NYC Administration for Children’s Services (ACS) to develop and launch a pilot initiative called Parents Supporting Parents, now called Parents Empowering Parents (PEP). The focus of the initiative was on hiring and training individuals with prior lived experience of the child welfare system to become Parent Advocates to mentor parents with children in foster care. Our objectives were to elevate parent voice, impact foster care agency culture and improve disproportionality and reunification outcomes.
A recent article published in the CWLA Child Welfare Journal (2025, Volume 103, No. 4) speaks to the success of this approach and important implications for policy and practice moving forward.
The initiative was based on the recognition that bias, racism and power differentials can affect how child welfare staff work with parents and how parents interact with the system. We envisioned that Parent Advocates–who had walked in the shoes of parents of children currently in foster care–would be effective mentors for those parents and would also positively impact foster care agency staff culture.
Casey Family Programs, the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the Redlich Horwitz Foundation and the Joseph Leroy and Ann C. Warner Fund stepped forward to fund the pilot. We partnered with Rise, a parent-led advocacy organization, to develop and implement the initiative with two contracted foster care agencies, Graham and Rising Ground.
We implemented an intensive co-design process, engaging lived experts in the design of the entire initiative. A key piece of the design was that Parent Advocates were embedded directly in the agencies’ foster care case planning units, becoming full members of the team alongside case planners and supervisors.
Based on the initial promise of the pilot, we were successful in securing City funding to scale the approach systemwide, with the vision that every parent of a child in foster care with a goal of reunification would have a Parent Advocate walking alongside them.
The pilot began with philanthropy funding seven full-time parent advocates at two of the 26 contracted foster care agencies. As of November 2025, ACS reports that PEP has increased to nearly 80 Parent Advocates systemwide.
In“Partnering for Change: How Lived Experience is Reshaping Reunification Practices and Fostering Culture Transformation in Child Welfare,” authors Marina Lalayants, Polly Mygatt and Jeanette Vega Brown state the following:
“The study findings indicate that the PEP Initiative not only enhanced practices within the two pilot agencies but also served as a blueprint for citywide systemic transformation. The involvement of individuals with lived experience proved instrumental in driving incremental yet meaningful, transformative culture change. Their inclusion in every phase of the initiative—design, implementation, and evaluation—ensured that the program remained grounded in real-world insights and addressed systemic biases effectively.
A central outcome of the PEP Initiative was its role in challenging and transforming stereotypes held by child welfare staff toward parents affected by the child welfare system. Initially viewed with skepticism due to their own past involvement, PAs successfully demonstrated their value as colleagues and contributors. This shift not only elevated PAs’ status within agencies but also fostered broader culture changes, encouraging CPs and supervisors to adopt more nuanced and compassionate perspectives toward parents.”
This project is an example of what it takes to move from vision to execution, including raising private funding; implementing a collaborative design process with lived experts; developing policies and protocols for a new initiative; piloting the new practice approach; and evaluating that approach and scaling it system-wide.
JULIE FARBER CONSULTING 