TEAMCHILD
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Mission Statement
TeamChild was founded in 1995 to help Washington State’s most vulnerable children, those caught in the juvenile justice system often because they are suffering trauma and unmet needs resulting from homelessness, poverty, physical and mental illness, disability, neglect, abuse and discrimination. Today, TeamChild advances its mission through three programs: Legal Services, Policy Advocacy, and Technical Assistance. Our three program strategies work together to improve the long term outcomes of youth who experience unequal treatment and more negative outcomes in our state’s education, juvenile justice, and child-welfare systems.
About This Cause
For twenty years, TeamChild has played a critical role in keeping youth out of juvenile court and reconnecting them to education, healthcare, and housing supports with the goal of keeping them healthy and safe in our community. Our specialized legal services are targeted to young people involved in juvenile court: teenagers who are predominantly youth of color and youth struggling with disabilities. Many of these youth have been touched by the foster care system. Today, TeamChild provides legal services to nearly 1,000 children in crisis each year in five of the most populated counties across Washington State: King, Pierce, Snohomish, Spokane and Yakima. Our staff help children with high needs get back in school, find stable housing, and access care and support that ensures they are healthy and safe in the community. Our results are very encouraging: 80% of children who receive legal representation from TeamChild because they are out of school get back into school. For some of the most distressed, highest needs children, the number of new offenses is cut by more than half. We are keenly aware that helping kids one by one is not enough. Our client work over the past two decades has exposed aspects of the education, juvenile justice, public healthcare, and other child serving systems that are working well and other aspects that are failing miserably. We are building TeamChild’s policy and technical assistance programs to advance broader system solutions that dismantle the dysfunctional parts of systems and strengthen the parts that work so that we avoid the need for our legal services in the first place. Our policy team will advance reforms that reduce the reliance on and overuse of arrest and detention, while our technical assistance team will work with partners to ensure those reforms are effectively implemented on the ground. Together, our three programs are designed to divert children away from school exclusion, arrest, and incarceration and directly into the supports that have the best chances of getting them back on track.