On April 15, 1947, Jackie Robinson walked onto Ebbets Field in Brooklyn and became the first Black player in modern Major League Baseball. The Baseball Hall of Fame records that 26,623 fans watched him take the field that afternoon—more than 14,000 of them Black. Robinson…
National Siblings Day arrives on April 10, and social media will fill with childhood photos, inside jokes, and hashtags celebrating the people who grew up in the same house with the same parents. For Plan B families—foster, adoptive, kinship, and stepfamilies—the day carries a different…
The phrase hangs on bulletin boards and appears in staff handbooks across the youth-serving sector: “If you see something, say something.” It sounds empowering. It places responsibility on every member of the organization to serve as a watchdog for child safety. And in practice, it…
Summer programming season approaches fast, and with it comes an influx of new staff, expanded activities, and extended hours of direct contact between adults and children. For youth-serving organizations, summer represents both an extraordinary opportunity to serve young people and a period of heightened vulnerability….
Planting Seeds You May Never See Bloom Every spring, gardeners push seeds into soil and wait. They water ground that looks the same as yesterday. They protect plots from frost, pull weeds, and check drainage—all before anything green breaks the surface. Some seeds sprout in…
Spring invites us to open windows, clear out what we no longer need, and make room for what serves us better. Most people apply that impulse to closets and garages. Plan B parents—foster, adoptive, and stepparents —need to apply it somewhere deeper: to the invisible…
A landmark 12-year longitudinal study reframes what your organization can do—and why it matters. Many staff members and leaders in youth-serving organizations carry a quiet tension. They engage with the ACE research, they understand the cumulative weight of adverse childhood experiences on the children and…
Starting tomorrow, the blue pinwheels will return to signal Child Abuse Prevention Month. Organizations share child abuse prevention statistics on social media. Lawmakers proclaim awareness. Schools distribute body safety coloring pages. And across the country, Plan B parents — those of us parenting foster, adoptive,…
I need a glass of water Most would think this is an easy statement with an easy answer. It should be. But, friends, it’s not! Recently I was on a flight to a work meeting. As usual the space was tight, the seats were hard and…
In early March, the Georgia Court of Appeals issued a ruling that youth-serving organizations should note. The case — Darlington School v. Philadelphia Indemnity et al. — reversed a $345 million judgment against five insurance carriers, finding that policies written decades after abuse occurred cannot…
You probably didn’t expect parenting to feel like a siege. You opened your home, your life, and your heart. And then you waited — for connection, for trust, for the moment when something finally shifted. Maybe you’re still waiting to see your kids healing from…
Any time an independent investigation finds wrongdoing, the alleged perpetrator will be upset. They often file lawsuits against the investigator or the youth organization or both. A story about a recent lawsuit from California illustrates the pitfalls of not asking enough questions in an investigation and why…