Bellevue, WA — The CFO Selections Foundation is pleased to announce a grant of $61,000 to TeamChild.
This grant will be given over a three-year period, and will assist TeamChild in their mission to provide help to children in need of legal services and advocacy in the courts. Anne Lee, TeamChild Executive Director, said “We are thrilled to partner with the CFOS Foundation in solving the upstream challenges that keep pushing youth into the justice system. This investment leverages TeamChild’s ability to scale our programs to meet the complex needs of our most vulnerable kids, including kids in the foster care system.”
About TeamChild
TeamChild was created in 1995, born out of the frustration of seeing young people with significant mental health, education, and housing needs cycle in and out of the criminal justice system without getting the help and support they needed to remain healthy and trouble-free in the community. Public defenders for these youth could recognize the barriers, but didn’t have the resources to address the problems. In contrast, civil legal aid attorneys didn’t have a mechanism for identifying and serving youth. TeamChild was created to bridge this gap between the juvenile justice system and the community.
Today, TeamChild advances its mission through three programs: Legal Services, Policy Advocacy, and Technical Assistance. The three program strategies work together to improve the long term outcomes of youth who experience unequal treatment and more negative outcomes in our education, juvenile justice, and child welfare systems. TeamChild is best known for its legal services program reaching children in crisis in King, Pierce, Snohomish, Spokane, and Yakima Counties. Their approach connects high-needs youth with supportive services, and program evaluations show that this breaks the cycle of arrest and detention. The results are very encouraging: eight out of ten children who receive legal representation from TeamChild because they are out of school get back into school. For some of the most distressed children, the number of new offenses are cut by more than half. TeamChild is also cost-effective: a dollar spent on TeamChild’s legal services program saves taxpayers two.
About The CFOS Foundation
The CFOS Foundation was founded by the partners of CFO Selections in 2007. The vision of this group is to harness the energy and talent of professional people who care about the needs of local foster children and work to make a measurable, positive impact in their lives.
