In front of the Child Welfare
office in Milwaukee

My 87 year old friend, Ms. Lucille, has told me how cruel and greedy the Child Welfare System had become in Milwaukee. She told me hard to believe stories of how newly born children were being taken away from their mothers, low income, and given to ‘adoptive families’ who get a State subsidy for taking care of the child.

These are some of the same kind of stories I heard from Welfare Warriors, a group that advocates for the mothers. The other day I went with her to a protest of the State’s department of Child Welfare office. I heard another ‘horror’ story from a mother whose disable son was removed from her home and she does not have the money to hire a lawyer to get her son back.

At a ‘clarification of thought’ meeting tonight I learned that the Child Welfare system has been ‘privatized’ and that is the main reason for the system turning against the mothers. Instead of giving money to a low-income mother for children’s money is now given to agencies taking away the children and keep parents away from the children. Privatized Federal, State and City responsibilities has happen in many areas, prison, schools and utilities. The government is supposed to serve the ‘common good’ but the private business exists for the bottom line. Some agencies may say they are ‘non-profit’ but making more jobs and money seem to their true goal.

One of the advocates present tonight was a young woman who worked for one of the agencies supervising home visits for of child and mother. She saw something was ‘terrible wrong’ with the system and now is an unpaid advocate for mothers, accompanying them to court. After the meeting how she was raised Catholic but after seeing how the local Catholic lay Society of St. Vincent de Paul was ignoring the poor she lost her Catholic faith. She told stories how she or her clients would call the Milwaukee St. Vincent de Paul central office looking for help only to be told something like we do not aide person in your zip code. She was happy to hear about our efforts to expose the local Society for taking money and donations given to the poor and using it to hire persons and create an expensive thrift store in the suburbs.

I think there are a lot of persons out there who have seen the suffering of poor, often by same agencies that claim to serve them. How do we join forces with persons like the Welfare Warriors or Coalition for Justice to “stop the war in the poor”?

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