children

An excerpt of the piece I wrote for The Connecticut Law Tribune on the Children's Law Center of Connecticut, which is celebrating 20 years of protecting children this year:

After 6-year-old Ayla was murdered, Judith Hyde heard a voice inside her head. The message: Create a children's legal advocacy center to represent young children in family court.

Hyde had founded the Child Protection Council of Northeastern Connecticut, which included a small program to provide supervision for court-ordered visits between parents and their children. During one of those visits, Ayla Rose Moylan was shot and killed by her father, who was apparently upset by his former wife's plan to remarry. The visit supervisor, Joyce Lannan, was shot too and ended up blinded in one eye.

Out of Ayla's death and out of Hyde's intuition came the founding of the Children's Law Center of Connecticut, an organization whose core service is providing legal advocates to children in highly contentious family court cases. Hyde wrote in a piece of literary writing that she shared with the Law Tribune that, after the shooting incident, she felt tired and wanted time to recuperate. But the voice inside pushed back, telling Hyde: "Now is the time when you will have people with you to make this happen."

Twenty years later, the center represents children in eight of Connecticut's judicial districts with plans to expand into Norwich next year if funding stays steady, according to Executive Director Justine Rakich-Kelly. The organization has been celebrating its 20th anniversary with a series of events this year, including its annual gala held on Dec. 6.

Read the full story here.

While the American economy has been officially out of recession for four years, social service providers told me for a piece I did for the Stamford Advocate that the need for assistance for the least well-off has not slackened. On this day of Thanksgiving, the need for social services is a reminder to give if you have the means to do so and to be grateful for the means that you do have.

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An excerpt of the story:

Robert M. Arnold, president and CEO of Greenwich-based Family Centers, which provides education, health and human services to children, adults and families in Fairfield County, said the economic recovery has been uneven, and people at the lowest rung of the economic ladder have had the lowest level of recovery.

"Things have to get really better up in the middle and the top to lift up the bottom level," Arnold said. "Things haven't gotten that good in the middle and the top to really lift up the bottom level."

Many people are working jobs on which they can barely subsist, Arnold said.

Jason T. Shaplen, chief executive officer of Stamford-based Inspirica, Inc., one of the largest providers of services to the homeless in Connecticut, said that the demand for his organization's services is at a record level. The number of people living in the street in Connecticut has increased 82 percent in the past three years and the number of homeless people in Greenwich and Stamford increased 45 percent in the past year, according to Shaplen.

Nationally, 100 million Americans live in poverty or live within 50 percent of the poverty line, Shaplen added.

Historically, homelessness was connected to people having mental health problems, substance abuse problems or lack of education, Shaplen said. While all those things still cause people to become homeless, the new driver for homelessness is people being unable to find work or make enough money from their work to meet all of their needs, especially in a housing market as expensive as lower Fairfield County's, Shaplen said.

The winter is an especially hard time for people in poverty in Fairfield County because they have the additional seasonal expenses of heating, warm winter clothing and maintaining vehicles that are not in great repair to survive winter weather, Arnold said.