The foster care system remains one of the most overlooked yet urgent issues affecting society’s most vulnerable children. Darcy Olsen, founder and CEO of the Center for the Rights of Abused Children, offers a clear-eyed perspective on why current reforms are insufficient and how legal advocacy can reshape outcomes for millions of kids.
With a personal story rooted in her own journey fostering and adopting children, Darcy emphasizes that many kids in the system are victims of drug exposure and neglect, not delinquency, and highlights the dire consequences of government failure. She walks through pragmatic reforms, including constitutional protections, legal representation, and safety measures that could drastically reduce child trafficking and abuse. Darcy’s work demonstrates that systemic change is possible when driven by accountability, rights-based law, and a commitment to creating safe, loving homes for every child.
Note: This transcript was generated and cleaned by AI.
Peter Lipsett: Many of us don’t think too much about the foster care system. Frankly, when we do, perhaps we think about those wonderful people who are actually willing to take foster kids into their homes. Or maybe we think in an unfortunate way about the kids who are stuck in that system, go through that system, and how sad that is. Maybe we think structurally and say, that probably isn’t a very good system. And we’re going to find out in our conversation today — you’re right, it’s not a great system. And we don’t spend a lot of time thinking about how we fix it. It’s a complicated process, a convoluted and imperfect system — one that sometimes, maybe too often, actually leaves the children it is meant to help in a worse position than they might otherwise be, or certainly not better off. But foster kids everywhere are very fortunate that one woman has set out on a crusade to begin to repair this system, and that is Darcy Olsen. Darcy is the founder and CEO of the Center for the Rights of Abused Children. It’s a name you may know if you’ve followed state policy — and policy in general — from her time at Cato and then a long tenure leading the Goldwater Institute out in Arizona, where she led things like Right to Try and other really important legislation, education savings accounts that have swept the nation. But she also has a personal story behind why she would get into this. We’re going to get into that in a second.
The work that the Center for Rights of Abused Children has done in legal representation, changing laws, and affecting the public policy landscape around this inadequate foster care system in just a few short years has been remarkable. We actually talked to Darcy back in episode four of Giving Ventures. Here it is, episode 108. A lot has changed, including the name of the organization, which then was called Generation Justice. Darcy, I’m thrilled to talk to you today. So good to see you.
Darcy Olsen: Peter, it’s wonderful to be here. I can’t believe it — episode four to episode 108. This is amazing.
Peter Lipsett: Well, let’s talk about all the things that have changed and all the things you’ve done. But actually, I want to go back to the beginning of your story in this. You’re kind of a policy wonk — frankly, not a world that when I met you, I would have necessarily expected you in. But this work is personal to you. So talk to us about Baby Ophelia.
Darcy Olsen: So Peter, while I was running the Goldwater Institute, I one day was praying and felt inspired to become a foster parent. And there’s really no other way to put it — it came through prayer. I thought I would help a teenager. I was single and working all the time, kind of a workaholic. I thought most of these kids were basically juvenile delinquents. And it turns out that most people think that. But what I found out is that’s actually not what this system is all about. So I went in ready to foster a teenager and they said, “Your loft doesn’t meet the right regulations, but if you could take a baby and put a crib at the foot of your bed, we’d be so grateful.” And I said, “A baby? But I’m single.” And I thought people wanted babies. I was so confused.
The woman said, “We have so many infants coming into foster care right now that they are sleeping in government office buildings and in shelters downtown. If you could open a crib, we would be so grateful.” And Peter, I don’t know how that makes you feel when you think about a newborn without a mother or anyone to pick them up and love them and hold them and comfort them. But it broke my heart. So I said, “I’ll get a crib and I’ll figure this out.”
And so I did. I took in my first baby as a newborn. And like so many others in the system, the vast majority of children coming into the system are there because of drug exposure — terrible neglect and abusive situations. All I knew about her at the time was that she had spent the first two weeks of her life on a morphine drip. There was a lot of prayer that she would be healthy, that her mom would know she was safe. I was worried about this woman. Where was she? I couldn’t reach her. And of course I was praying that I could do this by myself.
And that was the beginning of a very long journey. She went up for adoption and I did what any mother would do — I kept her. I went on to foster nine more children and adopted four of the ten. And that was the seed for the Center for the Rights of Abused Children, because although I was doing that as a mother with a mother’s love, I was in the courtroom for these children with my constitutional rights background. And it was devastating to see the lack of rights that these children have, and to understand that if we could just address some of those rights, we could completely turn around the consequences and outcomes for children who are being abused. And so that’s why I’m here with you.
Peter Lipsett: As we’ve alluded to several times, a lot of people don’t really understand the foster care system. They don’t think about it much. If they do, maybe they’re saying, “Those foster parents — God bless them, couldn’t do it without them.” And frankly, it’s uncomfortable to think about the kids, the system, the bureaucracy, what the parents of these kids are going through. That’s the harder part. Much easier to think about those great foster parents. Talk to us about the idealized process. What in theory, if everything was working well, what that process would be — and how does that contrast with reality? Because I think it gives a good sense of the gaps that you’re coming to fill.
Darcy Olsen: So the problem of abandonment, abuse, and severe neglect goes back to our founding. In the old days, what would happen is you’d get taken in and put on a train — an orphan train — sent out west with the hope that someone would take you in to work the farm. The laws were not ever written to protect a child who didn’t have a parent who would or could protect them.
In our more recent history — and this is such an interesting historical fact — it was Ronald Reagan who established the first National Foster Care Month. And what he said at the time is still what is ideal today: the best setting for any child is to grow up within a family. That is the unit. That is the ideal.
And when children are born into circumstances where they don’t have that, where they’re being born into a meth house and left on the floor among needles and filth, or into situations where there is just outright monstrous behavior, where children go to bed in fear every night because of what’s happening when that bedroom door closes — when those children have to be removed for their safety, we owe them a safe and loving environment, and we need to get them there and out of foster care as quickly as possible. It’s supposed to be just a temporary transition — from danger to safety.
In an ideal world, the parent — it’s mostly single moms — can remedy the situation. So if it’s drugs, which is the case in most situations, if they can get clean, that is ideal. Then the child can go home and the community wraps itself around them. And that’s wonderful. That happens in some situations. But in the ten children I fostered, not a single one was ever able to go back into the home environment because it was so incredibly dangerous. So then the goal is to find a relative, a coach, a teacher, someone who knows and loves the child — sometimes a nurse or the police officer who found them. And then finally, there are families like mine who say, “I don’t know who you are, but I will love you for a day, a week, a year, or forever.”
The goal is to get every child into a safe and loving home. That’s what Ronald Reagan identified as the need then. That is still the need now.
And what is really unique about the Center for the Rights of Abused Children and our contribution to this is that we recognize the problems that have been plaguing families and children in these situations for decades will not ever be remedied or solved until we recognize the constitutional rights of these little ones. So that’s what we’re doing. There are situations where we need to strengthen some of the pillars for parents as well — parents who are wrongly accused — and we’ve done that work. But the vast majority involve innocent children who get stuck in the system. One little boy I know was in there at age three and went through 47 different homes until he was 17 years old.
And I’ll tell you one more thing: I don’t even like the term “foster child,” because they’re not foster children. They’re boys and girls. They’re your children, they’re my children. Foster care is the place they go while they’re waiting for someone to love them, keep them safe, and help them heal. I want people to know that there is hope and there are solutions, and we are pushing them through furiously and fast and making a huge difference. In ten or fifteen years, I think we will have begun to end aging out. We can stop the vast majority of trafficking in the U.S. — most of those kids come from foster care, so we know where to put the reforms. And we can extend the promise of the Constitution — that we have fought so hard for in the context of adult rights — over the lives and liberty interests of these little ones, who are caught between a rock and a hard place: a parent who has harmed them or doesn’t have the capacity to love them, and the state, which is no place for a child.
Peter Lipsett: You’ve opened the door to so many avenues — we’re going to see how many we can go down. But I want to start here: you mentioned you don’t like the term “foster care,” and if you look at your name — even your old name, Generation Justice, and now Center for Rights of Abused Children — foster care isn’t in it, yet it’s the centerpiece of what you’re doing. A cynic might look at your name and say, “Rights of abused children — you’re just assuming that every foster child coming through is abused. Isn’t that a rude assumption?” So steel-man that for me. Why that name?
Darcy Olsen: We are much bigger than foster care. A lot of children who are abused never make it into safety. Most sexual abuse and incest is never reported. So our net is bigger. We believe every child has inherent worth and the right to bodily integrity — the same things you want for your children that I want for mine. There are some monstrous things that happen in this world that we don’t want to see. But when you see a pregnant woman on a street corner who’s shooting up, where do you think that child is going to end up? A lot of them will end up in the foster care system. Sometimes they can go to a relative, but often not — often they’re completely on their own.
I would say some children who are abused make it into foster care. And sometimes it’s true that children will end up in the system who don’t belong there, because bureaucrats make terrible mistakes. And so one of the reforms we have pushed so hard for is to make sure that every parent and every child in what they call “dependency cases” has an attorney. In 49 states, parents do have attorneys — they’re there to defend their rights, because the right to parent, the right to the upbringing of your child, is sacred. But most children do not. Most of these abuse victims do not. And it’s the same if they’re wrongly taken into the system — they don’t have anyone to say, “Hey, my mom didn’t do that. I need to go home.” So we are going state by state to ensure that when these most sacred and fundamental interests are on the line, the constitutional protections are in place — in this case, for due process.
We also work on laws. If your concern is the narrative of the state walking in and taking a child who’s just barefoot and playing, there are protections for that. There are a lot of laws we’ve helped pass that say this is just a freewheeling childhood and does not constitute abuse or neglect. We’ve made sure that parents have attorneys and rights so that if that happens, those kids pretty quickly go home.
The bigger problem, though, Peter, is the narrative that conservatives have never talked about — and one that I didn’t know about until I became a foster parent. Like most people, I thought kids in foster care were juvenile delinquents. That’s what the polls show: most of us think they’re delinquents. They are not. These are kids who have been severely abused. These are children who have had a sibling — or two — murdered, with the rest of the siblings ending up in the system. Nine of my ten children were born drug-exposed. I’m talking meth, heroin, multiple drug cocktails — almost not making it out of the NICU, the newborn intensive care unit. And one went home and died.
Both are problems when bureaucrats get it wrong. But the problem that is largely unaddressed right now is the lives of innocent children who suffer repeated abuse — sexual abuse, physical abuse — who are starving, and who are often left in these situations and never rescued. The American Enterprise Institute has done a tremendous job documenting child fatalities of children known to authorities. About 80% of kids who die every year are known to authorities who have failed to bring them to safety. We had a girl in our own community — she was in the system from birth to the age of ten, in and out, in and out. And she was eventually murdered at the age of ten. Twenty calls had gone in to the local child protection agency and they had not brought her to safety. These calls came from teachers and principals — not a disgruntled ex-spouse. So more often than not, we are notifying government about these horrible situations where kids desperately need rescue, and we’re not bringing them to safety. That needs to be remedied. And I’ll tell you: I assumed children who were abused to death were locked in closets and no one knew about them and there was nothing we could do. But now I know that government does know. So we’re going to make government do something about it. We’re going to hold them accountable for these young lives when they do nothing.
Peter Lipsett: Is the system just too overwhelmed with cases? Not enough people going into this?
Darcy Olsen: It’s a lot of things. Part of it is Supreme Court precedent that has been set in ways that discourage agencies from taking any action whatsoever. Part of it is a narrative that has swung too far — people think we take too many children. I’ve heard this so many times, and I’ve heard it from conservatives: “It’s just neglect. If we just wrap the church community around these families, everything will be fine.” That is not true. That is a false narrative and it’s destructive. Most neglect cases involve kids who are born into serious drug abuse situations — a single mom on drugs whose first love is the drug, who can barely walk down the street, let alone take care of a newborn baby.
And this is a statistic, not hyperbole: in 99% of neglect cases, there is more going on than poverty. That makes sense, because agencies don’t want to just take kids in because they’re poor. There are millions of poor children across the United States. They really only want to get involved if they think they absolutely have to — if they cannot fix this situation. And that’s what federal law says. You don’t get to remove a child on a hunch. You have to have real reasons, and you should have to have real reasons.
Half of the children who are removed into foster care will go home and be re-abused and re-enter foster care. So the reality is we’re not keeping children safe. We’re not keeping children alive. I had no idea about that. I think that’s true for most people. I assumed children who were abused to death were locked in closets and no one knew. But now I know that government does know — and so we’re going to make government do something about it. We’re going to hold them accountable for these young lives when they do nothing.
Peter Lipsett: All right, so let’s talk about some of the things you’re doing. I think all the listeners need a break from the horrors — because you are changing things. Reading some of what you’ve done in preparing for this, and watching your work over the years, it’s just so striking how these kids really are treated as second-class citizens. And I use that phrase deliberately, right? The Constitution protects every soul in this country. But we also have this paradigm in our minds: “Well, children don’t have the agency to make their own decisions.” And so you can understand how good intentions would lead to them not having lawyers — “they’re just kids, we’re going to take care of them.” And yet they are also citizens, also people. So talk to us about some of the changes you’ve made — the IDs, the legal representation, some of these wins that help these kids actually have a voice in the system.
Darcy Olsen: Sure. And on the constitutional point, I want to be clear: children have the same constitutional rights that we do. They are people. They are God’s children. They have the same worth that you do and that I do. Now, they may have a diminished capacity to exercise those rights, and there are good reasons for that — but they still have the right to life, to not be hurt in some of the horrible and monstrous ways that do happen. We’re not advocating for kids to emancipate at age nine or anything like that. We’re talking about life interests and real safety issues.
One thing I love to share with people is this: there is general public awareness about the dangers and the escalating problem of child sex trafficking in our country. What most people do not know is that about 85% of kids who are trafficked in our country come through the foster care system. And what that means is, when we know who they are, we can build protections and laws and reforms around them to keep them safe. And here’s why it happens: trafficking is a billion-dollar industry. These traffickers want money. They’re not going to go after my children, because I’m going to look for my children — there’s going to be a search and my whole community is going to mobilize. When you are in foster care, no one looks for you. It was only ten years ago that federal law even required states to report if a child in foster care went missing. They didn’t even have to report that to anyone. And traffickers knew this — there is congressional testimony about it. So they prey on these children. They steal them from outside group homes, or sometimes they lure them away with promises of affection, love, money, and things these children have never had.
So we’ve been building reforms to protect these children. We passed laws in Arizona, Missouri, and other states where it is mandatory: if a child goes missing from the foster care system, police must be notified and must search until the child comes home. In some states, police couldn’t even begin searching. In our state, we’d get notified but have no pictures — because no one is taking pictures of these teenagers since they don’t have moms and dads. So we said, “Give these kids free IDs.” We did that. And now if they go missing, police can press a button, see the picture, it’s uploaded in the system, and — like an Amber Alert — everyone can help find these kids and bring them home.
These are the things that make a real difference in the lives of these children. If we protect the kids in foster care, we can almost eliminate child sex trafficking in the United States. And I think that’s something we can all come together on. We may not agree on every nuance of what constitutes abuse or exactly when to step in — and that’s okay. Those are nuanced conversations. But we all agree that when a child is taken in, in one of these situations, and they cannot go home and they’re in the system, we need to protect them.
The best protection is a family. And short of a family, we need to make sure the laws are there to protect them if they go missing or if traffickers come. And you might wonder: how is it even possible that no one went looking for them? Here’s how: government would classify these children as runaways and then wash their hands of them and nobody would search. Some kids do run — but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t go get them. They’re 13 years old and they still need a mom, a dad, and safety.
Darcy Olsen: Children who are two and three years old don’t run. Agencies need to be accountable for these children. We need to prevent them from going missing. And then search and bring every single one of them home safely.
Peter Lipsett: The statistic — did you say 20,000 children disappear from foster care every year? That is a lot of kids. And yes, my assumption probably would have been that a lot of them run away. And then you go and say something like, “Three-year-olds don’t run.” That’s true. Three-year-olds don’t run away.
Darcy Olsen: Yes. But Peter, I also have a 14-year-old. If she runs away, should I just say, “Ah, she ran away — good luck”? No. The state is in loco parentis. At that point the state has a responsibility to protect the life of that child. If you believe in the dignity and worth of every human being, then the state has an obligation to find that child and make sure they are fine. A 17-year-old is still a child, and any mother will tell you that. Especially these children — children who haven’t been parented, children who were drug-exposed at birth, whose brains are different because of that. They take longer to develop. They lack a great deal of executive function. These children need protection and they need it immediately.
Whether they ran or not, I don’t care if they ran — they’re coming home. We’re going to search for them and we’re going to help them be safe. They do not belong in the hands of a predator.
Peter Lipsett: Talk to us about the legal side of it. It’s almost like you have a whole pro bono law firm built into what you’re doing. Talk to us about that work. Are you doing that across the country? Are you mostly in Arizona or certain states? Are there still laws preventing people from having lawyers?
Darcy Olsen: Sure. We’re not just in Arizona.
One of the things we were talking about is reunification — and some people worry that if kids had attorneys, those attorneys might over-advocate in ways that undermine reunification. But the studies have shown something different. In states where both children and parents have attorneys in these proceedings, the research shows that children are reunified safely at the same rate. It doesn’t wreck reunification at all. And these children get out of the system three times faster than children who don’t have attorneys, because the attorney is saying, “Hey, there’s a timeline here. Judge, let’s keep moving.” They’re also more likely to be placed with siblings. Relatives are found more often. All of the outcomes that we would hope for improve.
And can you imagine, Peter, going into a courtroom where everyone else has an attorney — the agencies have attorneys, the parents have attorneys, the judge even has a guardian ad litem to help sort out what’s happening — and the child victim is sitting there at 12 years old with no one? Picture an incest situation — which, unfortunately, happens more often than we like to think. There is nobody for you. Nobody to put your right to safety before the judge. You cannot have due process. You cannot have adversarial court proceedings. You cannot have justice with that kind of imbalance. Rights are only as good as their enforcement. And if no one is going to enforce your right to life or safety, you are out of luck. That’s what these outcomes show for these kids. That’s why children age out of the system.
So, to your question about our pro bono attorneys: yes, we have a national legal network of attorneys who help children in the most devastating situations. We helped children in Florida — two teenagers whose parents were both dead. They had been placed in separate group homes and wanted to live with their biological grandmother. The judge didn’t like the grandmother and was refusing it. So we fought on behalf of these children and their grandmother to get them reunited and out of those group homes.
I don’t want you to think we don’t help biological families. We do. We want biological families when they are safe. We just want to be honest about safety — and there’s a difference between reunifying with a pedophile and reunifying with someone who had a drug problem and is getting clean. Those are totally different circumstances. So we do have those attorneys available.
And then we’re also changing the laws state by state to give more of these children attorneys in their cases. We’ve passed bills of rights that protect both parents’ rights and children’s due process rights in these proceedings. The Constitution is a remarkable document. When you give parents and children due process and protect their rights against overreaching or bureaucratic government, the outcomes are better for everyone. We believe that children have a constitutional right to attorneys — just as the criminally accused do — because their lives and liberty interests are hanging in the balance of these decisions. But until we have that Supreme Court ruling, we’ll be working to make this policy state by state.
Peter Lipsett: That’s amazing. In theory, these attorneys for the kids should often be in partnership with the state, right? You gave that example where the state may not have been in favor of what the family actually wanted — and what the kids wanted. But in theory, it gives kind of double the arsenal for litigation on that child’s side. Yeah.
Darcy Olsen: Well, or on the parent’s side. I mean, that’s the thing. Like I said, we’ve helped mothers whose children were wrongly removed. In one situation, there was an attorney for the mother, but she wasn’t doing a really great job — and that can happen. So we stepped in. Sometimes we’re stepping in for grandma, sometimes we’re stepping in for mom.
We had a situation where a sister discovered that her own sister was trafficking her daughter. This happens a lot — it’s tied to drugs. Most trafficking, believe it or not, is done within families. This sister came to us and said, “How do I keep my niece safe?” Eventually the mother could not get clean, and so we helped the aunt adopt the child. Our goal is to see every child safe and loved. The first priority is biological parents, then biological family and kin. But sometimes those families are just not there for the child.
I’ll tell you a story that blew my mind. It took me years to fully understand what had happened. I was called in for a beautiful, healthy baby girl — which was very unusual. I asked the social worker, “This is a really healthy baby. What’s happening?” And they said, “The baby’s mom was 12 years old.” I said, “Okay — so she’s young, probably wants to go back to middle school. Are we just waiting for the grandma to get her house ready to bring the baby home?” And the social worker said, “Grandma is the reason the 12-year-old is pregnant.”
Peter Lipsett: Oh, no.
Darcy Olsen: Grandma was getting money, drugs, and rent paid in exchange for essentially selling her own daughter. At the time, I was so confused. I could barely process it. Now I understand it. Now I’ve read the statistics. I was so concerned about the baby girl. And really, I wish I had fought for both of them.
This happens all the time. And like I said, most trafficking does take place within families, and most of it is tied back to drug use. It is not a poverty problem. There are millions of kids growing up in poverty whose parents love them and will do anything for them. This is largely a drug problem. And when you are in the grip of serious addiction, your judgment is severely compromised. Anyone who has ever met someone who has recovered from a serious addiction — whether alcohol or drugs — will tell you that their first love was the drug, and that they were not in a position to do what was best for their child. That is especially true in cases involving infants, where we have the highest mortality rates.
Peter Lipsett: Well, this is such a nexus of so many issues that you’ve identified here. And so it means we’re always going to have some need for a foster care system — we’re always going to have kids who are abused in different ways, as much as we would like to prevent it. To kind of wrap things up here: how do you judge success over the next five to ten years? How do you know that you’re actually moving the needle — not toward a perfect system, which we’re never going to get, but toward a far, far better one? You mentioned ending aging out of the foster care system, which I think is a beautiful goal. Talk to us about some of those goals and how you get there.
Darcy Olsen: Well, one input is due process, right? This is a system that operates in the dark — for the parents, for the kids, for the aunts and uncles. There is no transparency. So getting attorneys into that system, creating more accountability within it — all of that has to be cleaned up the way you would with any other area of government.
On the output side, what we would like to see is no more kids aging out. When you come into this system, you either go home pretty quickly, go to a relative, or you get a new family. You don’t spend your entire childhood moving from home to home like the child I told you about who went through 47 homes over 13 years. Just devastating. In a country with millions of wonderful families, there are homes for those 20,000 kids. I’m telling you, if people knew, they would take them in in a heartbeat. So a lot of this is about information. I believe we can end aging out — that almost every child can have a safe and loving home.
Two: I think we can end most domestic trafficking. We know it’s largely within families, we know it’s connected to drugs, and we know these kids are coming up through foster care. There are multiple reforms to get into place to protect those children.
And then I want to talk honestly about prevention — about what real upstream prevention looks like — because these are things not enough people are willing to say. One: we have to stop the drugs. Any pregnant woman who wants to get treated and get off drugs — open the doors for her. Let that baby be born healthy with a normal brain. Give her a chance to raise that baby. Drug use is the number one driver of kids entering the system. Making sure pregnant women have access to treatment is really, really critical.
The things we’ve always said still matter — stable family formation is still important. Most of these children have no father in the picture, or the father can’t be identified. And then the third thing I would say is community. Most children who are abused and abandoned never have to go into foster care at all because their grandmother, aunt, uncle — someone has their eye on them and steps in and says, “Let me help here.” So it is really critical that if you see something, you say something — and that we wrap our arms around people facing these severe challenges. Mental health is also a piece of this, as we know from many of these situations.
If you’ve ever had someone with mental health issues in your family, you know how hard those are to treat. I would just say: don’t give up. Because healthy mothers and healthy fathers have healthy children. And at the end of the day, that’s what we all want.
Peter Lipsett: Well, Darcy, the work you and your team — and I know it’s a great team, with some real talented people working for you and alongside you in this fight — is just phenomenal and remarkable. It’s not something that I think we as conservatives, libertarians, and free marketers probably think about enough. I could put my wonky hat on, and I’m sure you could too, and make the case for why all of this is so important to those free-market aims we care about — reducing government overreach, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It’s all baked into everything you’re doing. And so it’s remarkable work, and it’s hard work. I’m sure there are very tiring and hard days. But thank you for doing it. Thank you to your whole team, and keep up the fight.
Darcy Olsen: Thanks, Peter. I appreciate it. It is a privilege to fight for these kids. And we’re really appreciative to you and to all of the supporters who have made it possible to rescue and help so many. We’ve helped over a million children, and that’s a good beginning. Thank you. And I hope you have me on again — maybe for episode 200.
Peter Lipsett: Thanks, Darcy.
Darcy Olsen: Thanks, Peter.
Peter Lipsett: Before we started recording, I told Darcy that I really like my job, which gets to be an inch deep and a mile wide on a lot of things — and that I don’t have to spend all of my days in such complicated, often heartbreaking issues like she does. But thank goodness that she and her team are there at the Center for the Rights of Abused Children, because they are doing stellar work — really important work, hard work. And as we heard in the conversation, it is a remarkably complex web of issues affecting these kids.
We look at them and say, “Those are foster kids.” But she even made the point that this is about more than foster kids. They are kids. They are America’s children. They are a rising generation — the ones we will count on to keep this American experiment going. And we need them to be safe. We need them to be secure. We need them to be educated and healthy. And that is the work that they’re doing.
It is terrific to see the Center making these leveraged, structural changes that impact hundreds of kids, thousands of kids, millions of kids at a time — but also this one-on-one work, the litigation work that’s helping that single individual. It’s a really unique organization that is able to do both of those things. So many policy organizations are focused only on mass change, which is really important. And so many point-of-service organizations are focused only on the one person right in front of them. What Darcy has built — the ability to do both — is truly phenomenal.
One of the great things about working at DonorsTrust is that we get to work with donors who care about that full spectrum. Some working at point of service, some working in policy, some working across the board, trying to drive change at every level. It’s a truly remarkable way of deploying philanthropy. If that sounds like you — if you want to be strategic with your philanthropy and really make an impact with the giving you do already, or hope to ramp up — then we would love to talk to you at DonorsTrust. Have a conversation about how we can be helpful with our donor-advised funds and other consulting work that we do. Give us a call, or go to DonorsTrust.org, poke around, kick the tires, and reach out to us. We would love to talk.
As always, thank you for being a giver. We’ll be back soon with another new episode. Until then, we’ll talk more soon.
