ANN ARBOR—With a mightily stressed child foster care system, one-third of the state’s foster kids, and fully half of the state’s permanent court wards, Wayne County’s Department of Human Services is about to get help from the University of Michigan Law School.

The Law School’s new Detroit Center for Family Advocacy, which opened on July 6, is designed to help parents and extended families care for their own children, to shorten the stays of children who end up in public foster care, and to keep some children out of foster care entirely.

The three-year pilot program will serve the Osborn neighborhood on Detroit’s Eastside, an area that carries one of Wayne County’s highest rates of children being removed from their families.

The center will help families with two types of cases. The first are cases in which legal assistance can help a parent, guardian or extended family member provide a safe, stable home for a child whose family has been investigated and substantiated for possible abuse or neglect. The second are cases in which legal services to a potential permanent caregiver could help a child exit the foster care system completely. Altogether, organizers project the center will help 600 children during the pilot program, and it’s been specially designed to be easily replicated.

But the CFA plans to offer much more than just legal counsel. A specially trained attorney will team up with a social worker and a parent advocate to help a parent or potential guardian build a plan to address any safety risks while still keeping the child with the family. While the lawyer can help with tasks such as restraining orders or powers of attorney, the social worker can assess parents’ strengths and weaknesses and formulate a plan to deal with them. Meanwhile the parent advocate—someone who has experienced the child welfare system firsthand—can use that unique perspective to help the parent navigate the system.

Professor Vivek Sankaran will direct the project and professor Don Duquette will coordinate the careful evaluation of the project. Both teach in Michigan Law’s Child Advocacy Law Clinic, which was the first such clinic in the United States when Duquette founded it 30 years ago. Law students from the clinic, under faculty supervision and as part of their studies, will help manage the cases, as well. In the near future, the CFA hopes to include faculty and students from other disciplines and volunteer attorneys.

Sankaran said in some ways the structure of the CFA will mirror that of a teaching hospital, where a clinical professor and highly trained staff pass on their knowledge to skillful trainees while providing important service to an underserved community.

The Detroit Center for Family Advocacy is being funded with grants from the Skillman Foundation, the Community Foundation for Southeast Michigan and the McGregor Fund; a grant from retired Washington State Supreme Court Justice and CEO of the Center for Children and Youth Justice, Bobbe Bridge, and husband Jon Bridge; matching funds from the Wayne County Child Care Fund; and support from the University of Michigan.

“This center represents an opportunity to help turn hundreds of lives around,” Sankaran said. “Children are better off being raised by family rather than by the government. We hope to provide legal tools to empower family members to protect and care for their own children rather than depend upon government foster care.”