SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA FAMILY MEDIATION INCORPORATED

This is a picture our Director, Randy Drew, took one day as he was leaving court. The empty baby carrier is a baby that the court decided was best taken care by a foster. Our families have to earn the right to bring their children back home by proving that they have done their work by taking classes, getting clean and/or attending therapy. Then they have to come up with a plan for peaceful communication because our families are multi-household families. This is where we step in, ensuring that parents have a detailed and fairly negotiated parenting plan that begins the peace. Our parents are often survivors of the foster system themselves and may have never learned what a functional family can look like. This parenting plan is often their first opportunity to take control of their parenting, create a vision for their family and develop a plan for peaceful parenting.

Twice a year we bring volunteer mediators and dependency court judges together to build community, lift each other up and celebrate the hard work we all do. In L.A. County, in addition to the approximately 60 Family Law (FL) Courts, there are approximately 36 Dependency Courts (and growing). This is up from 21 courtrooms when SoCalFamily Mediation began in 2017. In Dependency Court, the standard is child safety. Because of this, Dependency Courts tend to err on the side of caution, balancing that with the fact that you have to respect people’s rights and freedom to be parents, with the realities of the foster care system, whenever safe for kids. One could say, Dependency Courts are in the business of forgiveness. Family Reunification (FR) and Family Maintenance (FM) are the goals, whenever the home environment can be made safe for the child or children. Our role is to strengthen Family Maintenance by helping families advocate and negotiate for themselves. When Moms and Dads learn to communicate, standing up for what they need, and learning to bend to help the other parent, they create a parenting plan that is effective, sustainable and lays the foundation for a peaceful and functional homelife for their children. We are over 90% successful in reaching agreements with our families and these families, by and large, do not return to court. This means that SoCalFamily Mediation is creating stronger, healthier and safer families, breaking the generational cycle of children growing up in the foster system.