Imagine yourself as a successful entrepreneur in the 20th century. With a good idea, hard work, and some luck, you have managed to build a small fortune. And now you want to make sure that some of your money goes to help those members of society who seem to need it the most: orphans. So you donate to orphanages and start a foundation to help children whose parents have died or who are otherwise incapable of caring for them. Now imagine that, decades later, your money is being used instead to destroy the system that was meant to protect these children. And it’s all being done in the name of “justice.”
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This is the story of John Emory Andrus, who made his fortune as a chemical manufacturer and gave a significant amount of it to an orphanage in Yonkers, New York, called the Julia Dyckman Andrus Memorial. In 1935, the year after Andrus died, the organization received almost half of his foundation’s grants. Today, it gets almost nothing. But an advocacy group called upEND, which is devoted to abolishing the child welfare system, does receive grants. It proposes ending foster care altogether, even for children who have been severely abused or chronically neglected, and instead providing their parents with unrestricted cash payments.
How did this happen? Around 2018, the Surdna Foundation (Andrus spelled backward) seemed to change direction. According to some of the relatives I interviewed for a 2019 article in the Wall Street Journal, the 100th anniversary celebration of the foundation featured skits about white privilege and the speeches by progressive activists. That’s when they started to realize something was off. Grants were being made toward radical environmentalist groups and organizations devoted to racial and gender equity. Would Andrus have funded the publication of the “Green Equity Toolkit: Standards and Strategies for Advancing Race, Gender and Economic Equity in the Green Economy”? Seems unlikely.
The story of a philanthropist’s descendants and foundation staff ignoring the wishes of a donor is hardly a new one. The Ford Foundation’s dramatic change in direction is one of the more notable examples. There’s no question Andrus was an unabashed capitalist and would have been appalled by some of the Marxist causes to which his money is going. But the ways in which the desires of philanthropists who care about vulnerable children have been perverted to suit modern ideological trends are particularly galling.
The demands of the past several years that we defund the police were followed by another movement that we defund child protection agencies. The claim by advocates at organizations like upEND is that the child welfare system is simply a tool of racial oppression, harassing innocent families simply for being too poor to provide for their children. In fact, hundreds of thousands of children are abused and neglected in this country every year. More than 2,000 children die of maltreatment each year, more than from school shootings or childhood cancer or backyard drownings. Black children experience abuse and fatalities from abuse at significantly higher rates than their white peers. And the idea that poverty is what drives child welfare investigations and removals to foster care, as opposed to parental drug use and illness, is simply not borne out by the data.
But now that their theories have been welcomed into academia — upEND is housed at the University of Houston — and supported by large foundations. The “abolitionists,” as they like to call themselves, have been able to plant a stake. One of their founders became a finalist to head New York’s Administration for Children’s Services a couple of months ago.
Andrus is not the only philanthropist whose fortune is being misused though. Jim Casey, the founder of UPS, started his foundation a couple of decades after Andrus in 1948. The year before, he wrote that “The members of the Casey family have from the beginning intended that the principal purpose of the Annie E. Casey Foundation would be to support needy children in foster homes.”
One of Casey’s earliest gifts was to the Seattle Archdiocese for this purpose. He worked with the Child Welfare League of America to create Casey Family Programs, which “took orphans, placed them with foster parents, and provided a stipend so that the child could have his needs for food and clothing met and get a decent start in life.” As one of Casey’s colleagues, who served on the board first of UPS and then his foundation, told the chronicler of American philanthropy Martin Morse Wooster, “Jim really didn’t have much vision of an Annie E. Casey Foundation beyond Casey Family Services. The foster care programs were what he knew and cared about.”
But Casey, too, went off course. Starting in the 1990s, they began to fund a variety of liberal and progressive causes. It was all in the name of helping poor children, but it took the form of donations to ACORN and other kinds of activist political organizations. Not surprisingly, Casey funded efforts to make “equity” the center of child welfare policy. Reducing racial disparities in foster care, which often meant radically shrinking the number of kids in care despite clear safety risks, became a primary focus of Casey Family Programs and the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s advocacy.
Meanwhile, the mission of helping kids was expanded to the point of meaninglessness. A recent book by Lisa Lawson, the head of the Annie E. Casey Foundation, barely mentions keeping children safe from abuse or neglect. Instead, Lawson writes about “food insecurity,” a condition she says is plaguing more than 7 million children in this country. Casey and his whole generation would have had a good chuckle at the idea that any significant number of American kids are going hungry after looking at our obesity rates. Lawson also worries about the millions of Americans without broadband access. Her only thoughts on foster care regard how there is too much of it. She accuses agencies of removing children from homes because there is not enough food in the refrigerator, a claim that is absurdly false.
How did these foundations end up moving so far from their original mission? It may have been more obvious 100 years ago which kids truly needed protection and support. Even impoverished families often had two parents, and even if they struggled to provide, children could be protected from the dangers of the outside world. But there were also many more actual orphans — children whose parents died young from disease or war or violence. Churches supported these children through orphanages. And philanthropists could see how their money might support those who needed it most.
But it is also that the ideological winds shifted. And the children of philanthropists and foundation staff want to be seen as part of the vanguard. This evolution is evident even in more recently launched charitable enterprises. Take the Redlich-Horwitz Foundation, whose original child-welfare mission in 2012 focused on “achieving permanency for system-involved children, improving their educational attainment, and increasing stabilizing support services after they age out of the system as young adults.”
In 2020, though, not surprisingly, it shifted to “honoring equity and lived experiences.” And then “narrowing the front door,” that is, reducing government involvement in the lives of children who have been reported for abuse or neglect. And finally, now it is keeping “children safe at home where they belong — with their families.” In other words, they are now behind the movement to abolish child welfare. The most recent “impact report” from upEND thanks Redlich-Horwitz for the foundation’s generous support.
THE IMPORTANCE OF PROTECTING HOMESCHOOLED CHILDREN FROM ABUSE
The child welfare system rarely receives the money it should from state and federal governments. It is hard to attract and keep talented professionals to what can be a very challenging job with such low salaries, for instance. But the effect of that underfunding is that private philanthropies can easily throw their weight around.
Organizations like Casey, Surdna, and Redlich-Horwitz (not to mention Doris Duke and Conrad Hilton) have been able to impact the whole direction of the field. They have persuaded agencies that we should leave kids in unsafe situations because of racial disparities, that drug use by parents is not that much of a risk, that poverty is the true driver of child maltreatment, that abusive parents just need unrestricted cash, that group homes should be closed, and that congregate care (even if it is providing much needed mental and behavioral health treatment) is unnecessary. All of this has tarnished the legacy of some very generous Americans — and, more tragically, it has put our most vulnerable children at greater risk of harm.
Naomi Schaefer Riley is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where she focuses on child welfare and foster care issues.
