Our story

Our commitment is to build networks of care, connection, and leadership that centre survivors not as clients or cases but as our kin, our community, and those we build with. We believe in the power of community and connection as a source of collective healing, especially for children and youth separated from their families. 

Our work is grounded in building networks of care, and support with child welfare survivors, their families, and loved ones. Community development is not just about programming, it is about creating spaces for belonging, connection, and critical dialogue that centre the lived experiences and wisdom of survivors. We are committed to practicing community care and responsibility within our team, and in relationship with those we support, partner with, and build alongside.

We are committed to practicing community care that moves beyond top-down service structures building relationships, partnerships, and processes rooted in integrity, reciprocity, and collective responsibility.

We believe in supporting children & youth to be safe and connected to kin, keeping families together as much as possible. We acknowledge the profound and harmful impacts of family policing systems, including the separation of families, the imposition of blame, the pathologization of normal behavior, and the exertion of institutional control and advocate for institutional change in the child welfare system.

Our practice is grounded in the knowledge, leadership, and lived experience of survivors, because no one understands our realities better than we do. We center lived experience by supporting survivors as leaders, experts, and organizers of their own lives. Our leadership and staffing reflect the communities we serve, and our board, staff, and programs are co-designed with those most impacted. Through ongoing mentorship, peer-led therapy, and survivor-led services, we ensure that our work is truly by us, for us.

In our work, we recognize that children and youth impacted by family policing (child welfare) are often positioned without power, voice, or agency; both within systems and in their personal relationships. We center children and youth as full human beings with the right to make choices about their lives, while recognizing their developmental needs and right to be supported, not controlled. We reject carceral, punitive approaches to care. We practice advocacy that is rooted in transparency, truth-telling, and building the capacity of young people to navigate their lives — not as passive recipients of services, but as agents of their own futures.

We commit to a trauma-informed, healing-centered approach in all aspects of our work—with one another, our staff, clients, and the wider community. This means creating environments grounded in safety, compassion, affirmation and care. We honor emotional experiences, meet people where they’re at, prioritize nervous system regulation, and choose understanding, compassion and human dignity over judgment. Wellness is not an afterthought—it is central to how we show up, support healing, and build sustainable relationships. Our trauma-informed practice is a continuous journey of learning, unlearning, and deepening our collective care.

Our work is rooted in supporting survivors by creating meaningful opportunities for skill-building, leadership, creativity, and connection that reflect the realities of our lives. We believe that knowledge belongs to the community and view learning as a collective, relational, and liberatory process—not something to be hoarded or gatekept. At CCWS, we share knowledge to build capacity, fuel advocacy, and inspire collective action, always with the aim of disrupting isolation and expanding access to resources, skills, and information. Our practice is reflexive—we learn from what we do, remain open to feedback, and welcome challenge and disruption as vital parts of community-building. We approach co-learning with reciprocity and care, recognizing that knowledge flows in many directions and that we are all both teachers and learners.

We strive to build a sustainable organization with long-term funding, reasonable workloads and organizational coherence with our principles. We strive to “walk the talk”, aligning our values in action – on the personal, interpersonal and organizational levels – treating one another with the same care as we do our clients and partners.  We seek to reflect these values in our orientation and onboarding.

We understand anti-Black racism as systemic, structural, and inseparable from family policing. It is embedded in every institution that governs Black life including education, medical institutions, policing, and social services. We root our practice in Black feminist, abolitionist, and survivor-informed thought expansively shaped by queer, femme, mad, and disabled Black thought leaders and community organizers. Our commitment to Black life is not a performance, it is a living practice of resistance.

We practice open transparent communication and knowledge transfer to enable sharing information so that we can work together in healthy collaboration. We understand conflict as natural and inevitable in relationship, and strive to move through it through open, honest communication, learning and willingness to repair harm.

We seek to build reciprocal relationships, grounded in respect, transparency, and shared responsibility for how we show up to one another. We our work to be relational work, and commit to doing the relational work required to maintain healthy relationships.

We understand decolonization as a practice of disrupting internalized colonial white supremacist cis-heteropatriarchy the systems, structures, and beliefs that have shaped our relationships to care, safety, and survival. We understand family policing as a direct product of colonization woven into the institutions and social systems that govern our lives. Our work is rooted in personal accountability, and practicing new ways of being in relationship with ourselves, with community, and within systems we are forced to navigate. Decolonization means embodying the futures we imagine not as saviors or service providers, but as people in fellowship, and community members.

We operate from an anti-oppressive and decolonial lens in all aspects of our work. We understand that child welfare survivors exist at the intersection of multiple identities, experiences, and systemic barriers including race, gender, sexuality, class, disability, and more. Our practice is shaped by a commitment to building relationships, partnerships, and networks that reflect and support the diverse realities of the people we work with. Anti-oppression is an active practice of reflection, learning, and accountability. We work to recognize power, name harm, and create environments where people are seen, respected, and supported in their fullness.

We understand harm reduction as both a philosophy and a practice a way of showing up for people navigating systems of violence, isolation, and systemic harm. At CCWS, harm reduction is not only about substances or crisis intervention; it is embedded in how we approach advocacy, community support, and relationship-building. Our work exists because harm exists. We engage in harm reduction knowing that we operate within a system we did not create a system that produces the very conditions of harm it claims to solve. 

Within our programming and services, practicing harm reduction means grounding our work in trauma-informed care, centering persons seeking support, moving at their pace, respecting their choices, and supporting them through complex systems without control or judgment. It means practicing care that is consent-based, non-coercive, and responsive to people’s lived experiences of harm. 

Harm reduction is how we navigate the realities of survival while holding space for long-term visions of change, safety, and autonomy. We do this work knowing that harm reduction is necessary but not enough, without addressing the root causes of harm and building towards the abolition of family policing.