Resources For Families & Community

The Collective of Child Welfare Survivors ("CCWS") inaugurates its annual public talk with a serious discussion of what abolition means in the context of child welfare/protection, the family policing system, and how we can reimagine supporting families.

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Featuring: el jones, josie pickens, elizabeth julien-wilson & Josh Lamers

Discussion on abolition, family policing, and liberation work in the child welfare context

Panel Recording: Abolition & Child Welfare

Webinar: Anti-Black Racism & Child Protection in Ontario
(Presented by Josh Lamers)

In Conversation with BLAC - A Webinar on Anti-Black Racism & Child Protection in Ontario

Join BLAC for an informative webinar providing information on the Child Welfare system in Ontario and anti-Black racism. Meet the presenter: Josh Lamers (he/him) is one of the co-creators of the Collective of Child Welfare Survivors (CCWS). Josh is a Black queer organizer, activist, law student, and child welfare survivor/abolitionist. Josh spent the first 3.5 years of his life in and out of foster care in rural Ontario until experiencing further racial displacement in adoption to a white home in another predominantly white rural town. Josh’s community and academic work centres the intersections of Blackness, Disability and madness, child welfare survivorship, queerness and transness. Josh is the co-creator of various Black radical spaces that organize against anti-Black racism in institutions like post-secondary education. Josh’s award-winning research centres the abolition of child welfare through the experiences of Black child welfare survivors and families. Josh has his Bachelor and Master of Social Work from X University, and is currently a Juris Doctor Candidate at University of Windsor in his final year.

Part 1: Rights in the system & navigating investigations

Part 2: Anti-Blackness, enslavement, and systemic harm

Taking a Life: Abolishing Adoption in Canada & Elsewhere

Abolition, Adoption, and the Fight Against Family Policing

This annual public talk by CCWS confronts the violent realities of adoption in Ontario and beyond especially for Black, Indigenous, and racialized children placed in white adoptive homes. Framed around the Ontario government's 2020 shift toward "permanency planning," the panel names adoption as a form of state-sanctioned separation.

Featuring moderator Josh Lamers and panelists Ashley Ash, Harrison Mooney, and Zaira, the conversation “interrupts the white-saviour narratives that wrap adoption up as some benevolent undertaking,” centering adoptee voices who survived “supposedly safe houses.”

Themes:
Adoption & colonial violence, Black & Indigenous family separation, adult adoptee voices, family policing abolition, racialized harm in "permanency" narratives

🎧 Recommended Follow-Up:

  • Zaira’s podcast: Adoptees Crossing Lines

  • Harrison’s memoir: Invisible Boy: A Memoir of Self-Discovery

Madness, Anti-Blackness, and the Institutional Gaslighting of Care

At a time when Ontario group homes are being exposed for using restraints and forced medication on children in their care, this CCWS public talk confronts the maddening violence of family policing. This panel explores how systems like child welfare destabilize and dehumanize Black children, youth, and families — not just through material separation, but through constant contradiction, institutional dishonesty, and systemic gaslighting.

Family Policing as Maddening Systems

Themes:
Anti-Blackness in child welfare, Mad studies & psychiatric violence, Survivor testimony,Mental health & family policing, Institutional gaslighting

Speakers:

  • Dr. Idil Abdillahi (she/her) – Academic, abolitionist, mad scholar

  • Thaila Dixon (they/them) – Child welfare survivor & organizer

  • Tisheena Burnette (she/her) – Black child welfare survivor & advocate