Indigenous-led program unites families, diverts kids from child welfare system in 98% of cases

There was a moment in Cara Courchene's life when reuniting with her children seemed out of reach.

The child welfare system seems stacked against parents like her, but one Indigenous-led program has had remarkable success in trying to change that.

In 98 per cent of cases, the Family Group Conference program either reunited children with families who love them, or prevented a child from entering the child welfare system in the first place.

Courchene is one success story. She credits her mentor through the program of never giving up on her. 

"What stuck with me was the way my mentor would come and check up on me, and there was a lot of times where I felt completely alone, and she wasn't worried about who would be there or anything like that," said Courchene, a member of Sagkeeng First Nation who lives in Winnipeg.

"She would come just knock on my window or my door and say, 'Hey, are you hungry?' or 'You need someone to talk to?' — and I think that's what helped me get through some of my hard times."

The Family Group Conference program at Ma Mawi Wi Chi Itata Centre will publicly release a report on Monday that illustrates the program's success in reducing the number of Indigenous children in a child welfare system where Indigenous people are overrepresented. 

Over the course of three years, 655 children took part in the FGC process. More than a third of the children (263) are living with their families and another 139 were waiting to return home, as of March 2020. The program also diverted 141 children from ever becoming a ward of the province.

Some families hadn't completed the program when the statistics were tallied, but the evaluation found FGC had a consistently high — 98 per cent — success rate in family reunification and diverting families from becoming involved with Child and Family Services.

Having all of those children living with their families and in their home communities would reduce government foster care costs by $15 million annually, according to an Indigenous-based evaluation of the program from 2017 to 2020.

Diane Redsky, executive director of Ma Mawi Wi Chi Itata Centre, an Indigenous-led family resource organization, said the glowing review backs up what she already knows.

"We have been saying to everybody, since the birth of the Ma Mawi Wi Chi Itata Centre in 1984, that investing into Indigenous-led strategies to care for our own and to ensure that our families are on the path of healing from colonization, generally speaking, that there's power in that and those are where the solutions lie."

The Ma Mawi Wi Chi Itata Centre has facilitated the FGC program for more than 20 years, but in 2017 the Winnipeg Foundation, provincial and federal governments committed $2.5 million to triple the number of eligible families over a three-year period.

The centre sought out an Indigenous-led evaluation to ensure the program was meeting its goals.