In this solidly researched book, the authors demonstrate that the knowledge and techniques exist to decrease the incidence of welfare dependency, poor-single parent families, and alienated, uneducated youth. Within Our Reach provides a detailed account of the problem, and describes 24 programs that have proved successful in changing the lives of seriously disadvantaged children.

Common Purpose: Strengthening Families & Neighborhoods to Rebuild America

This refreshing book is an antidote to despair. For Americans skeptical about our national capacity to turn around inner-city devastation and reverse high rates of illegitimacy, school failure, and intergenerational poverty, Common Purpose offers inspiring tales and hard evidence of success on a scale that is large enough to matter

Disposable Children: America's Child Welfare System

Complex and knotted issues are untangled as author Renny Golden offers an incisive and detailed critical analysis of each arm of today's system, revealing a bureaucracy lurching from crisis to crisis and failing to keep children safe and whole. Tragedy, however, does not have the last word here. Drawing from the research of the family support movement and from community and youth development initiatives, Golden offers examples of innovative community-directed efforts to build the support necessary to prevent family and social breakdown.

Where is Home? is the story of one child who defied the foster care system and survived because she placed her trust irrevocably in herself.

For Reasons of Poverty: A Critical Analysis of the Public Child Welfare System in the United States

The public child welfare system has been increasingly attacked for failing to implement long-standing national policies, especially family preservation. Pelton, a social work educator, continues this attack, but in a uniquely comprehensive, coherent, and compelling manner. His well-documented critique focuses on the philosophical underpinnings and internal workings of public child welfare, especially its medicalization of child abuse; inappropriate out-of-home placement of children for reasons of poverty; excessive reliance on foster care; and dysfunctional dual structure (investigative versus helping roles)

How should professionals - judges, lawyers, social workers, psychiatrists, and psychologists - conduct themselves in pursuing "the best interests" of children who have been abandoned, neglected, or abused? The agonizing dilemmas posed by these three questions were the subject of one of the seminal publishing events in the history of The Free press. The result has been a set of historic guidelines which forms the basis of their landmark trilogy Beyond the Best Interests of the Child, Before the Best Interests of the Child, and In the Best Interests of the Child, published between 1973 and 1986