Nearly one in every twenty children in Illinois (200,000) and approximately 37,000 children in Chicago have had a parent in jail or prison. Due to systemic racism, Black and Latinx children are more likely to be impacted by parental incarceration. Parental incarceration negatively affects children, including lower educational attainment and the likelihood of justice system involvement. Additionally, parental incarceration significantly harms the families and communities of those incarcerated, creating significant burdens for parents and caregivers, further exacerbating the harm inflicted and racial inequities.

Illinois Action for Children (IAFC), an advocate for children and families and a catalyst for transforming childcare and early learning programs, partnered with ChiByDesign to understand and strengthen the relationships between parents impacted by incarceration and their children. As the initial phase of an extended collaboration, ChiByDesign facilitated co-design, future framing, and prototyping workshops that convened formerly incarcerated parents, children of incarcerated parents, caregivers, family support service providers, academics, and justice system stakeholders. We amassed these critical stakeholders' collective knowledge to identify key innovations that must be pursued to strengthen connections among families impacted by incarceration.

1. Co-designers developed concepts that address:

2. The impact of emotional and physical distance on family bonds

3. Economic barriers families face after parental incarceration

4. Trauma stemming from involvement in the child welfare and justice systems.

Play-Centered Family Support Spaces. To sustain and build relationships between incarcerated parent(s) and their child(ren), non-profit organizations will create programming for incarcerated parent(s), children, caregivers, and extended family members to bond outside of carceral facilities. Concept features include:

1. Transportation for parents, caregivers, and children

2. Play-based activities

3. Educational and learning resources for children and parents

4. Shared meals and nourishment

Guaranteed Resources for Children and Caregivers. To ensure families can meet their basic needs and improve the probability of reunification, they will receive financial resources until the caregiver can provide them. Incarcerated parents will receive financial resources to care for themselves and their children upon release. Concept features include:

1. Financial advisors for caregivers and parents

2. Educational hubs to support families

3. A digital portal ensuring immediate access to family-sustaining resources

4. Re-entry organizations as pass-through organizations for financial resources

Ecosystem for Advocacy, Skillbuilding, and Wellbeing. To keep families intact and support youth through the trauma of separation, co-designers developed a policy concept that would create an ecosystem of services and people with the knowledge and tools to support youth in foster care and their families. This policy concept aims to create:

1. An advocacy center where youth are validated and supported

2. Updated mandated reporting policies

3. Sustainable and supportive communities

4. Resources equipping foster youth with nutrition, housing, and clothing

5. Skills and career-building programming

The concepts created were directly informed by the lived experience of our co-designers. Utilizing a co-design approach enabled us to engage and co-create with lived experts in a collaborative and supportive environment. Integrating their perspectives and knowledge was critical to reimagining family connections for justice-impacted families.

OUR APPROACH

Illinois Action for Children engaged ChiByDesign to design and employ a co-design approach to better understand incarceration-impacted families' challenges and co-create interventions that address them. ChiByDesign facilitated a series of workshops that convened formerly incarcerated parents, children of formerly incarcerated parents, caregivers, and stakeholders across the justice and child welfare systems and family support organizations. The workshops aimed to:

1. Convene families who have been impacted by incarceration and other stakeholders to understand the conditions, policies, practices, and experiences that disconnect children and families from incarcerated parents.

2. Collectively imagine futures where the needs of families impacted by incarceration are met.

3. Develop anti-racist infrastructures with lived experts that foster positive connections between incarcerated parents, their children, and those who care for them.

We achieved the project goals through three co-design workshops:

1. Understanding. Convene a diverse group of stakeholders (formerly incarcerated parents, those who've had incarcerated parents, caregivers, and other stakeholders) to connect their experiences and the policies, practices, and infrastructures that influence them.

2. Future Framing. Collectively imagine futures in which families impacted by incarceration have developed and maintained strong connections and are supported by one another and their communities.

3. Prototyping. Collectively prototype new policies, practices, and infrastructures that address the challenges incarcerated parents and their families face. These prototypes will inform future programming for parents and children within Cook County.

Barriers to Strong Family Connections

The co-design workshops surfaced many challenges hindering the ability of families to build strong connections due to a parent's incarceration. The barriers were wide-ranging, from mental health to carceral policies and procedures inhibiting parent and child bonding.

Co-designers identified 22 key challenges that create barriers to developing and maintaining strong family connections. These challenges must be addressed to foster and sustain positive family connections. We categorized them under the following levers:

1. Over-incarceration in Black communities

2. Parent-child bonding barriers

3. Economic barriers

4. Trauma and mental health barriers

5. Denial of parent rights and authority

DESIRED OUTCOMES

Co-designers identified 5 key outcomes that must be pursued in supporting families impacted by incarceration. These outcomes represent co-designers' collective vision of a future where children and their parents are connected and supported.

1. Sustained family connections that create thriving relationships and stronger communities. Developing thriving family relationships requires constant and consistent positive interactions between incarcerated parents, their children, and the caregivers caring for their children. It also requires establishing conditions that allow them to focus on building relationships rather than the hardships typically associated with parental incarceration.

2. Prioritized access to healing and wellness supports for Black and Latinx families to enable resilient and healthy communities. Beyond financial resources, families impacted by incarceration require resources and supports that facilitate healing and holistic wellness (social, emotional, spiritual, and physical).

3. Continuous investment in family-sustaining employment and financial security for incarceration-impacted families. Increasing families' financial security requires the sustained provision of financial resources and employment opportunities for caregivers and returning parents to care for their children and themselves.

4. Assured access to resources that enable families to flourish. Families impacted by incarceration (parents, children, and caregivers) require guaranteed access to resources and infrastructures that enable them to meet their basic needs, promote wellness, and expand access to knowledge and digital tools.

5. Improved educational pathways for Black and Latinx communities to create their desired futures. Enabling Black and Latinx communities to create their desired futures requires increased access to traditional and non-traditional education pathways, enabling parents to support and provide for themselves and their families and children to pursue their dreams.

PRINCIPLES

Developed from co-designer discussions, the following principles should be incorporated into interventions and utilized as a metric for creating positive connections between incarcerated parents and their children.

1. Champion family and community bonding.

2. Advance youth agency and empowerment.

3. Prioritize family preservation.

4. Equip justice-impacted families with mental health resources and support.

5. Prioritize autonomy and self-determination.

6. Cultivate inter-agency data sharing and collaboration.

7. Develop centralized relationship-nurturing spaces.

8. Curtail justice and child welfare system involvement.

9. Advance digital literacy.

10. Provide hyper-local and culturally responsive services.

11. Leverage public infrastructures to promote family bonding and community empowerment.

12. Cultivate inter-agency data sharing and collaboration.

13.Leverage play to strengthen parent-child bonds.

CO-DESIGNED CONCEPTS

To actualize these outcomes and principles, workshop co-designers developed three concepts to address significant barriers to incarceration-impacted families building and maintaining strong connections. These concepts address the impact of emotional and physical distance on family bonds, the economic barriers children and families face, and the emotional, financial, and educational challenges faced by youth forced into the child welfare system. Each concept offers ideas that IAFC and partner organizations can advance, test, and develop into pilot programs that strengthen family connections for incarceration-impacted families.

Play-Centered Family Support Spaces

Co-designers chose to address the impact of emotional and physical distance on family bonds.

They created an accessible, family-centered space that utilizes play-based activities to help

parents, children, and families connect and support each other. A non-profit collaborating with

state agencies to make programming possible will run this new family-centered space. Codesigners developed the following concept to demonstrate the possibilities of leveraging family-centered spaces to strengthen the bonds between parents and children:

To sustain and build relationships between incarcerated parent(s) and their child(ren), non-profit organizations will create programming for incarcerated parent(s), children, caregivers, and extended family members to bond outside of carceral facilities. This new programming will focus on creating support groups for families in the space. This new family support programming will necessitate and strengthen cross-agency collaboration by developing partnerships between jail/prison facilities, state agencies, and a lead non-profit organization running programming working with each other to bring families together. Whereas carceral facilities are not children or family/friendly environments, this programming will take place in a child-centered and family-centered green space with a diverse infrastructure (i.e., pools, basketball court, library) that prompts parents, children, and family members to engage in various activities. This space will be accessible to all family members, not just incarcerated parent(s) and their children. Facilitators and volunteers will help run the family space, creating opportunities for parents and children to bond through community support.

Guaranteed Resources for Children and Caregivers

Co-designers chose to address the economic barriers families face after the incarceration of a parent. They determined that a policy should provide guaranteed financial resources to families impacted by incarceration and the caregivers responsible for the children without restriction. Co-designers developed the following concept to enable and support this policy:

To ensure children impacted by incarceration and their caregivers can meet their basic needs, they will receive financial resources until the caregiver can provide them. Caregivers include family members and others the parent has entrusted to care for their children. To improve the probability of reunification, incarcerated parents will also receive financial resources that enable them to care for themselves and their children upon release.

Caregivers and parents have the autonomy and agency to spend their financial resources as they see fit as long as they contribute to their and their children's physical, social, emotional, and economic well-being.

Ecosystem for Advocacy, Skillbuilding, and Wellbeing

Youth in foster care lack adequate experiences, services, and tools to meet their educational, emotional, financial, and health needs. Through policy, co-designers addressed critical barriers that create traumatic events once families become formally involved with the child welfare and justice systems. The co-designer-recommended policy also provides youth essential support once they age out of the child welfare system.

This new policy creates an ecosystem of services and people with the knowledge and tools to support youth in foster care and their families. Currently, child welfare prioritizes family separation over preservation, impacting parent-child bonding and healing. Under this new policy, families remain intact unless preservation causes more harm than good.

The advocacy center is the hub for guardian ad litem (GAL), court-appointed special advocates (CASAs), and other system actors who will validate youth's pain and connect them with the resources and knowledge needed to navigate the system. These actors prevent behaviors detrimental to children's and youth's well-being.

REFLECTIONS

Next steps for this work. Our collaboration with Illinois Action for Children has catalyzed a continuation of this work. We are currently working with the leadership and Board at IAFC to secure funding for Phase Two of the project. In Phase Two, we will prototype and iterate upon the community-generated ideas from Phase One and continue building meaningful and impactful relationships with IAFC stakeholders, Illinois families, and adjacent systems actors. The Illinois Department of Human Services Commission on Children of Incarcerated Parents and the Chicago Children's Museum have expressed commitments to host and sponsor the prototyping of Play-Centered Family Support Spaces. We are excited about the interest and dedication of local government and philanthropic leaders to continue the development of concepts created by formerly incarcerated parents that center on the needs of currently incarcerated parents and their children. Illinois Governor JB Pritzker recently said, "Illinois will become the best state in the nation for families raising young children…" and focusing on the relationships between our most vulnerable parents and their children is a huge step towards meeting this goal.