Posts Tagged ‘Praxis International’
Re: My June 4, 2011 Post on Four Special Issue Resource Centers (Ellen Pence/MPDI): (Pt 2 of, well, now it’s 3), “Same text, better formatting, some updating”). [Publ. again March 29, 2016<~~].
You will notice that some grants refer to the “Special Issue Resource Center.” …
Given the column headings I selected, that of over perhaps twenty years, only THREE different women are shown: Ellen Pence and Denise Gamache headed up most of them as “Principal Investigator”, then in about 2000, mostly just Denise Gamache, and in 2016, I see a “Renee Gutman.”
Denise Gamache is now associated with “Battered Women’s Justice Project” (and was while working also at DAIP) which decided to “come out” (incorporate in MN) in the year 2013. I see that “Renee Gutmann” got her degree in 1993, and has worked for DAIP since 1993 (LinkedIn) and is characterized as “Accountant” for DAIP.
THIS POST IS:
Re: My June 4, 2011 Post on Four Special Issue Resource Centers (Ellen Pence/MPDI): (Pt 2 of, well, now it’s 3), “Same text, better formatting, some updating”). [Publ. again March 29, 2016<~~] (short-link ends “-3ck”).
Part 1 (most recent post) explains why I’m re-blogging it with some updates. It was recently reblogged on Red Herring Alert, in an interesting juxtaposition of articles.
This version of the same post makes some charts more readable. The gist of the material is the Ellen Pence / Casey Gwinn connection (representing the Duluth, MN-based “DAIP” as it now goes by, and the Family Justice Center concept (now called “Alliance for Hope International” as a California nonprofit of which the “Family Justice Center Alliance” has become a program). It also intersected with Telling Amy’s Story, and got under my skin at the time, as it still does.
As does the entire “Family Justice Center” setup. I still remember “connecting the dots” on discovering that the San Diego Family Justice Center Foundation (it’s full original, corporate name) existed to funnel money to Camp Hope, Inc. — but Camp Hope, Inc. wasn’t staying properly incorporated. No matter, shut down one version, file for a new one, move the money. It was a minor, minor detail — charitable registration number was so close, and more recently realizing it’d changed names AGAIN, that got me reviewing the earlier tax returns of this operations. I have been living IN California before, during, and while, this business model was created, funded, and replicated. It’s worth an entirely separate blog to alert people to what, exactly IS that business model — but I am only one person.
The fuller background on the original (a) philanthropic private wealthy couple and (b) public funds behind the multiple names surrounding both the San Diego Family Justice Center and the associated “Camp Hope” theme, are another separate story which I also learned considerably more fascinating background on this past summer. By doing, the usual thing — scrutinizing tax returns and looking up the entities and people named in them. Some of this is exposed below in the section with light-brown-background and teal borders. Actually, influence from “Fuller Seminary” leadership may have been involved so, “fuller background” could be a pun, also.
“Getting” the reality of the Family Justice Center Alliance is, I’d say, as important as getting the reality of the Duluth Model, CCR, treat everyone and let us be the train-the-trainer people concept. So I will continue to bring it up, where it ties into the other subject matter. Both involve replicating BUSINESS models. A close diagnosis of the original models then, is always appropriate — and by “diagnosis” I mean, accounting-wise. This can’t be just one organization, but involve the various related organizations (translation: “networks”) to construct something of a picture of operations. Even for people who weren’t “there,” right on scene locally — it can still be done.
SHARE THIS POST on...
Yes, Broken Courts, Flawed Practices, and the Parade of Fools: (Pt.1(a) Intro, Context) [Last post of 2014, publ. June 29, 2014].
From this post as first published:
This post is about advocacy group supporters and followers failing to set standards and keep their own leaders ethical. In a larger sense, the same goes for all of us as citizens, supporting by personal energy and labor (i.e., government revenues) — how can we keep leaders honest or ethical if we don’t have a grasp of what they are doing, what they are paid to do, and how the system is organized? ….
It is a natural continuation of the recent (and from May 2012) “Parades, Charades and Facades,” and my posting this is keeping a personal promise (to myself) for the year 2014, to expose what’s underneath the rhetoric.
I had no way of knowing at the time, but this became my last post of 2014, and I didn’t post anything for the entirety of 2015, for another round in the court system and while handling (yet) another round of family-generated problems putting my housing at risk through previous rounds which destroyed a sustainable profession (through the family courts) which was then used, apparently behind my back, to take control of an inheritance, and all but “dare” me to challenge the current status quo.I tend to challenge any current status quo which forces competent individuals onto food stamps needlessly, and continues to harass and interfere, cyclically, as I am noticed to be engaging in obtaining replacement work. This was coming to a head in summer 2014, which also may have prompted my desire here to lay out the elements clearly, naming names, as to which organizations occupied what status on the family court reform (and associated “domestic violence prevention” food chains, and how I came to understand where they were on that food chain.
In late 2019 I am coming back to review this post along with a few others which engaged in the “Our Broken Family Courts Initiative” (i.e., the Cummings Foundations, legal domicile Nevada, field of operations it seems, they’d chosen for some reason nearby Arizona.
I noticed it lacked my usual “Title & Shortlink” format, so came here to add one, to add the date published to the title itself, and these comments. It’s clear I considered this even in 2014 an important point to make by the next update section.//LGH Dec. 7, 2019. Here’s that Title now:
(short-link ends “-2ug”). Having also now noticed this post is an obnoxious 25.4K words long, I’ll see if/when I might get to an abbreviation and/or re-posting of key parts. That’s not a promise, just a recognition of the need! NOTE: This post has comments (some dialogue with readers) and more helpful links. Most posts don’t have comments; these are worth reading (and found at the bottom) as are I still believe its extensive list of tags.
//LGH.
[Published June 29, 2014; Post in edit mode late July-Aug. 2014; expanded to almost double the size,nearly 24,000 words; with background info….In most posts, a lot of the length is simply quotes, my style is not just tell, but “show and tell.”]
February 2016 Personal Update:
Without changing the contents here (except one paragraph or so, cleaning up some formatting and adding tags), I’ll mention that the MAJOR break in posting anything between June 29, 2014 and early 2016 came because my personal situation heated up so much after I went public on fiduciary abuse by an older sister — who’d played a crucial role in supporting/enabling (if not inciting) our original “custody war,” after playing a negligible, passive, codependent, domestic-violence-enabling role the previous decade, after learning that I was a battered wife and mother and seeking intervention.
From summer 2014 – early 2015, the situation went into probate court — lasting in total, nearly a year, to finish transition. Throughout 2015 I was working with and renegotiating standards with personnel in control of my resources, and continuing to withhold access to evidence of the paper trail….From summer 2014 – 2016, I was still writing things up, investigating, communicating privately with some individuals — but also had to spend major time, that’s writing time, and to lawyer, sister, starting with unearthing a written commitment on her part, yes/no — are you resigning or not? Then, requesting to settle out of court (which is possible under California code and the individual trust), which (of course) was rejected, stringing the process out, adding more professionals (not that I had some for protection on this end).
In 2015, a major transition dealing with new people — major negotiation time, and now as the year 2015 closed out and so far in 2016– I find myself again fighting for housing, and to obtain financial records, which certain people don’t want found. Both my (so to speak — father no longer involved, and I was prevented from continued involvement years earlier) young adult children now being out of the state, I had hoped to move on with life, and promptly move out of present housing. I found — “not so” from certain personnel, and that “not so” is in one of the most effective forms of messing with other human beings — litigation absent the supporting facts (and here, even proof of standing) as a form of extortion, which like some of the other things this blog talks about (child-stealing, wife-beating, stalking, terroristic threats on individuals, statements under penalty of perjury which are, well, known to be falsehoods by those speaking, these are criminal issues.
In these conditions, struggling with wordpress HTML and getting out a post, wasn’t going to happen. I’ve been working at a different format to start uploading what did, still, continue learning during the non-posting time. We shall see…. Anyhow, that’s why no follow-up parts to this post occurred, much as I would’ve liked to complete them. There are plenty in draft, and I am posting again. There are still plenty of survival-level challenges, which means that about the only relief or “down-time” still involves this kind of blogging anyhow —
––and in continuing to blog I am still thinking about the next generation, particularly of those who may have been trafficked, traded and repeatedly disrupted (UNLESS they come into an abusive home, it seems — then the “don’t disrupt” theme seems to prevail) like commodities between and among parent/non-parent caretakers — all rationalized and presided over in the institutions run by privately-networked in organizations & with those in government positions people (judges, experts, and social science research & demo projects building their resumes and journaling their findings) “IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST” and in the name of “NON-ADVERSARIAL COURT PROCEEDINGS,” “REDUCING CONFLICT” and of course Treating and Healing the scourges of wife-battering and child abuse [“SUPERVISED VISITATION / BATTERERS INTERVENTION”], for “Futures without Violence” “Safe Horizons” “Justice” (a common label on oh so many organizations), FAMILY reunification, preservation, (…. Responsible Fatherhood, Healthy Marriages, Access and Visitation — all such good, wonderful, noble things…) and my favorite term when applied to what allegedly MUST happen between perps and those perpetrated-upon: “CONCILIATION.” Unless parental alienation was perpetrated upon someone in a high-conflict relationship, in which case cold-turkey quarantining of the offender with de-programming for the alienated minor children.
Maybe we should call these courts something more appropriate to what takes place in them — like virtual auction blocks, or stock markets in human lives, with some able to profit so well in the field, they can as majority shareholders, demand changes in management, streamlined efficiency and increased return to shareholders, futures, options, the whole deal, on the profits of churning individual human beings’ relationships under the banner of helping society — and of course anyone “low-income” adjust to business as usual.
// Thanks for Readers’ Patience, including with some of the formatting in reading through existing posts, or if you were expecting new ones that didn’t come timely…., LGH (“Let’s Get Honest) 2/6/2016.
Between “Pts.1” [1a and 1b] and “Pt.2” I expect to post more material on the Family Court Enhancement Project (“FCEP”), which I understand is all the talk about town (i.e., on the internet in these circles (use your search function to find some of it…). So the title of this blog refers to a series. It is a natural continuation of the recent (and from May 2012) “Parades, Charades and Facades,” and my posting this is keeping a personal promise (to myself) for the year 2014, to expose what’s underneath the rhetoric.
These parades, charades, and facades have become a problem for the people who match the profile of what they claim to represent, “Protective Parents” and/or “Battered Mothers,” specifically. I am among that class and a witness of the practices, tactics, and censorships of dialogues involved. I believe collectively the groups involved comprise a cult, and exhibit all primary cult practices.
Before a few mental circuits of distressed parents disconnect, or melt from the heat of their own righteous indignation, (“But my children were abused; I am an incest survivor” etc.), this post is not about whether or not incest or abuse took place in those cases, or children are being placed in the care of batterers or dangerous parents. I’m a survivor, and I know that plenty of times, abuse, sometimes incest did take place and children ARE being placed in the care of batterers. Mine were….
This post is about what kind of parents are taking a road trip (real, or virtually) with ANY advocacy organizations whose articles of incorporation (if any) boards of directors on their tax returns and patterns of incorporation, charitable filings they have not yet even identified (let alone read and understood), and what’s worse to a destination they have not evaluated as sensible, based on analyses of those organizations in the larger context.
It’s about the dangers of tunnel vision. Focus is one thing, but tunnel vision, an entirely different thing. it’s about how even spending days, weeks and months on a combination of social media, group -emails, individual emails, and even supplemented by various published articles on a certain topic can still be like eating white bread and peanut butter only, and wondering why you can’t make it through the marathon.
It’s so easy to get a sense of TIME (date of origin of a group), PLACE (where did it originally incorporated, and if it’s one of those state-skipping chameleon corporations, make a note of it, and find out where it’s been before), SIZE (for that, see the financials), and POSITIONING (who else is it interlocking agenda with; and — this is important — is it talking from a religious-exempt institution, or from a law school, or center/institute (etc.) at a university, or individually. Universities, hospitals, government represent considerable clout, prestige and authority, and lesser accountability for said “Center” or Institute” when it comes to tracking the funding = tracking the influence. Is it a regular HHS grantee? On which federal funding streams?
How much does anyone involved really know, as an abuse survivor or simply as a taxpayer, about the USDOJ/OVW (Office of Violence Against Women) funding streams proceeding from passage and subsequent re-authorizations of the Violence Against Women Act (1994ff) and who’s on them, who’s advising them? What about the people who have been directors of that Office? (Two — Bea Hanson and the Hon. Susan B. Carbon — in this post). What are their affiliations, where did they come from policy-wise and professionally?
SHARE THIS POST on...
OVW + BWJP-FVPF + PRAXIS + NCADV(s) + AFCC = same old, same old (with new names on the grant systems) Here’s why: [Publ. July 6, 2011]
Post Title with shortlink and enclosed comments added June, 2019. Post written eight years earlier.
(This post came up in a search and I needed to add a “Read-More” link anyway).
See Gilder-Lehman Center at Yale or his NYT Obituary April, 2019. Undated photo.
OVW + BWJP-FVPF + PRAXIS + NCADV(s) + AFCC = same old, same old (with new names on the grant systems) Here’s why: [Publ. July 6, 2011] [WordPress-generated, case-sensitive short-link here ends in just two characters, probably because it’s so early in this blog: “-K7”]. As first published, about 10,800 words, incl. any & all quotes, image captions, tables, etc. //LGH June 23, 2019
On review of this post, I see that perhaps the final ⅓ is quoting (at length) three sources on Irish Slavery, including “Tangled Roots’ “Barbadosed: Africans and Irish in Barbados” from GLC.Yale.Edu, a center originally inspired when businessmen/history buffs G&L heard lectures by a Yale history professor David Brion Davis, who I now see just died this past April after a long, productive life:”Prizewinning Historian of Slavery Dies at 92” NYT April, 2019.
Professor Davis wrote or edited 16 books, but paramount were the three that examined the moral challenges and contradictions of slavery and their centrality in American and Atlantic history. ~~|~~The first, “The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture” (1966), won a Pulitzer Prize and was a National Book Award finalist. The second, “The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823” (1975), won the National Book Award as well as the Bancroft Prize, one of the most prestigious in the study of American history. ~~|~~The last book of the trilogy, “The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation,” was published in 2014 as Professor Davis approached 90. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award…~~|~~President Barack Obama presented Professor Davis with a National Humanities Medal in 2014 for “reshaping our understanding of history,” as the citation said. ~~|~~The fundamental problem of slavery, Professor Davis wrote, “lay not in its cruelty or exploitation, but in the underlying conception of man as a conveyable possession with no more autonomy of will and consciousness than a domestic animal.” [ “~~|~~” = para. break omitted]
I was (and still am) pretty irritated at the exclusionary practices of the above-named groups in deciding how to solve “family” problems involving abuse; see concluding paragraph. And there are many parallels between abuse and slavery.
Understandably, this torrent of text with missing paragraph breaks can be very irritating to read. But for those who do read, or skim, I believe I have made the point that AFCC members flock together, consult together, and set policy together. Generally speaking any policy that comes out will somehow, somewhere, contain the words “Parental Alienation” “High-Conflict” and usually to go with it, “treatment” or “solutions” etc.
The solution is generally going to require counseling or the services of a psychologist, counselor, mediator, psychiatrist, therapist or other mental health expert.
- First, positioning member (this is long done, and ongoing) high in government, particularly in the court system.
- Programs are pretty much pushed from the Top Down while proclaiming they are actually grassroots demand . . . .
- Running conferences — all over the place, but noticeably in real nice places that most of the people they are talking about (in the conferences, i.e., parents) have little chance of reaching (or affording hotel & airfare for)– such as Honolulu, with an after-trip to Cuba, or other cool places. As well as the Contiguous US conference circuit, ongoing.
- Pushing the services of psychologists and psychiatrists, including Ph.D.s in the same to remedy the majority of life’s problems.
- This of course is easier to push when you also have judges in the mix willing to sign a few court orders forcing treatment.
- Taking advantage of Federal Grants and teaching membership how to do the same, whether from HHS or DOJ.
- Strategically forming nonprofit corporations to contract, or subcontract with whatever the grants are for.
- Skillful involvement of Child Support Service (OCSE) weaponry** to target participants in certain programs, like parental education, in particular.
- Co-opting the Battered Women’s Movement and diluting it through “collaboration.” (HHS grants system helps motivate this behavior). For example, when Battered Women’s Justice Project combines with Association of Family & Conciliation Courts to study the problems with Custody.
Development of a Framework for Identifying and Explicating the Context of Domestic Violence in Custody Cases and its Implications for Custody Determinations
BWJP and its project partner, Praxis International, are expanding recent multidisciplinary efforts to more effectively protect the safety and wellbeing of children and their parents in the family court system by crafting a more practical framework for identifying, understanding and accounting for the contexts and implications of domestic violence in custody arrangements and parenting plans.
Read that one aloud nonstop, three times (one quick breath only per time) and try to deduce the meaning. Separate and examine each phrase and try to locate in time & space, and clearly label what they are referring to.
BWJP and Praxis staff have formed a National Workgroup with representatives from the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges (NCJFCJ) and theAssociation of Family and Conciliation Courts (AFCC). In consultation with leading researchers and practitioners, they have begun to examine the institutional processes by which family courts commonly reach and/or facilitate crucial parenting decisions, including the use of auxiliary advisors such as custody evaluators, guardians ad litem and court appointed special advocates. The intent is to identify the ways in which current institutional practices produce both problematic and helpful results for children and their parents.
The goal of this analysis, which draws heavily from the Praxis Audit Process of institutional ethnography, is to develop concrete recommendations for producing safer, healthier outcomes for children and their battered and battering parents.**
Commentary:
Yes — rather than, say, accountability, let’s go for making sure the battering parents as well as the parents and children battered are safe. This is equally important, right?, to protecting both perpetrators and their victims, whether the other parent, or children.
Since when did the safety of a person who beats on or abuses another person rise in equality to the safety of the person attacked? Does this happen throughout the criminal law system as well? Is battering no longer a criminal matter, but a “family” matter? After all, the name of BWJP is “Battered Women‘s Justice Project.”
Any project to “produce an outcome” should be most concerned about the processes involved to get there — which is where the “Justice” part supposedly enters in!
TO figure out how to do this, assemble experts from BWJP — a group that has so far not reported (at all) on the AFCC– and the AFCC, and another family court oriented group, NCJFCJ.
AFCC judicial members and others are notorious for switching custody to batterers on the basis of parental alienation, a theory derivative of some incest-friendly psychologists (Gardner et al.) and promoted by an organization founded by them. This sad/bad custody-switching habit spawned by AFCC (it wasn’t battering; it was parental alienation, and your mind needs adjustment, Mom; GREAT idea. . . .) has itself spawned another set of nonprofit groups who like to complain about it (but not address AFCC’s role or the fatherhood grants system’s role, or for that matter, the role of the child support system in funding the operation).
There already IS a framework — and these organizations are IT! So the same organizations are going to “frame” (or rather REframe) the problems they have helped create? — AFCC, as a primary agent, and BWJP at this point, I’ll have to call a decoy. Who, really is being “framed” here?
Let's Get Honest! Absolutely Uncommon Analysis of Family & Conciliation Courts' Operations, Practices, & History 