Senior Policy Associate

About CFR

The Center for Family Representation Inc. (CFR) is an award-winning, innovative law and policy organization that serves primarily Black and Brown families and youth in Queens, Manhattan, and the Bronx with an interdisciplinary legal defense model that serves more than 2400 clients every year. CFR was originally founded in 2002 to dramatically change the trajectory of indigent parents being prosecuted by the City’s Administration for Children’s Services (ACS).

Our goal is to defend and protect our clients’ rights, reduce the harm of family separation and prevent or minimize the time any child spends in the foster system. CFR provides interdisciplinary family defense with a model that was unique at our founding and that is now being replicated nationally: we assign every client an attorney and a social work staff member, and teams have the support of parent advocates, who are parents with direct personal experience of being investigated and prosecuted by ACS.

CFR’s Early Defense Practice represents parents during a child protective investigation (to avoid court involvement where possible). Our SCR practice assists parents in clearing their names from state maltreatment records. As an agency committed to securing justice for families, we built the Youth Defense practice (YDP) to defend youth at risk of family separation through incarceration. YDP uses the same interdisciplinary model to represent youth being prosecuted in Queens and Manhattan in Supreme Court Youth Parts, during Probation Adjustment and in Delinquency proceedings in Family Court.

CFR’s Home for Good program provides legal and social work services to clients in immigration, civil legal services and criminal defense matters, to afford clients an efficient and well-coordinated one-stop solution to a range of issues that threaten family stability. Recognized as experts in our fields, we annually train over 500 practitioners in the city, state and around the country on strategies to promote family preservation and interdisciplinary representation, and we provide community based “Know Your Rights” presentations to parents, youth and service providers.

We advocate at the city, state and national level for policies that reduce the harm of family separation, and promote parent engagement and justice for youth and families.

The Senior Policy Associate will help lead CFR’s interdisciplinary policy team, working to advance anti-racist policies that seek to eliminate or reduce the harms of the family policing, adult and youth incarceration, immigration, and housing systems. This person will help establish and drive CFR’s strategic policy agenda in consultation with the Supervisor for Government Affairs and CFR’s Executive Director. They will be responsible for the overall coordination, direction and daily work on a range of CFR’s policy initiatives and projects.

This person will be supervised by the Executive Director but also work closely with the Supervisor for Government Affairs as well as with a wide variety of supervisors, senior staff and directors on policy projects, including communications related to CFR’s policy priorities.

This person will directly supervise CFR’s policy team in their collective work, coordinate the activities of CFR’s External Engagement team (EET) and other ad hoc policy projects that involve staff at all levels, and participate in coalitions of advocates and impacted communities.

Location: This position is seated in Manhattan. However, the Policy Supervisor should expect to have a presence in Queens, The Bronx, Manhattan, and Staten Island as needed. In alignment with CFR’s telecommuting policy, this role is remote or in-person as needed.

Specific Responsibilities will include but are not limited to:

Policy:

• Develop CFR’s strategic policy agenda in consultation with the policy team and the ED, Supervisor for Government Affairs, and coordinate work to accomplish CFR’s policy goals and priorities.
• Supervise CFR’s interdisciplinary policy team (create agendas, organize materials, delegate projects and meet as needed individually with policy team members;…