Let’s make child safety and wellbeing the paramount principal in custody outcomes. Let’s stop policy and special interest groups that hurt children. In Washington State there exists secret special interest groups who are promoting policies that harm children, deceiving lawmakers by disguising their bills as “parental rights” policies. Last year we were able to stop two harmful bills from proceeding through legislature that would have increased child abuse. It was happenstance we were able to stumble upon these bills, there exists no agency tracking this type of legislation. We need your help to make sure this doesn’t almost happen again. We need to educate lawmakers on how these bills are sliding under their noses, and we need a team tracking bills during session. Funds will go towards educating lawmakers and organizations during the interim about the elements of good and bad policy in family court, and help us intensely track bills during session. Additionally, your funds will go towards helping us continue to offer services we already offer that help protective parents keep their children safe, such as court watching, professional reviews, and peer to peer support. Overwhelmingly, protective parents find themselves more often than not the underrepresented party in family court. Having an easily accessible and easily navigable page with links to filing, case law search, looking up documents and how to guides is essential for pro se and underrepresented parties. At payes.org we created this essential resource for King County, see www.payes.org/family-court-resources. Funding will help us expand this incredibly useful resource to the other 38 counties in Washington State.

It must be recognized that being a parent is a 24/7 job, especially in the early years. If you combine this element with our system’s fundamental assumption that marriage is the solution to poverty and the only socially acceptable way a family with children can form, we have an socioeconomic environment where marginalized mothers will always be dependent, and thus under the control of, another person or entity. This dependency, creates an often toxic environment for which the caretaker is at the mercy of those who provide her living expenses: whether its the father, family member or roommate. Help the movement in recognizing that domestic work is labor so that mothers can live as independently as any other laborer, families can stay together and potential mothers are not economically coerced into abortion. Abortion should be a choice, not economically coerced. With funding we can change the narrative on motherhood from “its so hard” to “its so great.” Our federal government spends less than 1% of its budget on assistance to needy families, which is actually down from 5% in 1995. The first step is redefining the formal terms of motherhood as labor, creating at least a category of motherhood that fits within the parameters of labor laws and then we can advocate for a livable wage for mothers and other full-time caretakers during the early years of childhood. With funding, we want to create an easy to navigate page for single moms to access as many subsidies, credits, cash benefits, childcare, coupons, and assistance programs as they can, based on their location.

Awareness for alternative families not just creates options for potential parents, but destigmatizes the already existing alternative families. Through federal grans special interest organizations are awarded the upwards of five hundred million dollars a year in marriage campaigns, unfortunately the realistic effect of these efforts is that it financially compels women into sexual relationships in exchange for financial support for motherhood. Alternative families exist as an option in place of these sexual contractual relationships. Alternative families exist in many forms: single-moms supported by the community, single parents cohabiting with other single parents, but most notably: multi-generational households. Multi-generational households keep children constantly socially engaged as first-born children have immediate playmates with cousins, aunts, uncles and grandparents. Multi-generational households also keep mothers out of isolation, the other adult house-mates are a natural deterrent to domestic violence and solve the unaffordable child-care dilemma that has plagued modern society. Multi-generational households facilitate an environment where child-rearing traditions and knowledge can more easily be passed down from generation to generation. Multi-generational households are not a new or radical concept, in fact this is the basis of the Mosuo tribe in China where children essentially never move out, men and women have sexual relationships but don’t live together, and mothers raise their children with the child’s uncles, aunts and maternal grandmother, instead of with just the mother and the father. Help PAYES spread awareness about alternative family types so our future has options when starting a family. With funding we can spread information about alternative families through various avenues: social media, merchandise, and public relations.