The Head of a New York Charity Crusades for Children, State by State

It is 8:30 on a winter morning, and Marcia Robinson Lowry has just arrived

at her office in midtown Manhattan. It’s about an hour earlier than she normally gets in, but today promises to be extremely busy, with meetings with two major donors and a state official across the Hudson River in New Jersey.

Ms. Lowry is the founder and executive director of Children’s Rights, a nonprofit organization that, through lawsuits and studies of public policy, seeks to overhaul poorly managed child-welfare systems across the country.

The charity investigates jurisdictions with a history of system-wide problems, from repeated abuse and neglect in foster homes to overloaded caseworkers. Children’s Rights’ lawyers then put pressure on government officials to make changes, usually by filing a class-action lawsuit. Once they win or settle a case, they vigilantly monitor government agencies to be sure they are complying with the court’s ruling. In the dozen years since its founding, the organization has successfully instigated changes in child-welfare systems in 11 different states.

“It’s not that we ask for utopian things,” says Ms. Lowry. “We’re just asking governments to do what the law requires of them, to protect children. But when it comes to governments taking action, the areas where there is pressure is where things get accomplished. And because these kids can’t vote, it’s up to us to produce that pressure on their behalf. Someone needs to give a voice to these kids. They don’t have any power otherwise.”

A Call to Action

Indeed, the reason Ms. Lowry is headed to New Jersey today is to make sure that the state is finally doing what it should to protect children — like Charlie and Nadine H., two of the 60,000 youngsters on whose behalf the organization filed a class-action lawsuit against New Jersey in 1999. Charlie, who was 10 at the time, and Nadine, who was 8, had been living for five years in a foster home with a woman who would routinely beat them with broomsticks and whose live-in boyfriend was a convicted sex abuser. The kids couldn’t bathe because the home’s bathtub was infested with cockroaches.

It wasn’t until Children’s Rights filed its lawsuit and the case was exposed that the state finally found an adoptive home for the children.

Ms. Lowry, who received her bachelor’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University in 1962, began her career as an investigative reporter for the Long Island Press, hoping to educate people about important social issues.

“I thought that if I could explain society’s problems in a neutral, fair, and in an interesting way, people would rise up and do something,” says Ms. Lowry. “That didn’t happen, and I became frustrated. I didn’t feel like I was doing enough.”

So she pursued a career in public-interest law. She went to work at Community Action for Legal Services, a nonprofit group now known as Legal Services for New York City, and chose children’s issues as her specialty.

“When I started out, the whole concept of children having any representation was very uncommon,” says Ms. Lowry. “But I felt that children in foster care were like incarcerated individuals who had no one willing to fight for their rights.”

She went on to work for the New York Civil Liberties Union for six years, where she oversaw lawsuits to overhaul the city’s child-welfare system, and then for 16 years did the same in jurisdictions throughout the country for the American Civil Liberties Union.

In 1994, Ms. Lowry decided to create a separate charity: Children’s Rights. “I felt that children’s issues were sufficient enough that they needed their own organization,” she says. “Also, the aim of the ACLU is often tied to a liberal agenda, and I felt that children’s issues shouldn’t be associated with any political party. These problems aren’t political, they’re fundamental.”

Raising Money

It is now 9:30 a.m., and Lynn Edens — who, with her husband, Wes, has given tens of thousands of dollars to Children’s Rights since 2004 — arrives for a meeting with Ms. Lowry, along with Jethro Miller, director of development, and Allan Margolin, director of marketing and public affairs. The goal of the meeting: to pick Ms. Edens’s brain about marketing strategy and how to increase the number of people who support the charity.

“We like to work with donors to brainstorm these sorts of issues,” says Mr. Miller. “Some of our best ideas on how to explain our work to potential supporters come from supporters themselves rather than staff alone.”

Fund raising has consistently been a challenge for Children’s Rights, says Ms. Lowry.

“A direct-service organization has the ability to show donors how their work makes a difference in a very concrete and visual way,” she says. “But what we do is much more cerebral. A lot of people think lawyers are not very constructive. They don’t understand how law can leverage huge changes. Our challenge is to describe how our work really affects children’s lives in a way that people can more easily understand.”

In 2005, the last year for which final numbers are available, 26 percent of the organization’s $3.9-million budget came from gifts and grants, while 70 percent came from lawyers’ fees.

According to a federal statute, anyone who sues to vindicate federal rights against a government entity and wins is entitled to be reimbursed for the amount spent in preparing for the case. So when Children’s Rights sues and wins, or settles, the charity’s costs are reimbursed by the government. But the group doesn’t always win its cases, and it also spends significant resources gathering evidence that never results in a lawsuit.

Ms. Lowry says her charity needs to grow less reliant on legal fees. “The problem with attorneys’ fees is that it is very ‘lumpy’ — very uneven income,” she says. “We can’t predict exactly how much the fees will bring in, so it’s really important for the stability of the organization that there be more steady donated income.”

She notes that the charity’s 2007 budget calls for $5-million, and she is already nervous about how the group will raise the additional funds.

But Mr. Miller says that Children’s Rights has raised more money from individuals and foundations in the last year or so, in part because it has stepped up solicitations of grant makers and affluent people. And its Inaugural Benefit, a gala, raised $1-million in October, exceeding a goal of $400,000.

The event’s success has caused members of the charity’s inner circle to question whether they ought to modify its communications strategy to reach new donors.

“I think you should let the strategic goals of the organization drive what happens in your communication,” Ms. Edens tells the group. She notes that, as a former investment banker, she is motivated to give when a charity can show her specifically how her money is used to further its mission, a strategy she says Children’s Rights already uses well to reach its current donors, most of whom have backgrounds in finance or law.

However, she adds, if the charity decides to seek new donors, it might also want to consider a more “feel-good” approach in its marketing materials and perhaps highlight stories of the children who have been helped by the organization’s efforts.

In addition, she suggests that the charity court people who are interested in the policy-research aspect of Children’s Rights’ work.

“If you offered the ability to support a specific policy initiative or to endow a chair, where a particular intellectual might come in and produce a piece of research, that might help increase the breadth of your donor base,” she says.

Ms. Lowry thanks Ms. Edens for her ideas and asks if she can call to discuss them further as she hammers out a more formal strategic plan, something she admits has been delayed for too long.

“We’ve been a very lean organization, and we’re so focused on getting things done that we haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about the bigger picture,” says Ms. Lowry. “But it’s really important to have a more overarching plan. And as more donors become interested in us, we’ll have more of an opportunity to think about where we should go from here.”

No Deadwood

At 10:20 a.m., Ira Lustbader, one of the charity’s associate directors, and Jeremiah Frei-Pearson, a staff attorney, come to Ms. Lowry’s office to discuss the status of an investigation of a child-welfare agency. (They asked that the state not be named since the investigation is still pending). They tell Ms. Lowry that the state’s governor has learned of the investigation and had an associate call to say he wants to talk. This is potentially very good news, Ms. Lowry says: “We can and will litigate, but obviously it’s always better if we can get a resolution.”

In its 12-year history, Children’s Rights has initiated 18 lawsuits in 12 states. Eight settled out of court, and eight went to trial, with only one loss. Two lawsuits are now in settlement negotiations, and the charity is currently investigating child-welfare systems in four states.

Ms. Lowry credits the commitment of her 33-member staff (including 12 who hold law degrees) for this favorable win-loss record.

One of those lawyers, Mr. Frei-Pearson, joined the organization in October after working for four years at a big law firm to help pay off his student loans. His job at Children’s Rights, he says, satisfies a deeper need: “When your clients are abused kids, thinking you may be able to help them fires you up. But when your client is a big corporation, only your paycheck fires you up, and after a while that isn’t a big enough motivator, at least not for me.”

Ms. Lowry says that she is very selective about the lawyers she hires and that it often takes months to fill a position.

“I expect everyone to perform at a very high level,” she says. “There’s no room for deadwood around here.”

Law and Disorder

At 11 a.m., Ms. Lowry, Mr. Frei-Pearson, and Susan Lambiase, a Children’s Rights associate director, leave the office to catch a train to Trenton, N.J.

Today they are meeting with Kevin Ryan, who was appointed commissioner of New Jersey’s newly created Department of Children and Families in July, to determine whether the state administration has complied with the settlement the charity’s lawyers negotiated with officials over the summer.

Monitoring progress in the states where they have won or settled cases is what Children’s Rights’ lawyers spend most of their time doing.

“We don’t just go away” after a case has been won or settled, says Ms. Lowry. “We are prepared to reload the cannon if things aren’t getting done.”

Indeed, in New Jersey, Children’s Rights has had to reload the cannon several times. The charity first began investigating the state a decade ago, when local advocates reported major problems, including a severe lack of medical treatment for children in custody, widespread abuse and neglect in foster homes, and inadequate screening and training of caseworkers. In 1999, Children’s Rights sued the state on behalf of 60,000 New Jersey children.

Over the next few years, the charity prepared for trial. Then, in March 2003, a judge granted The New York Times and Newark, N.J.'s Star-Ledger access to thousands of files collected by Children’s Rights detailing numerous accounts of neglected foster children. State officials immediately contacted the charity to negotiate a settlement, and, by June, the state had agreed to put $30-million into improving the child-welfare system.

It was a start, but over the next couple of years, it became apparent that the effort was being severely mismanaged, says Ms. Lowry. So, in December 2005, Children’s Rights went back to court, charging that the state hadn’t complied with the terms of the settlement.

“What often happens on a case — and what happened in New Jersey — is you have a defendant that wants a quick fix, often because they don’t want the bad publicity,” says Ms. Lowry. “So rather than try to fight in court, where it is obvious they would lose, they say, ‘OK, fine, we’ll fix it.’ But then they don’t actually put in a management team to get it done. What governments haven’t figured out yet is that they can’t get it fixed unless they have really persistent, smart people who are constantly monitoring themselves. So that’s where we come in. We are the outside force that ensures that things move forward.”

The threat of a court battle prompted state officials to return to the negotiating table. In July, a court approved a detailed plan for fixing the system, and Gov. John Corzine created the cabinet-level Department of Children and Families.

Ms. Lowry says that the lengthy battle fought in New Jersey, while frustrating, is unfortunately all too common. “We need to be very persistent with this stuff,” she says. “In the end, it makes no difference for the kids if we get nice legal decisions but nothing actually changes.”

A True Believer

It is 3:30 p.m., and the team is headed back to New York. Everyone seems impressed with the progress made since Mr. Ryan took over, such as the creation of a 24-hour child-abuse hotline, a substantial reduction in the number of cases per social worker, and an increase in adoptions.

“There is a real sense that they have some control over the system now, which certainly was not the case before,” says Ms. Lowry. “Their energy is refreshing. It revs me up. But, in a way, it’s also somewhat frustrating because there are still so many other places where so little is getting done.”

By the time Ms. Lowry and her colleagues return to the office, it’s almost 5 o’clock. Ms. Lowry’s last meeting is with Alice Rosenwald, co-chairwoman of the charity’s board for the past year. Ms. Rosenwald, co-chair of the American Securities Holding Company, a merchant and investment bank in New York, is the granddaughter of Julius Rosenwald, the Sears-Roebuck president and renowned philanthropist, and the daughter of William Rosenwald, the longtime national chairman of the United Jewish Appeal, which was later part of a merger that created United Jewish Communities.

“I’m on the phone or e-mail with Alice pretty much on a daily basis,” says Ms. Lowry. “She’s full of so many ideas and energy about people we can reach out to and things we should try.”

Indeed, when Ms. Rosenwald arrives, she is all smiles and bursting with enthusiasm. She explains how, 27 years ago, haunted by news stories about abused children, she decided to commit herself to the cause of helping them.

“I thought: ‘I’m an investment banker, I’m part of a philanthropic family, I’ve got the resources, so all I have to do is figure out how to deploy them,’” she says. “If only it were that easy.”

Ms. Rosenwald says she began researching charities that focused on child abuse. “Organizations would say they were ‘child advocacy’ groups, but they were really direct-service providers, which is wonderful, but they were coming in only after the damage was done,” she says. “I couldn’t find anyone who was stopping it at the initiation point.”

She says she eventually located a handful of groups that looked to be making some progress. She donated money to each and then tracked their results over time.

“The one that soared to the top was Children’s Rights,” she says. “So I called Marcia and asked if I could meet with her.”

“The answer was yes,” says Ms. Lowry, with a laugh.

Ms. Rosenwald doesn’t sit on the board of any other charity, and says her primary philanthropic goal is to see that Children’s Rights remains sustainable for the long haul.

She helped plan and finance the October gala, and last year, she also gave close to $2-million to the group, part of which is earmarked to help increase salaries for the lawyers on the charity’s staff.

“What is amazing is that this organization has managed to attract such a stellar crew without being able to pay them commensurate to their expertise,” she says. “But you can’t sustain that long-term.”

Ms. Lowry notes that the charity’s lawyers were paid at or near the minimum of what public-interest lawyers generally make and, as a result, it has been difficult luring top talent. Since Ms. Rosenwald’s gift, however, the group has been able to increase salaries.

The meeting ends around 7 p.m., and Ms. Rosenwald offers Ms. Lowry a ride to Grand Central Station, which she happily accepts. It’s been a long day, but a productive one. Tomorrow will probably be similar, Ms. Lowry suspects.

“On any given day, I’m involved in between 8 and 12 different projects,” she says, grabbing her coat. “Maybe it’s my poor attention span, but I like doing many things at once. There is never such a thing as a ‘typical day,’ and that, I think, is what makes them all so interesting.”