NEWS & BLOG POSTS
Recent Posts
Reflections on upEND’s 5th Birthday
June 19, 2025
Five years ago, around Juneteenth—a celebration of delayed but hard-won freedom—a small collective of insiders-turned-abolitionists planted the seeds of upEND.
Read MoreupEND Statement on Texas Governor’s Trans Youth Directive
The upEND Movement opposes any efforts made to represent gender-affirming healthcare as child abuse.
Reproductive Justice Demands the End of Family Policing
Communities gathering to abolish the family policing system are continuing the ongoing struggle against reproductive oppression.
upEND’s New Home, New Faces, Same Goal: Abolish The Family Policing System
Houston, TX (January 20, 2022) —– The upEND Movement is beginning the new year in its new home at the University of Houston Graduate College of Social Work and expanding our team. We welcome a new program director and communications manager to join us in our ongoing commitment to building a movement of abolishing the […]
Finding Space to Imagine: How White Supremacy Culture Stifles Creativity
How do we collectively and collaboratively create new ways of supporting and caring for families without replicating the coercive structure, surveillance, and separation in other forms?
The upEND Movement Releases How We endUP: Ideas About How We Can, In Community, Move Towards the Abolition of Family Policing
Washington, DC and Houston, TX (June 18, 2021)—Last year, in the shadow of Juneteenth, which commemorates the day news of emancipation from human chattel slavery reached Galveston, Texas in 1866, and during the tumultuous summer of 2020, we launched upEND—a movement to abolish the child welfare system and center the experiences of Black, Native, and […]
Making Possible the Impossible: A Black Feminist Perspective on Child Welfare Abolition
In 1863, Harriet Tubman and eight of her trusted scouts orchestrated the Combahee River uprising in South Carolina. The uprising, which followed a year of planning and organizing, freed almost eight-hundred enslaved people, burned thirty-two planation buildings, and decimated the rice plantations that rested at the center of the state’s economy.[1] The Combahee River uprising […]
upEND Featured In
Confronting the Racist Legacy of the Child Welfare System with Alan Dettlaff
Adoptees Crossing Lines Podcast
News Archive
Fostering tragedy: Experts say system designed to protect children can break up families, CBS Sunday Morning, December 4, 2022
No More Carseats, How Is That Legal? Podcast, July 6, 2022
“It’s Like A Leech On Me”: Child Abuse Registries Punish Unsuspecting Parents Of Color, Buzzfeed News, April 27, 2022
What Did Child Welfare Learn From 2020?, Child Information Gateway Podcast, January 15, 2021,
New upEND Publication Calls for Fundamental Transformation of Family Policing, July 27, 2021
CPS disproportionately takes custody of Black children, report says, July 26, 2021
Being with Family Is a Human Right: We Can’t and Won’t Deny It, A Second Chance, Inc., December 14, 2020
What It Means to Abolish Child Welfare As We Know It, the Imprint, October 24, 2020
Reimagining Child Welfare Services: A Call to UpEND Child Welfare as We Know It, Children’s Bureau Express, August/September 2020
University of Houston Launches upEND Movement (VIDEO), Fox 26 Houston, July 15, 2020
Now Is the Time for Abolition, the Imprint, June 22, 2020
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