Restore Hope to tackle Sebastian County incarceration, foster care issues

Jan. 13--A new organization is coming to Sebastian County to address problems related to adult incarceration and children in foster care.

Restore Hope Arkansas Inc. is a nonprofit enterprise designed to fulfill many functions. Among them are to reduce the rate of incarceration in the state, decrease recidivism and to reduce the number of children entering the Arkansas foster care system.

Restore Hope CEO Paul Chapman said this initiative began in 2015 as a way for Gov. Asa Hutchinson to respond to growing prison and foster care populations in Arkansas.

"... When he took office, we had actually experienced a couple of years of the fastest growing prison population in the nation," Chapman said. "So currently we have about 18,000 adults incarcerated at a cost of about $24,000 per head per year. We've got another 1,000 to 1,500 in county jail backup, so we have a lot of people incarcerated in Arkansas. We've got 55,000 on probation and parole, and so we have a significant portion of our population under criminal supervision, if you will."

This number of incarcerated people has a negative impact on the state foster care system. Chapman said there are currently over 700 Sebastian County children in foster care, 67 percent of whom cannot be taken care of in the county due to a lack of beds to do so.

"(The children) are placed around the state," Chapman said. "This poses all kinds of problems not only for the child, who is now taken away maybe from other relatives or support systems they may have at school or with friends, sports teams, but it provides a real problem for our system in that now we've turned our case workers who should be trying to come to the end of it into logistical managers, 'How do we get this child that's in Little Rock back to Sebastian County next week for a visit or for a court hearing?'"

Chapman said there are more Sebastian County children in foster care than children from Pulaski County, with the latter having a significantly higher overall population than the former.

One of the key elements of Restore Hope is its emphasis on collective impact. According to Chapman, this means that multiple organizations or entities from all sectors of the community must come together and collaborate with one another to effectively achieve social change. This includes representation from the public, social and private sectors.

"... In a collective impact initiative, you have to bring some additional resource, called a backbone in that genre, to help coordinate the activity," Chapman said. "That's what Restore Hope is. It's a backbone organization in a collective impact initiative that takes some state focus and resource from DCFS (Division of Children and Family Services) and ACC (Arkansas Community Correction) and ADC (Arkansas Department of Correction) and it helps local communities then make and execute collaborative plans to take care of their problem."

The Restore Hope Alliance of Sebastian County

Chapman said there is also an economic reason why people in the Sebastian County area should care about these issues. Restore Hope is an organization that looks to a system called the Tupelo Model of Community Development for success. This model takes its name from the town of Tupelo, Miss., and one of the chief facets of it is the idea that economic development starts with community development beginning with the poorest residents.

"As the story of Tupelo goes, back in the 30's, they were all cotton farmers and they had eroded their topsoil," Chapman said. "It was a bad time to be a Tupelo cotton farmer, but most everyone was. They got together and decided that they were all in it together. In other words, crime affects business, so business should care about crime. ... They reinvented themselves into dairy farmers, and then they reinvented themselves into manufacturing, and then they reinvented themselves into healthcare."

Chapman said as a result of these efforts, there are now more jobs in Lee County, Miss., where Tupelo is located, than residents there to do them.

With this in mind, Chapman said a Restore Hope alliance will be formed in Sebastian County later in the year. It will be made up of 20 to 25 leaders from the public, social and private sectors who will meet on a monthly basis to accomplish various goals.

"... One of the goals that we've already started working on, just given the crisis of the number of children in care, is we want to stop the kids from coming into care," Chapman said. "... One of the strategies is we're going to have wraparound services for the families because ... there are real problems in the community. We have real citizens in this community that have real problems and they need help, and the kids are being taken from their home because of the neglect and the abuse that's happening."

Chapman said Restore Hope is currently trying to find a chairperson to lead the Restore Hope Alliance of Sebastian County. However, it does have a project manager in the form of Abbie Taylor Cox, the executive director of STEPS Family Resource Center in Fort Smith.

"(I joined due to) the fact that there are so many people that are downtrodden, and down on their luck, and they think that that's just the way it is," Cox said. "... And (the fact that) we'd be bringing community leaders together and all kinds of organizations together to wrap around people, to make them realize that they can change their lives. ... I want to be part of that."

Chapman said the Sebastian County alliance is planned to start meeting in February, with Restore Hope already having another alliance in place in White County. Alliances are also planned to be formed in Garland and Crittendon counties.

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