Children rising up against abuse through just a phone call

Girls Court brings an all-hands-on-deck approach to the lives of vulnerable girls, linking them to social service agencies, providing informal Saturday sessions on everything from body image to legal jargon, and offering a team of adults in whom they can develop trust.

It’s now common for youth to remain in foster care or residential treatment for years. For troubled or victimized children in need, assistance at home is often more effective than foster placement.

The foster care system is widely acknowledged to be 'broken', and to ignore those who age out of the system. A program in Memphis is improving the lives of at-risk youths by working to reunite them with their original families.

Children coming from abusive households are often reluctant to discuss their past experiences. A Mexican foundation is using animated characters to help abused and ill children speak about their lives.

Child mortality rates in third-world countries are often shockingly high. But they are gradually decreasing due to efforts that target contagious diseases and more widespread health education.

Fixing the education system in the country requires addressing the problem of student motivation to endure and succeed in school. Pathways to Education is a Toronto-based program designed to keep at-risk kids in school. It offers four different kinds of support: counseling, academic, social and financial, all of which contribute to a 46 percent decrease in the student drop-out rate.

A panoply of responses to poverty has emerged to address poverty in the United States and abroad. The responses share in three key tactics: Measuring impact, paying for success, and collaboration.

The Homeless World Cup is the premier soccer tournament for homeless players. Programs around the world use soccer as a means of building a sense of community, sublimating negative energies, and encouraging personal growth.

Child First is a program in Connecticut, where staff members deliver home-based parent guidance and child-parent psychotherapy to help prevent the detrimental physical and mental effects of toxic stress on children. The engagement is guided by an evidence-based methodology called Child-Parent Psychotherapy, which is grounded in collaborative problem solving.

More women are being incarcerated around the United States and that has spurred more institutions to create prison nurseries, which allow women to be with their newborns. It's not a new idea, but it's finding support among prison advocates as well as budget hawks because research shows nurseries can lower recidivism rates among mothers. The idea of children in prison remains controversial however.