Rethinking Child Welfare: The Children’s Law Center of New Hampshire
In New Hampshire, children enter the child welfare court system through multiple pathways: delinquency, abuse and neglect, or CHINS (Children in Need of Services) proceedings. On paper, these are distinct legal categories. In practice, they often reflect overlapping realities shaped by poverty, trauma, and unmet needs.
After more than two decades working in public interest law, attorney Lisa Wolford saw how broadly these systems converge, and how rarely they address the full scope of a child’s circumstances. In response, she founded the Children’s Law Center of New Hampshire (CLC-NH) in 2022, the state’s first civil legal services nonprofit dedicated exclusively to protecting and advancing children’s rights. Now in its fourth year, the organization is addressing the limitations of the current child welfare system and advancing what meaningful reform could look like for children and families across New Hampshire.
An Interdisciplinary Model of Support
The Children’s Law Center was created to fill a critical gap in New Hampshire’s legal landscape. Unlike some legal services organizations that address a single issue or case type on behalf of a client, CLC-NH takes a wraparound, interdisciplinary approach to representing children.
The Children’s Law Center is grounded in a different premise: that children’s needs are interconnected, and that systems must respond accordingly. “We don’t think of children as having multiple legal challenges,” Wolford said. “But kids growing up in intergenerational poverty, experiencing intergenerational trauma, often have needs across a spectrum of legal contexts.”
“. . . kids growing up in intergenerational poverty, experiencing intergenerational trauma, often have needs across a spectrum of legal contexts . . . Children are often multi-system involved. If we’re only taking care of one aspect of a child’s legal needs, then we’re not positioned to achieve good outcomes”
As a result, “children are often multi-system involved,” Wolford explained. “If we’re only taking care of one aspect of a child’s legal needs, then we’re not positioned to achieve good outcomes.”
That means representing children not only in delinquency, CHINS, or abuse and neglect proceedings, but also in special education, guardianship, district court matte rs, and other related legal challenges that impact their daily lives. Most children involved in these systems are living in poverty and experiencing significant household instability, and many have unmet special education needs, often tied to emotional and behavioral disabilities.
“Almost all the kids we work with have special education needs,” she said. “And those needs are often the result of trauma, which delays the development of executive functioning skills.”
“Almost all the kids we work with have special education needs. And those needs are often the result of trauma, which delays the development of executive functioning skills.”
A System That Pathologizes Poverty and Penalizes Trauma
Wolford argued that the child welfare system consistently fails to address the root causes of children’s behavior. Instead, she said, it relies on a flawed and enduring narrative that frames children with challenging behaviors as “bad,” allowing the system to overlook the harmful outcomes it often produces for them.
Wolford’s experience at CLC-NH is that this narrative is especially pronounced in the delinquency context, where trauma is prevalent, but children are frequently viewed as budding criminals. However, it is also deeply embedded in child protection cases—where, despite a formal legal determination that a child has been abused or neglected, similar assumptions about the child’s behavior persist. Further, across the cases in which CLC-NH works, poverty consistently shapes outcomes, yet structural barriers are rarely addressed.
When the primary focus is on compliance and punishment—for example, on whether a parent attends counseling or a child gets community service hours done—the system can end up penalizing both poverty and childhood trauma and its resulting behavioral dysregulations.
“Has anyone asked if the family can pay rent? If they have food? If they can access transportation?” Wolford stated. “It’s nearly impossible to comply with these types of court orders if you’re struggling to meet your family’s basic needs.”
The central structural challenge is that courts are being asked to solve problems they are not designed to address. “We’ve created a system where we funnel families into court to address problems that courts are not equipped to fix,” Wolford highlighted. “The American legal system is set up to adjudicate legal disputes, not to solve poverty, household dysfunction, or trauma.”
That same extends to first responders. “Law enforcement gets stuck holding the bag way too often,” Wolford added. “They’re not trained to be social workers, but they’re responding to situations that are fundamentally about mental health and family instability.”
“We’ve created a system where we funnel families into court to address problems that courts are not equipped to fix. The American legal system is set up to adjudicate legal disputes, not to solve poverty, household dysfunction, or trauma.”
The Impacts of Removal and Institutional Care
Even though removing a child from their home can have negative consequences, including the weakening of connections to family, school, and community, the state relies heavily on removing children from their homes and placing them in congregate care or other institutional settings. “The national average is about 12% of children in foster care living in group homes and institutions,” Wolford noted. “In New Hampshire, it’s twice that—24%.”
These placements are both disruptive for the children and costly for the state. Institutional placements can cost more than $700 a day for one child, with specialized or crisis care being significantly more costly.
“The national average is about 12% of children in foster care living in group homes and institutions. In New Hampshire, it’s twice that—24%.”
And the research has shown that the long-term outcomes of removal are equally concerning, “Kids age out of the system at 18, often without school diplomas, without stable housing, and without support,” observed Wolford. “Homelessness and poverty rates are extremely high for these youth.”
Separation from family can produce lasting cognitive and emotional harm, particularly when it results in chronic stress. The longer children remain in foster care, the less likely they are to achieve permanent, stable placements, and the more likely they are to experience continued disruptions throughout their lives.
Preventing Court Involvement Before It Begins
The Children’s Law Center improves outcomes for at-risk children through direct representation, systemic advocacy to improve statewide policies, and training for professionals across the system. In 2025, the organization helped secure the right to counsel for abuse and neglect victims in institutions, a protection that previously didn't exist.
For Wolford, while diversion and restorative approaches are constructive alternatives to formal court involvement, meaningful reform begins before a court case is ever contemplated.
Wolford emphasized that incremental improvements are not enough to fix what she sees as a fundamentally flawed system. “I think the statutory framework has to be radically reconsidered,” she said. “We need wholesale reform.”
Ultimately, this requires shifting resources and attention away from court-based responses and toward earlier, more effective interventions. For example, expanding access to services, reducing reliance on removal and institutionalization, addressing poverty as a central factor, and expanding data collection to better guide policy decisions.
Doing this, while simultaneously reforming the law to significantly reduce the number of and types of children and families subjected to child welfare legal proceedings, is key. “We have some idea about how to do this,” Wolford said, referring to 2021 reforms to the delinquency and CHINS systems, which reduced the number of court-involved children in those proceedings through an assessment process that serves children outside court.
“Children and families should be able to access meaningful services without going to court,” she added, pointing to the importance of social supports, mental health care, and educational access. And even small interventions targeting resource scarcity matter. “We’ve helped families get things as basic as free Wi-Fi, so kids can do their schoolwork,” she noted. “That kind of support can make a real difference.”
“I think the statutory framework has to be radically reconsidered. We need wholesale reform . . . Children and families should be able to access meaningful services without going to court.”
Breaking the Cycle and Reimagining the System
The Children's Law Center is at the forefront of a growing recognition that New Hampshire’s child welfare system needs transformation. The ultimate measure of any system is whether it improves outcomes for children and families. When it falls short, it’s not only failing to resolve underlying challenges but reinforcing them over time.
“We’re seeing the same patterns repeat,” Wolford said. The intergenerational nature of system involvement – where children who grow up navigating foster care, educational disruption, and court oversight are more likely to encounter the adult legal system later in life and start families that face the same challenges – underscores the urgency of reform.
Breaking that cycle demands a fundamental shift in how New Hampshire understands and responds to children in crisis. Rather than continuing to invest in expensive systems that intervene only after harm has occurred, and too often deepen it, the state has an opportunity to commit to approaches that recognize children’s behavior as a reflection of unmet needs, not moral failure.
The work of the Children’s Law Center focuses on that shift but also underscores a harder truth: meaningful progress will require better advocacy, a fundamental rethinking of the systems, and broader public investment at the state level.
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About Lisa Wolford, Esq.
Lisa Wolford
Executive Director, Children’s Law Center of NH
Lisa is a former New Hampshire Public Defender, New Hampshire Department of Justice Senior Assistant Attorney General, and Disability Rights Center – NH special-education lawyer. She is an experienced manager of legal services staff and a skilled trial and appellate litigator who began her 23-year legal career representing children in delinquency cases. From 2019 to 2020, Lisa led the NHDOJ investigation into decades-long systemic criminal abuse of children at the Sununu Youth Services Center in Manchester, NH.
Lisa is a member of the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates (COPAA), a national special-education nonprofit; and is the National Association of Counsel for Children’s (NACC) State Coordinator for New Hampshire. She has served on the state Oversight Commission on Children’s Services since December 2021, as an appointee first of the New Hampshire Supreme Court and later, the President of the New Hampshire Senate. She was a charter member of ABLE-NH’s Inclusive Education Task Force and served on the New Hampshire Bar Foundation Board from 2019 to 2023, chairing the Foundation’s IOLTA Enhancement Committee from 2022 to 2023. She is the primary author of A Guide to Appellate Advocacy in New Hampshire.
Lisa is a graduate of Wellesley College, cum laude, and Cornell Law School, which awarded her the Public Interest Rising Star Award in 2008. In 2019, she was awarded the New Hampshire Bar Association’s Public Interest/Public Sector Award.