Friday, March 8th | 1:00 – 2:15 PM (ET)
Discover how we can work towards a future without policing and surveillance of families in our upcoming “What Is Family Policing?” webinar series. Hear from our Executive Director, Melody Webb, author & abolitionist, Alan Detlaff, co-founder of upEND, Maya Pendleton, and a host of individuals with lived experiences. Get to know more about our panelists and their passion for this work below.
Register to join our virtual discussion!
In Solidarity
Melody (she, her, hers)
Melody R. Webb, Esq.
Founder and Executive Director
Mother’s Outreach Network / Guaranteed Income Coalition
Meet the Panelists
Alan Dettlaff is a professor at the University of Houston Graduate College of Social Work, where he also served as Dean from 2015 to 2022. Alan began his career as a social worker in the family policing system where he worked as an investigative caseworker and administrator. Today his work focuses on ending the harm that results from this system. In 2020, he helped to create and launch the upEND movement, a collaborative effort dedicated to abolishing the family policing system and building alternatives that focus on healing and liberation.
Alan is the author of Confronting the Racist Legacy of the American Child Welfare System: The Case for Abolition, published by Oxford University Press in 2023. He is also the co-founding editor of Abolitionist Perspectives in Social Work, a peer-reviewed scholarly journal dedicated to developing and disseminating an abolitionist praxis in social work.
Maya Pendleton is a co-founding member of the upEND movement, contributing to upEND as a researcher and writer focused on dismantling the family policing system. She brings her expertise to Alan Detlaff’s book Confronting the Racist Legacy of the American Child Welfare System: The Case for Abolition, published by Oxford University Press in 2023. Additionally, Maya serves as an adjunct professor at American University, guiding students in transformative justice and abolition studies.
Melody Webb is the Executive Director and Founder of Mother’s Outreach Network (MON), an advocacy organization that promotes the inclusion and empowerment of Black mothers in the struggle for family preservation by transforming government income and child welfare laws, policies and practices from punitive to uplifting. She is also founder and co-convenor of the DC Guaranteed Income Coalition. A graduate of Harvard College and Law School, she is a career-long public interest attorney with a broad practice area and policy background in cross-cutting advocacy, as Associate General Counsel at Service Employees International Union, working on Capitol Hill, and advocating on public policy on local DC and federal issues,.
She served on the Counsel for Child Abuse and Neglect of the DC Superior Court as a parents’ defense attorney and on the DC Superior Court, Court Improvement Program Advisory Committee. Melody authored From Authoritarian State to Black-Inclusive Democracy, 2020 edition of the University of Florida Journal of Public Policy and is author of Building A Guaranteed Income to End the “Child Welfare” System in the 2022 edition of the Columbia Journal of Race and Law, Strengthened Bonds: Abolishing the Child Welfare System and Re-Envisioning Child Well-Being Symposium issue.
