Gerard Wallace’s lifetime and work on kinship care
Gerard Wallace, who grew up in Brooklyn, suffered as a child and so devoted his career to ending childhood suffering. Retired now, he lives in the rural Helderbergs and believes some of the worst suffering happens in rural areas. Wallace, a lawyer who advocated for kinship family rights, had a hand in creating a dozen laws in New York state that gives grandmothers and other kin rights in caring for children whose parents are unfit. “Why I got into kinship care and meeting grandparents raising kids is that my home was really a broken home,” Wallace says in this week’s Enterprise podcast. “My father was an alcoholic, worked on the waterfront. He was a good person but, when he drank, it was a nightmare …. We grew up in a state of toxic stress.” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.