Marcia Robinson Lowry, Founder and Executive Director of Children's Rights

Even after 30 years of experience in children’s rights, Lowry is consistently outraged by how government systems fail children. That outrage and indignation were what inspired her to start Children’s Rights and drives her to work to make the system better for kids in the future.

Lowry was working for the American Civil Liberties Union in New York when she decided the most vulnerable members of society needed an organization of their own. About 10 years ago, she started Children’s Rights, a New York-based national advocacy organization for abused and neglected children.

Children’s Rights generally brings class-action suits against state governments, although recently, Lowry personally represented three of the four teenage boys found starving in their New Jersey home, where their adoptive parents were supposedly being monitored by case workers.

The oldest of those boys was 19 and weighed less than 50 pounds and was found digging through a neighbor’s trash for food. His three younger brothers weighed even less. Lowry, who became guardian ad litem for the three younger boys, said she will never understand how the government social workers, who were present in the house, did not report the abuse. The four boys had been adopted, but caseworkers were present because the family was in the process of adopting one of the other foster children living in the house.

“How can something like that happen? Beats me,” she said. “I represent three of those kids, and I couldn’t to this day tell you how anybody could have been in that house and seen those four boys, who were so stunted in their growth, and not immediately report it to the abuse hotline. I can’t give you an answer to that. It doesn’t make any sense to me.”

Children’s Rights now employs 10 attorneys and a staff of 31 and uses its expertise to change child welfare bureaucracies. They scrutinize failing systems and provide solutions to systemic problems. If a system fails to respond, Children’s Rights uses litigation to force reform and monitor its implementation.

Lowry said she has always been interested in civil rights and public interest law, but did not initially intend to focus her career on children. She spent four years working as a journalist before going to law school. Growing up in Florida, in the segregated South, she said, fueled her interest in civil rights. A liberal aunt in New York who was a lawyer piqued her interest in the law.

“I felt that I couldn’t accomplish enough as a journalist. I wanted to be more actively involved in resolving social problems,” she said. “As a journalist, all you can do is document and point out issues—and you have to be neutral—and I decided I wanted to be more actively involved in identifying the problems, not just solving them.”

After earning her J.D. from the New York University School of Law, Lowry won a public interest fellowship and worked for the legal services program in New York. It was then that she chose to specialize in children’s rights.

“I thought that children’s issues would be the most interesting and the one [area] where I could make the most difference in people’s lives,” she said. “I didn’t start out with that particular goal, but once I started working on it, it just seemed to me [to be] the area where there was the greatest opportunity to have a positive impact on people’s lives.”

After that fellowship, Lowry spent a year with the New York City Child Welfare agency before joining the New York Civil Liberties Union to start a litigation program for children, which has proved invaluable because Lowry’s job involves understanding and identifying problems within child welfare bureaucracies.

Accountability is the single biggest problem in child welfare across the country, Lowry says. Most states have good laws to protect and serve children. The problem is no one pays attention to the laws, she said.

She said voters should hold governors more accountable for child welfare systems and that a failed system is a reflection of a failing governor.

“Ultimately, in any state system, it’s the governor who is responsible for having the state agencies perform properly. And it’s just not a priority, because the voters don’t know about it; and if they knew about it, it wouldn’t be affecting them,” she said. “And these are kids who don’t vote, and often their parents have been unable to care for them and have their own problems. So nobody who elects officials pays attention to these kids. That’s why we have to go to court.”

Children’s Rights has cases in numerous states across the country in various stages. As executive director, Lowry supervises the legal department and the policy side. She is also directly involved in cases in Georgia; Washington, DC; Tennessee; and Nebraska. Lowry said attorneys interested in doing pro bono work with Children’s Rights must be willing to dedicate long hours to the cases. There are opportunities with other organizations if attorneys can only dedicate a few hours per month, she said.

Lowry said she couldn’t imagine swapping her public interest career for a dazzling private-firm salary. Too many lawyers don’t realize that it’s perfectly easy to live on a public interest salary, she said.

“We work with local firms whenever we can. It’s taken on as a case by the firm, and as I said, it’s really a major commitment of time and resources,” she said. “Courts are enormously powerful devices to affect social problems. And I think the more creative we are with the use of the law, the better we can serve the people who are less fortunate than we are. And there is an enormous amount of pro bono work that can and should be done.”