Assemblywoman Gail Pellerin and Nonprofit Insurance Alliance CEO Pamela Davis fail at an attempt pass legislation. Santa Cruz County had 120 children in foster care as of Jan. 1 of this year. As of April 1, the county had no foster children in an FFA home.
“After an all-but-failed eleventh-hour attempt to pass state legislation narrowing California foster care agencies’ liability in sex abuse and neglect claims, one of the country’s largest nonprofit insurance firms, based in Santa Cruz, announced last week it would pull out of insuring the agencies.
Pamela Davis, founder and chief executive of the Nonprofit Insurance Alliance, a 501(c)3 that insures 90% of the state’s foster family agencies, said her organization was forced to make the decision due to growing financial risk in backing these organizations in abuse and neglect lawsuits. Davis said the decision could result in the collapse of the foster family agency arm of the larger foster system in California. That concern was echoed last week by the state’s top insurance officials, who said the dissolution of liability insurance could displace thousands of foster children. Roughly 8,100 children are served by foster family agencies throughout the state.
Davis brought the issue to local Assemblymember Gail Pellerin in June. The two Santa Cruzans worked on Assembly Bill 2496, which attempted to more narrowly define how foster family agencies could be held responsible in abuse and neglect lawsuits. The bill, proposed just months before the end of the legislative session, met criticism and was gutted, leaving what Davis described as a shell of its original intent. ”