The Women Behind NCSL's Children and Families Program.

• Author: Griffin, Kelley
• Position: Carolyn Kastner and Michele Rivest

In 1982, Carolyn Kastner and Michele Rivest were both working for NCSL on projects affecting children. Kastner was helping states develop laws to enforce court-ordered child support and paternity establishment, something that few states did at the time. Rivest was working on a project to keep troubled youth out of the juvenile justice system.

But they believed it wasn't enough. As they dug into these issues, they could see how the success of children was intertwined with the well-being of the family.

"We understood this work was really significant in the moment," Kastner says. More and more, state lawmakers were looking for guidance, and Kastner and Rivest thought NCSL could best serve them with a whole program for children and families to develop a comprehensive understanding of the complex forces at play and how states could approach them.

But a new program would need new funding.

That's why they found themselves meeting on their own with major philanthropic groups in New York City. They were connected to the foundations by Peter Forsyth, who was with the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, established by the family that founded the Avon Products cosmetics company.

By the end of the trip, they had secured $1 million from foundations that saw the value in supporting states-through NCSL-to work on children's issues with a program dedicated to the effort. (That would be nearly $2.9 million in today's dollars.)

"It was just remarkable," says Rivest, who has since done her share of fundraising. "It's usually months of work and cultivation, and we did it in a week.

We both talk about it as one of the greatest moments in our life.

Issue Needing Attention

Kastner joined NCSL in 1979, focusing on child support enforcement. At that time, courts would award child support but there was really no mechanism for collecting. That often left single mothers and divorced women and children in poverty, turning to state and federal aid programs.

One of the first things Kastner did was publish an NCSL report that described laws on paternity establishment and child support enforcement and tracked what all 50 states were doing. She says lawmakers were starting to pay attention, especially when they learned about states' successes in her report.

By 1981, Rivest had joined NCSL for a project funded by the federal government on runaway and homeless youth, aimed at keeping them out of the juvenile court system.

"Many states treated teens as young as 12 or 14 as...