This book provides a range of perspectives offering valuable insights, suggestions and advice to stimulate ideas for establishing, growing and modifying a Child Advocacy Centre (CAC) model and multi-agency collaboration in order to build capacity to respond to the incredibly diverse types of cases, children, youth and families that come through a CAC’s doors.

This volume examines how organizations advocating on behalf of youth maneuver between grassroots social movements pressing for reform and the established systems of power and authority to improve conditions for youth in urban communities.

Each year, a number of youth who migrate alone and clandestinely from China to the United States are apprehended, placed in removal proceedings, and designated as unaccompanied minors. These young migrants represent only a fraction of all unaccompanied minors in the US, yet they are in many ways depicted as a preeminent professional and moral cause by immigration advocates. In and beyond the legal realm, the figure of the "vulnerable Chinese child" powerfully legitimates legal claims and attorneys' efforts. At the same time, the transnational ambitions and obligations of Chinese youth implicitly unsettle this figure. The maneuvers of these youth not only belie attorneys' reliance on racialized discourses of childhood and the Chinese family, but they also reveal more broad uncertainties around legal frameworks, institutional practices, health and labor rights—and cause lawyering itself. Based on three years of fieldwork across the United States, Lawyering an Uncertain Cause is a novel study of the complex and often contradictory rights, responsibilities, and expectations that motivate global youth and the American attorneys who work on their behalf.