Tell Your Story

Learn to Tell Our Story Here
A POWERFUL PRESENTATION

Have a story to tell?

Tell your story about your experiences in the Alabama family courts. Your story will be shared with the Alabama Legislature and used to help reform Alabama family law.

Tell Your Story

Guidelines
  • Story must be solely about Alabama family law.

 

  • The story should be no more than 400 words. Refer to all children and adults only by first name. You may include each child’s age. You may reference the Alabama county and judge by name, and provide the attorneys names, if you so choose.

 

  • Do not include the name of any home, business, and/or school addresses, names of any schools the children attend or have attended, names of any professionals such as therapists, doctors, counselors, associations your spouse and/or children may belong like boy scout or girl scout troops, or information that someone reading could use to identify or attempt to contact those mentioned.

 

  • ALFRA reserves the right to edit for grammar, usage, syntax, spelling, and punctuation, or if the story exceeds 400 words. We must verify the sender by communicating by email.

 

  • Stories in locations outside of Alabama will not be published.
How to Correctly Copy & Paste MS Word Text to Display on this Website

Due to your Word version and settings you may not be able to copy and paste your story from a Word document.
The following instructions is a work around for this issue.

First, Copy your text from Word and place it in a plain text editor like Note Pad. Located from the Start Menu > All Programs > Accessories .  Then, copy (ctrl “C”) and paste the text from Note Pad into  the “Tell your story” window. We do not allow right clicking on the website. So to paste, place the mouse in the “Tell Your Story” window, then paste using ctrl “V”. This will paste the text on to the page. This 30 second process will prevent you from having to retype your entire story in the form above. Alternatively, you can also use the following website (http://word2cleanhtml.com) to remove the hidden formatting from your MS Word file. Then just copy and paste the text from the word2cleanhtml website into the above form.

Using Your Story as a Powerful Advocacy Tool

Legislators make important decisions about Alabama family law practices. They receive much of their information from the system’s legal and judiciary participants, which could create a potential conflict of interest.

Our research has shown that since 1852 Alabama has passed laws to ensure continuation of federal incentive funding. As a consequence, many laws are not in alignment with what is best for our children.

Alabama is currently ranked 42nd among the 50 states in overall child well-being. The ranking system covers four categories: health, education, economic well-being, and family & community. The Alabama Family Rights Association believes that our low ranking is due to an outdated custody model. Approximately 40,000 children in our state are annually subjected to seeing their non-custodial parent only 4 to six days a month twice a month, equating to only 4 years out of 19 years of a child’s minority life.

We need to tell the Legislators our stories on real issues. The best way is for each of us explain the issues encountered in 400 words or less and submit your story through our website. These stories will be reviewed and passed on to the appropriate legislators allowing all of us as one collective voice to be heard.

To submit your personal story, please visit our Tell Your Story page.

In addition to your written story posted on our website, we need you to email your local legislator and ask for a 15 minute visit. This step is crucial in order to inculcate our message of child’s rights and equal protection. Legislators by oath should abide by needs of their constituents. Many legislators do not know what those needs are unless communicated. In person visits are a profound way to support our message and our children in 2019!

Please, copy ALFRA on emails to your legislator at info (at) alfra (dot) com [ replace at with @ and dot with . ] If no email response is provided please call the legislators office to secure an appointment.