In our book Anna, Age Eight, my co-author Katherine Ortega Courtney and I devoted a chapter to how we can and must design Child Welfare 2.0. The model each state currently uses comes from one developed more than 100 years ago. Our experience working with child welfare systems, setting up continuous quality improvement programs (CQI), has taught us that while some systems are thoughtfully resourced and getting results, many face incredible challenges because of out-of-date protocols, old data systems, lack of resources, and a lack of capacity to form productive partnerships with city and local government, and other state agencies.
Our design process for Child Welfare 2.0 promotes innovation that is both disruptive and political. In our book we provide a blueprint for moving forward with a new New Mexican system, but it needs buy-in and customization on the local level to respect different histories and cultures.
We start with questions.
- What are the root cause of childhood trauma and maltreatment?
- How do we ensure that each county level child protective services office has the staffing, resources and empowerment to do one of the hardest jobs on earth?
- How do we create a child welfare system for the tech-infused age where staff and clients are wired through mobile devices?
- How do we create a new type of agency that is guided by a data-driven and collaborative process, engaging all local elected officials and the agencies they fund and run?
- Who is invested in keeping things as they are and who is devoted to fixing a broken system?
Who’s in the room?
As we bring communities together to talk about keeping children safe and families strong, we need to ask, “Who should be in the room as we design Child Welfare 2.0?”
The design challenge requires a multidisciplinary approach and all the smart people we can find on the state and local levels. At every talk we do, we seek to hear the voices of those who work diligently within child welfare and have valuable insights. (These are the heroes of Anna, Age Eight.)
As we get ready to facilitate a community conversation about how a new 2.0 system should work in Santa Fe, we identified key partners who would enrich the dialogue. Many of the following invitees have never been invited to share their views on how to rethink and reinvent child welfare.
Here’s our invitation list for our first talk:
- the mayor
- city councilors
- county executives
- school board members
- leadership within private and public health systems (including epidemiologists and prevention specialists)
- leadership within the law enforcement and judicial systems
Then we add representative from vital community partners who have much experience with local children and parents including leadership from:
- CASA (Court-Appointed Child Advocates)
- Big Brothers/Big Sisters
- School-based behavioral health care
- Domestic violence shelters and offender programs
- Early childhood learning centers
- Food banks and homeless shelters who work with our most vulnerable families
- Youth development agencies like boys’ and girls’ clubs
- Transportation gurus who know how to get car-free folks to vital services
We must bring together the thousands of non-profit agencies who serve families and the local foundations who support them. We also need to hear loud and clear from our parents, youth and children—all extended family members, foster parents and adoptive parents--who have experience with the system. We need to listen very carefully to those teens who have aged out of the system to hear how their lives fared. They are our “users” and their perspectives will shape the new “user experience” of Child Welfare 2.0.
Before we start our series of community meetings we also require the involvement of partners who come from the private sector:
- The business community focused on measurable results
- Information technology experts who know state-of-the-art software
- Architects and city planners who understand the power of user-friendly environments
- Socially-engaged writers, artists and storytellers who inspire and enlighten our communities
A challenge as huge as designing Child Welfare 2.0 require public and private sector thinking, if not actually on-going involvement in the running of this new enterprise. We also stress that while the system in NM is state run, our reinvention process requires local input from each county.
Setting a Big Table
As we launch our on-going talks about Child Welfare 2.0, we will work diligently to create space for listening to as many perspectives as possible. Our data-driven process does depend on numbers, but it also relies on qualitative data in the form of stories from our residents.
We don’t pretend that implementing the data-driven 2.0 system will be easy.
For example, within government there will be resistance to a new design. While state government, controlling how child welfare runs, is not the military, it is built on a chain-of-command model. If you have a problem or an innovative idea, you’re supposed to go to your direct supervisor for guidance, not skip over a level of management. Such organizations are resistant to change, and that’s before we run into all the individuals who are just riding it out for a couple of years till retirement, or don’t want to put in the extra work reform would require, or who just woke up on the wrong side of the bed one day twenty years ago and decided to make it a habit.
As former government employees, we understand the challenges of pushing innovation within a bureaucracy. But if an idea like a fully-staffed and tech-empowered agency can get through a legislature, we may well invent a new type of agency called Child Welfare 2.0, eventually known as Child Well-Being 3.0.
That’s what we want for child welfare. We just need to make sure that continuous quality improvement is a permanent part of the process. We want to end the common practice of government agencies acting before assessing and planning. We want to end the practice of governments and foundations funding projects without a rigorous evaluation process. When child welfare is properly funded, correctly staffed to meet best practice guidelines, expertly infused with state-of-the-art technology, and guided to use data to inform all actions, we will at long last have a vital agency of authority in a place. Child Welfare 2.0, along with its partnering family serving agencies, will be empowered to prevent all forms of adverse childhood experiences, trauma and maltreatment.
My co-author Katherine and I are “see-the-glass-half-full” people. We’re incredibly optimistic that with the right people at the table, we create a tipping point for a brand new agency that is set up for success. Join us as Child Welfare 2.0 becomes a reality.
About a community conversation on Child Welfare 2.0: The authors of Anna, Age Eight: The data-driven prevention of childhood trauma and maltreatment, Katherine Ortega Courtney, PhD and Dominic Cappello, discuss their book focused on how we must and can fix child welfare—a monumental challenge that requires the engagement of all of us. Thursday, June 28, 2018 2:30 PM - 4:30 PM, Santa Fe Community Foundation Fees: FREE. Please register. Contact: amclaughlin@santafecf.org or 505-988-9715. Download a free chapter here: www.AnnaAgeEight.org
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