When I began working in communities and neighborhoods over 30 years ago, an older, more experienced colleague suggested that I distinguish between means and ends. The effort you put into building upstream, relational and holistic collaborations to support families (means), should lead to a reduction in child maltreatment, removals and even fatalities (ends).
As a profession, we seem to have two minds about this. We cheer at conferences when speakers talk about transformation and re-envisioning the system. But we mostly stick with traditional child welfare responses, promote casework that utilizes impersonal techniques like virtual conversations with parents, and apply algorithmic assessments. All of this results in little more than compliance, not transformative change.
Regardless of how our child welfare system evolves, we will always have a responsibility to keep kids safe. Community and neighborhood-based initiatives are considered an entry point for family support and upstream prevention, but we should not lose sight of honoring the long game: engaging parents and children, and leveling the playing field so we can improve their health, safety and well-being. If we are serious about re-orienting the nation’s approach to child safety, we have to do the hard work of making child protection part of a collaborative, community-driven effort, not an unfamiliar interloper that investigates, removes or makes referrals.
Historically, the foundation of child welfare has been built on individual responses, counting the number of cases, and implicitly minimizing the value of a team model. To this day, our response to suspected maltreatment often begins with sending out a lone social worker who is stretched beyond capacity, instead of a team approach that is more deliberative. On the other hand, Zoom meetings and analytic scoreboards are dangerously silent, because they rarely tell us what we need to know but find hard to measure.
None of these approaches can fully reveal the underlying narratives of a family, nor the impending or imminent harm to a child. I’m thinking about the importance of seeing, sensing and assessing parental energy levels, their intent and ability to get things done, the context in which they are asked to raise their children, the neighborhood environment and its level of vitality or history of disinvestment, the capacity and willingness of other family members and friends to help, and the availability of safe, supportive venues for kids to play and be with other caring adults.
These are the family functioning factors that are nuanced and can’t be fully appreciated from afar. We won’t learn much sitting in our offices or scoring a questionnaire. Our best chance of knowing and engaging a family is meeting them, respectfully, where they live because the task of keeping kids safe and families strong is not just a response. It is an exercise in partnership, proactivity and presence.
Authentic community-based initiatives are not programs, nor should they serve as satellite offices for the local CPS agency. Instead, they are collaboratives, creating opportunities to come alongside parents who are managing stress or feeling overwhelmed by their own history of trauma, poverty, marginalization and isolation.
Attempting to measure child safety in the context of those factors is admittedly difficult to do. What we do know is that well-managed, community-based approaches, built on the social determinants of health or the five protective factors, create connections to families and helpers as well as a level of intimacy rarely achieved through traditional agency approaches. The means are how we organize the work. Our ends are enhanced levels of child safety, family strengthening, parent autonomy and community enrichment.
Well-planned and managed community-based work allows us the opportunity to rethink the circular conversations around caseload size, and instead consider case constellations. The constellation consists of helpers, parents and all the other people, places and things that minimize severity and maximize opportunity.
After years of trying to establish an ideal or recommended caseload size, we’re still fumbling around, hoping for the right combination to prevent maltreatment and fatalities. Conversely, community-oriented approaches require us to serve in unison with our professional partners and with families, creating relationships that are based on possibilities, not on fear and risk.
The case constellation is determined by a family’s individual opportunity and difficulty. Working together, in more natural settings, helpers, parents and young people revisit and define the circumstances and resources that promote the health, safety and well-being of families. At the same time, they can strengthen the quality of community responsiveness.
People new to community and neighborhood work eventually understand that we never fully eliminate the elements of risk, but we can encourage and facilitate closer connections to the big and little things all families need to thrive.
The best minds should go to the hardest problems. We need greatness to run through our community-based approaches. We need the best well-trained and supported minds, great thinkers and great doers who understand the opportunities for enhanced levels of child safety, stability for families and deepening the spiritual core of a community. “Good enough” approaches that utilize Zoom, algorithms or one caseworker with 50 families are not great for anyone. If we are serious about getting better, we need to do better and move closer to the communities we are called to serve.
