Recently, I was asked to provide testimony to a city council regarding the quality of services delivered by its community-based child welfare providers.
Prior to public remarks from professional and lived experience experts, the administrative team of the local agency reported on recent accomplishments and challenges. The legislative committee’s questions prompted a predictable serve and return by the agency leaders. It did little to highlight the strengths and deepening problems. It was mostly defense and deflection, peppered with the usual remarks about keeping kids safe and families intact. There was little about quality, but a good deal about compliance. Not much about child and parental well-being, but wonderful charts about the decreasing numbers of kids in care.
There was almost nothing about the role of their private partners who are contracted to provide community-based support to families. Unfortunately, that was the exact point of the hearings: to determine the city’s role in improving, transforming or eliminating the role of community-based providers for individual neighborhoods, because their recent performance record was mixed and faltering.
What transpired was not surprising. More often than not, politics, public perception and self-preservation will influence the front-facing responses of public servants in leadership positions. Gray patches of information are the norm in child welfare.
Despite best intentions, perseverance and commitment to their profession, the leaders of public agencies are rarely able to be totally transparent. It can be difficult for them to answer a direct question related to performance, intent or mistakes, especially when many of the circumstances are beyond their control. An appointment to the leadership role does not come with a magic wand.
It’s also not because they are intentionally duplicitous. Having been in similar roles myself, I know that discretion is not an underlying character flaw. Instead, the unforgiving parameters of the public sector positions demand a good deal of compromise and meticulous messaging for all the obvious reasons. Responses to legislators, the public, the media, families or lawyers who are suing them are all generally filtered through a screen of systemic protection and survival. These leaders actually serve multiple masters. Consequently, you might not lose your values, but your voice of authenticity is diminished.
What might seem like an uneven performance by a leader of a public agency is usually the result of having several audiences and stakeholder groups: administration, taxpayers, advocates and grant makers, families and the workforce.
This is one of the reasons why it’s almost impossible for large bureaucracies to deliver effective, customer-responsive child protection and family support services, and why they need smaller, community-based organizations as partners who cover the front lines of service delivery.
When the balance of a leader’s behavior is weighted toward maintaining the good graces of a mayor, a governor or legislators, and the media, then caution, mediocrity and incomplete explanations rule the day. Whereas, in community- and neighborhood-driven settings, staff at all levels must be more responsive to their “customers” — the families they serve every day.
It’s not a more virtuous role, but it is closer to authentic. The public-private alliance that lends itself to excellence.
Unfiltered truthfulness is the foundation for relationships with families in a community. Warren Buffett was quoted saying, “Trust is like the air we breathe — when it is present, nobody really notices; when it’s absent, everybody notices.”
Community-based agencies do have a responsibility to their funder and to the public. However, the key to their success is winning the confidence and trust of those they serve, families in a neighborhood, a community or zip code. This task is central to the support versus surveillance equation.
This is not a problem to be solved, but it does require attention. I’ve dealt with it on numerous projects around the country and learned that you can’t ignore questions or doubts related to sincerity, boundaries and compromises. With a growing consensus in our profession that community-oriented support of families is a preferred approach, let’s consider a few rules of the road to balance the issues of trust, transparency and accountability to funders, policymakers and the public.
Rules like knowing your lane. In our work, understanding your “why” is more than a buzz phrase. It implies accepting a well-defined role in the continuum of support for families. Effective child safety and family stability requires robust public-private partnerships, with prescribed responsibilities. This makes it easier for everyone to speak with more conviction and clarity.
The skill of knowing your customer and listening to your primary audiences, creating data and narratives that highlight progress or regression of the services.
Knowing your personal red line on core values, your tipping point when it comes to compromise, and committing to authenticity when reporting on your agency’s child safety and family support activities. Finding the middle ground between the nuanced areas of child welfare, then messaging a clear, coherent story that tells others “how the children are doing.”
Acknowledging the differences between organizational culture changes, and strategies that are a one-dimensional quick fix, not transformational, then letting people know that enduring improvements take time.
And finally, advocating for community partners by demanding the level of funding, capacity building and infrastructure they need to succeed, and the need to advocate for their success.
It is not likely that public child welfare leaders will ever be totally transparent. The bigger the system, the more complex the web. Intersecting mandates, policies and politics, funding issues, confidentiality and reporting responsibilities make that almost impossible. However, their partners closest to the families being served are more likely to keep it real. It’s another reason why we need community-based alternatives.
