Tom Morton, founder of the Child Welfare Institute who spent his entire career working to improve the child welfare system, has passed away at the age of 77.
Morton’s career began as a youth services social worker in Washtenaw County, Michigan, after graduating from the University of Michigan. In 1984, he relocated to Georgia to launch the institute, a nonprofit educational organization that provided technical assistance, training models and system improvements to state and international child welfare agencies. He also served for a time as co-director for the National Resource Center on Child Maltreatment.
In 2006, Morton began a five-year run leading the Clark County, Nevada, Department of Family Services, overseeing a complete restructuring of the system. In quasi-retirement, he continued to consult in the field with Casey Family Programs and as a child protection practice specialist for the federal Commission to Eliminate Child Abuse and Neglect Fatalities.
Morton also penned several opinion pieces for The Imprint over the years, frequently with his colleague Jess McDonald, who once led a dramatic reform of Illinois’ child welfare system in the 1990s following a class-action lawsuit by the ACLU. Youth Services Insider invited McDonald to share a few words about Morton:
He was a critical part of the team that helped improve the Illinois child welfare system in the late 1990s in what many called a worst to first recovery. Truth be known, both Tom and I understood that real reform of child welfare was about building a strong ethic of excellence in practice. Stopping the hemorrhaging of massive intake to child protection systems in those troubled times was going to take more than additional staff, more foster homes, and more residential settings.
More money than anyone could imagine was being pumped into the child welfare system. Tom asked me; “If you got all the money for staff, foster homes and residential care would we satisfy the concerns of the ACLU?” We both knew the answer, absolutely not.
He helped us understand the importance of understanding safety and risk. We learned that if you cannot make good safety decisions at the front end of the child protection system, why should anyone trust that we could make good decisions about keeping kids safe in care or ensure that work with families would result in safe reunifications? He helped guide us to a better understanding of safety, one that led to dramatic improvement in front end work. We learned to make better decisions that dramatically reduced the number of children pulled from families. Much more happened in our world of practice because Tom taught us to question our work and seek better approaches.
Illinois changed and demonstrated that attempts at reform could be successful. We were successful largely because we learned to question our work, to look closely at how we engaged children and families and to adapt training and staff support based on what we discovered. Tom taught us how to do this. Thousands of children and families benefited from the lessons the child welfare system learned from Tom.
Tom had a unique understanding of organizational culture and the issues within a system that cause it to go off track. He saw how fear and inertia could undermine progress. He also understood that we learn more slowly than the circumstances demand. He learned to accept, begrudgingly, that perfect was the enemy of good, but he never gave up his pursuit to make practice as close to that high standard as possible. He never lost his drive to learn new science and methods to share knowledge.
He remained intellectually curious to the end. He was a good teacher and mentor. He willingly shared his wisdom, fully recognizing that not everyone agreed with him.
He was proud of his family and his large community of friends. I am proud to have been his friend. He will be deeply missed.
Morton is survived by his daughter and three grandchildren.