 Hello and welcome Tara McGinnis and I am delighted to be in conversation with this group of people today. Welcome to this event at New America. We hope that whether you're watching live or you're repeating this at home that you'll join in the conversation with us. We're going to do this conversation really in three parts today. I want to introduce you to this truly amazing set of panelists. We're going to talk a little bit about the world in child welfare as it is and how we hope it can be and then we really want to get in conversation with all of you. Both here through the event through Slido and we'll pop our Twitter addresses in there so you can keep this conversation going after we're done. First, I just want to introduce you to a few folks who I greatly admire. We are here today talking about a book that I wrote with Hannah Shink called Power to the Public. It's been described as a blueprint for governments and nonprofits to harness the power of digital technology to solve public problems. You're going to hear about what that looks like in one area today. And Hannah and I really wrote it to lift up the type of work that you'll hear from our panelists. I want to just briefly introduce them. Some of you know them very well. We've got Marina Mitza, Six-Do, Cancel, and Amber Salzer. I'm so excited. Marina runs the Child Welfare Vertical here at New America's new practice lab. It's a team I run focused on family economic security and well-being. Her portfolio includes an 18-state working group where child welfare leaders come together and share and co-design promising practices. Marina is a public problem solver extraordinaire and was most recently the chief technology officer at the Department of Veterans Affairs in the Obama administration. Six-Do, Cancel, a founder and CEO, think of us, a tech nonprofit with a mission to drive systemic change in the child welfare and foster care system. This is work that Six-Do has been at since he was 16. He's one of the creators of Hack Foster Care. This is a movement that's brought a whole new set of diverse stakeholders into the conversation. And Amber Salzer, who is a program manager and LGBTQIA lead for the Department of Children, Youth, and Families in the licensing division. She's worked for the state of Washington really for a decade now doing this mission-critical work on child welfare, foster care, licensing and kinship. Her roles have involved working with children and families, supervision, continuous quality improvement. Prior to this, she worked in the private sector supporting homelessness and supporting homeless and at-risk youth and families. Ms. Salzer has driven to improve the quality of care for children, youth, and young adults, and I can't wait to get in conversation with her today. So I think you have a sense of who we're talking to. I want to begin with a round of from all panelists, but maybe Amber will start with you. I want to just level set for our audience. How will you characterize the current state of the child welfare and foster care system in this country? And as we move through the panelists, maybe we can get into kind of some regional differences. Thanks Tara. I would characterize it as changing. I think it's changing and I think it's improving. And I think that sometimes it feels like it's not. I think if you ask the children and youth and families who are in this system, it feels like slow change. But I picture it like an avalanche where it's just building and building and building and we are in it now and it's changing for the better. You know, the way I look at it is like, I think it's a very exciting time, right? Because the ecosystem is just shifting. And so what I see right now in child welfare, there are pockets of really good things that are going on that are innovating that are starting to lead to results. But just as important as those pockets of work is that you see the money changing. So how things are financed, you see the regulations being changed because of the pandemic, right? And because there was a momentum pre-pandemic around changing some of these regulations. And then the laws that were changed over the last decade, a lot of those implementations like a family first, the normalcy, the sex trafficking and normalcy act in child welfare, fostering connections, like all of those are bubbling up to this tipping point of implementation and what needs to be iterated on some of those pieces and then what actually needs to be kind of scaled and started. And so we're in this very unique moment that it's so happened that this specific sector went through some reform changes that changed away money and regulations went down with the pandemic hitting. And I think that is actually what's making it so ripe right now to actually think about what is the future that we actually want to create. Yeah, absolutely. I love the optimism of my, of my COVID. There's a lot of pockets of goodness in foster care. So I work with 18 states. I interact with a number of other ones and some are doing really amazingly. They're licensing 99% of kin. They're making sure that kinship placements are financially resourced. Some are knocking it out of the park and making sure that kids are placed with adults that they know and trust from the first day that they're in foster care. And some are knocking it out of the park in terms of keeping kids out of foster care, which is a goal that I think has been under recognized for a long time and is getting a lot more attention and resources now and I'm excited to see that. So I wanted to talk because it's been a, it's been a really 18 months. I want to talk a little bit about COVID-19, some of the successes of your work and some of the efforts on really tackling group homes. Absolutely. So we want to kick it off. So, you know, we ran this qualitative study, because as foundations, like many Casey Foundation was going through a process where they're thinking through what is their next step right. And in terms of reducing, making the decision to eliminate or reduce care. And in their strategy making they realized that there was all this science around what's going on. And what are the harms of institutional placements but what was missing from the body of work was what were the actual things that young people were experiencing and we're saying and we're believing about group homes. We found that journey and we engaged 78 participants. We were able to really lift up those experiences that young people went through and it wasn't it wasn't too positive. And so it matched up with some of the harms that we knew were happening from like the numbers perspective, but to put the narrative to it. So young people talk about, you know, how the restrictive setting of not being able to have access to the right hair products or the right hygiene products the routine of every day having paid people, giving you cafeteria food when what you want most as a home right. The ability to the experiences of having your visitation leveraged as if you behave then we'll give you visitation but that actually doesn't actually lean. It doesn't bring you any closer to healing. We heard from young people their experiences and shared those with actual state leaders. And as of today we have 22 states who have raised their hand to say that they're going to either eliminate or dramatically reduce the use of group homes and their states and specifically the use of the use of group homes as a placement. There are young people who have severe, you know, psychological needs and so that's a very different type of group home than the ones that we're talking about today. I'm glad that you brought both the incredible outcomes to bear the commitment that states have made, but also the method behind it 60 and I think this is something in the new practice lab but really in the conversation of power to the public that we're trying to elevate that. It isn't always about the what it's about the how. And I think this formula you followed in the case study and share it out to the to the broader group that think of us work on group homes really elevates the importance of bringing the to bear the voices of the folks who are at the center of this policy by large part these young people and so this method while it seems plain as day that you would start with the people at the center of the challenge who are being served and ask them how it's going is not generally how we make policy. And certainly, you know, maybe a survey or here or there but really to anchor into the folks you serve and so it'd be really interested to lift up this method this is one of three things and to show that it isn't an outlier set of group. Let's do this paired with data and real time say this is the, you know, this isn't just 78 people this is the experience that you can see another data points across the board I think is part of the power of getting the state commitments that you do. I just want to open up and see if anyone else is interested in talking about the importance of really anchoring into the families you serve or things you've learned along the process from that. I shared the two links to six shows the quality of studies they're hard reads, but I think everybody needs to read them to really understand what these young people's experiences can be. I'll just add that I think it's like so crucial that we are working with the people that we're serving and that we're listening to them and, like, that we are culturally responsive and elevating the children using families because they're the ones that know best, we don't come into the work as the experts were not we are to meet with them and let them guide the work with us to really important and I think as we see in child welfare system and many other government systems sometimes the structural bias gets baked in deep and presents itself, whether it's hair products or other ways and I'd love to just, especially as we level set before we talk about building what we'd like. Ask each of you maybe starting with Marina, you know where do you see the inequity that we're tackling as a country really show up in pronounced ways and what are some examples. Absolutely. I mean, you can look at child welfare as a whole and see that we are crazily disadvantaged and harming our black and brown families. But then when you start looking into why it's easy and a key reason why we all need to do what six or did which is go out and work with the families and put the children and the families at the center is that you're in my experience maybe very different from the other the experience of the families that we are interacting with and if you don't understand their you build in structural harms without realizing it and I think those are a tremendous opportunity in child welfare. As a few examples you know when you're approving a grandmother or an aunt or an uncle to take placement of a child. We have a lot of hoops that you have to jump through and well meaning people added requirements like you have to have functional literacy, which they meant to say you need to be able to read a medication label, but in practice that gets held against people that have a lot of proficiency and became almost a literal literacy test. That's harmful and my working group is helping to remove that requirement from states. Thinking that folks should have recycling. That's nifty, but is actively harmful that you would require a kinship placement to have recycling in order to get financial placement. Things about community standards which were intended to say hey, if you live in a community where every house has lead paint. We're not going to ding you for having lead paint that was turned on its head and used as a racist and classist way of denying a lot of families licensure by saying your home isn't up to community standards as it is up to me. And even just imagining how easy a particular task is. I'm going to cite tuberculosis tests which many states require for all their kinship placements taking. It may be pretty easy for me to go get a tuberculosis test, but taking time off work finding childcare finding transportation, going to a medical facility requires waiting, potentially being exposed to covid and paying some amount of fee is an insurmountable hurdle that I think is Amber, you and I realized in Washington state, even if you test positive for tuberculosis, that's actually not a denial so why are we putting so many people through this burden and tremendous props to the state of Washington for actually removing that requirement and changing it so that you only have to do it if you answer a particular way to some screening questions that mean you really may be at risk for it and I think looking for those sorts of ways that we've really baked harm into the system without realizing it is a key to fixing a lot of it. Amber, other of you want to jump in with stories from your work or other examples about how this inequity shows up. I will just add that an equity shows up for us like as a nation, because of disproportionality if there's the disproportionality of children in care, where there is their overrepresented black and brown children indigenous children there's. It's, it's not that that's one piece of it and then there's also the challenge that caregivers don't represent the community or the folks who are receiving services from the system. So, there, there's this awareness of what the problem is but now, like we're building on it like in Washington state we have a new unit recruitment and retention so there's targeted recruitment specialists who are going to be reaching out to those communities, we're the child care deserts deserts are who are trying to bridge these kinship resources into our system, because that's what's best for kids but that's, you know, it's been an it's been an equitable over time and I think that, like Marina you mentioned it's these good intentions right the history of social work is this idea of happy helpers coming in to help families. When we look back like we know there has been so much harm that's that's that we've caused you know and so it is like, you said Marina we're turning it on its head, we're trying to make some change. Yeah, when I think about like the inequities that we face every single day. I mean, the one of the inequities here that we see at think of us is even the battle of young people versus families. We're looking during the pandemic to kind of unblock these housing vouchers that were made specifically for young people who have experienced foster care in many places, we could do that. But in some places if there was another program called a fup, then they were like you can't launch the foster care specific housing program, you have to work through that program. So we put workers and frontline workers in a position where they had to make choices around, do I give this young person of housing voucher or do I give this family of five about a housing voucher. And it's that competing is that pivoting towards each other that we see over and over in child welfare when it comes down to older youth in care. There's a narrative of like, oh well if we can go earlier before young people are teenagers, then we can go ahead and have different type of interventions in their life when that is actually not supported by the actual science. Right. We know that young people who are in their adolescent stage have this. We used to believe from zero to six you had the most flexibility in your brain, the promise of adolescents is a great report to look at by name. And we used to believe like that was your moment. And if you can get, if you can do interventions there, then it would set a different trajectory for your person's life and that's true. What's also true now, and what we've learned post 2011 is that adolescents actually had the same plasticity kind of upswing during their adolescent years, and that that's an opportunity to rewire the brain that's an opportunity to really develop those skills. And so one of the biggest inequities that I see for the young people that we serve is just even the perception that is in the mental models that are leading policy and leading practice that actually doesn't actually help young people heal develop or really even positions them to thrive. And then I would be remiss if I didn't mention that according you know the public health journal published just one stat that I just want people to just totally meditate on when you get a chance which is 53% of all black families will experience a child abuse investigation before their child 1853%. So if they're like if I don't that's not a black issue I don't know what is a people of color issue right. So I say that to say there's something systematic that has been created years and decades ago that it's now our opportunity to dig into and say how might we actually unravel some of those inequities is in things like Marina had just said. So I appreciate you stopping us and I'm just gonna for the point of it can make sure this fact and the link. Make it out to the entire audience but that 53% of all black families experience a child abuse investigation, and back to the nature of how how scale and how it's sunk in a culture of deeply, you know, investigating some families and our moment, really, to dig in on that it does feel like now how that shows up I do think we talk in the, in the book a bit about a phenomenon in some child welfare systems of just like whose data, whose data the government has and whose data the government doesn't have and so I think some things that often appear. So we have an agnostic neutral we talked about the importance of anchoring into the human conversation, but a big piece we work on elevating is data real time data practices but so often low income and black and brown communities, they're, you know, substance abuse shows up in government data where what their wealthier white counterparts has the same challenges but not in a government data set that would lead you to to the type of a child child abuse investigation so I think really thinking about curate data who's involved in, in using and analyzing data and people come from the communities that that the line the data is going to be a really important part as we look forward, especially as more and more government systems kind of rely on a bunch of data feedback groups. I want to shift now. So we've level said, this is a truly optimistic group that's already gotten into where we're going from where we're coming from. Maybe, Amber, I'll start with you but I'd love to just get each of you in your own words, just to lay out a vision of what you see as possible, and either kind of at a mission level or at a specific example level in the child welfare system. You know, let's paint a picture of where we could head. Thanks Tara. I think, like, as a mission level. One of the things that we have identified in Washington State is that race is not a predictor of your outcome. So like you, like, there's this idea of preschool like to present pipeline and like that, that is not like we want to get all the way away from that. So race should not be an indicator of your success in this world as a child youth or adult. I think specifically, like one of the visions I have with in child welfare is this idea that that everyone is welcome, like in foster care licensing, these myths that I think are missed that still exist. We have a same sex couple who think that they can't even apply to provide foster care to children or adopt children. That is not okay and we are changing that and that's, like, it's incredible to be a part of that. So, brief examples. You know, I'll talk at the hundred thousand foot level. For me, when I think about what is the new vision going forward. You know, I think there's a lot of conversation about prevention and the laws and the money have changed in order to be able to do more in that space. And I'm hoping that we'll be able to do the right things as an ecosystem right, and that will design with the actual people who are impacted. So my hope is that on the prevention and that, you know, the folks who need the most are the ones who actually find themselves in child welfare, but when we don't need young people to come into care that we have provided that support. I'm also hoping that this specific moment is actually leveraged to say what does what type of supports and and and aid actually can be leveraged at that moment for those families. Then once you're in care that we have a new system that is truly rooted in family first right. And so including family in all different aspects being placed with relatives, and even when that's not possible that even if you find yourself in a foster home. So I'm hoping that you can tell someone that the conditions are set up for you to be able to heal for you to be able to develop, and that you truly at the end of that experience, our position to thrive, just as much as your parents are. Absolutely. I just, I agree with that wholeheartedly I think that that's beautifully said. I don't know how I top that everything that they said, when people ask me what my goals are in child welfare I usually have a three part answer which is one most kids shouldn't be in foster care in the first place. We regularly remove children because a parent couldn't afford daycare left them home alone and they were reported for leaving them home alone. And then we cause intergenerational trauma, hundreds of thousand dollars of fees, and then we go turn around and we pay the foster parents a daycare statement stipend, just pay for daycare upfront, and then we avoided the removal and the tremendous harm. So we should be keeping most kids out of foster care in the first place. But if a child really has to enter foster care they should be placed with an adult that they already know and trust, and that adult should be immediately financially resourced to keep that child through to permanency whether that means the child stays with them, or ideally they go home. Right now here in your comments and I can see in the head nodding from the panel. Before you've mentioned that a system that's proactive versus reactive six days of this in the kind of front, let's really focus in on the support rather than the system that we have today. I can't help but make sure and we can pop into the chat the New York Times did an incredible investigation today on the cost of child care that would leave you to be a parent who leaves a kid at home, and we are dead last in our national peers there are, I think at $500 compared to 5x what any of our peers are spending and it would break your heart that perhaps saving paying for someone to be in a home by by investing in the childcare and hopefully we're on the bridge that here with a very active conversation in Congress about making these front end investments through a child tax credit through lowering the cost of childcare, and through really investing in families on the front end to be able to stay in their homes or have have a high quality care for their children and youth so I'm going to join you all in the glass half full here I want to first remind everyone that we would love to be in conversation with you I can see some questions coming into the chat in Slido already. Just pause and because just in a few moments, we're going to turn this over to a larger conversation so please take a moment now put your question in the in the Slido chat. We are here to you can hear the energy from the panels we're here to get in conversation not just with this this panel but with all of you, although, if you don't have a lot more questions of my own. So, I want to keep moving and maybe and we're grabbing into your work in Washington State I want to ask you a kind of a two parter to start. First, you've made a lot of change at a public sector level, like you to talk about as specifically as possible one of Washington State successes. So part of that is helping colleagues recognize and embrace change so you know the steps on that, if you would jump in first. Hey, thank you. I say that one of the successes that I am super excited and happy for Washington is how we are. Okay, so let me speak to this so like specifically in Washington we have an office of racial equity and social justice that office has identified lgbtq a plus leads for our division in licensing division. We were allowed to identify leads region wide that we have leads who are volunteering their time in addition to their workload to focus on how we can be inclusive to that specific population within foster care licensing. And those leads are responsible for teaming with their peers and training and elevating how we are an inclusive agency. From that we're also shifting how we ask questions so there's a reason that people feel like they cannot come and apply for licensing. And so we're asking questions in a different way it's not, would you support a child who may or does identify as lgbtq a plus it's how will you support that child. So changing like how we asked those questions. This expectation we have is that families do help keep families together, reunite families. So when we're working with foster families people who want to provide care to children they don't know, we're asking them how will they maintain connections with the child's family. How will they support permanency, not just legal permanency but cultural permanency and relational permanency so how we are asking questions and meeting families looks different, and it lines out the expectation early on when we're working with them so that's, that's a pretty specific change and it's big like historically it's been our system is, you know, it's, it's binary and our laws the precedence things are, you know there's, there's a lot there so that that is changing how to get people to embrace change. You know, I think it looks like a lot of ways for different people. So I think it's, it's, you know, personal stories, it's really listening and centering the experience of the people who are working with our system, it's data, it's research. And it's changing this rhetoric that like changes hard to stability is change like change is the only thing that's going to keep happening. So do you want to jump in a bit on how you really get the breadth of nonprofits to anchor into the voices and organizing of young people and people who are in foster care system. Yeah, absolutely. One of the things I'll say is that, you know, one I had the pleasure to learn from Marina and folks like Emily right more different tactics to try to understand the problem differently. And I think when we've been doing this work for so long, that the number one thing that I do think is miss one of the things that I think is missing is to be able to step back and start to understand your problem differently. And that's by centering lived experience, but being intentional about not just being centering lived experience you have access to, but actually being inclusive of the spectrum of experiences. And that will start to broaden your horizon around what are some of these problems. The first thing I would tell folks is like, which does not, which causes staff time, which is to understand the problem differently by engaging lived experience and then from there, being able to say okay, how might we then be able to organize around these different themes. When you're able to pull out like our report that has multiple quotes from multiple perspectives of people who are directly impacted by people who work on the issue. The organizing comes together right the unison starts to come together because folks are to understand the issue differently and start to understand the possible solutions differently. And so what I would encourage is like, if you want to organize really well. The first part is to listen extremely well, and that listening is going to bubble up those insights. Organize really well. The key is to listen really well. I think that's some keeper comments for whatever area you're working with children. Marina, I know you as a person of ruthless focus on outcome in addition to being someone who volunteered in the system. And so I love for you just to talk a little bit about how you take and take a problem at its source at the center that seems unbearable and kind of break it, break it down. Yeah, my specialty as it were, but I think the secret is is not a secret at all. It's the only way I know how to do this is to work backward and really crawl through what the process is directly and six those point like do it with as many people with real experience as possible. So like, if we take ending group homes, which I am a huge supportive of that sounds like a really overwhelming goal. Or if you tell people you know there's 100,000 kids in foster care that need homes that's like, people get paralyzed they don't know how to help 100,000 people and so you really need to break it down and work backward. And like to me it's like how did kids end up in group homes in the first place, and you start working with real kids and you work backward and you read their files. And I mean, six so you have a crushingly emotional New York Times op ed from weeks ago that everybody should read which is that you had an aunt, who was not just available but was a foster parent and the system didn't find her. Criminal and unacceptable and it happens all the time, most states the way that they find family for kids in foster carries. They check the credit bureaus and if you guys have ever looked at your own credit report it says like, you know, Marina Nitsa maybe associated to you know my husband Charles and other people, and they send letters in the mail form letters to the people that are associated with you on your credit and that's it. That's how they do family finding. And, you know, I give a ton of credit to a state like New Mexico at the beginning of 2020, their kinship placement rate was around 3%. And they've gotten it to almost 60% during a pandemic by doing some pretty basic things like shifting the incentive so that you have to ask kids about placement options. And I think like, to me, a huge way to do this is you break family finding and relative finding down so that you make that the easiest step in the system when a kid enters care. You have to make the easiest path to finding a relative and placing them at that relative, and then you need to make the easiest path licensing which means financially supporting that relative and if you do that upfront. So the number of kids that are going to trickle down and move 65 times and change high school 16 times and up in a group home or in juvenile hall, to me fundamentally gets much much smaller. So, to recap, I would immerse yourself with people with lived experience and also like really crawl through the process because the secrets are all in the solutions I should say are all in the details it's in the removing the recycling requirement it's not a literacy test it's in that sort of pieces and slowly but surely we're eliminating them. I want to come back because I know there's some interest in the group about removing the recycling requirement and other things like that but before we jump into conversation again popular questions into Slido friends. I want to close out because I know you are working with him we're in a number of others in a kind of shared way a way that breaks them. I think the norm and can you tell us a little bit about your working group and how you share these practices out. And when someone has figured out a hack that that which is probably the wrong thing to call it these are, these are fixes that help, you know, millions of families you want to talk about the working group that. Absolutely so I at under Tara Tara is my boss at New America. So I run an 18 state working group. Every month we have a different topic and they tend to be pretty specific. It's background checks for foster parents it's how do you find relatives and then I meet one on one with each of the different states and learn about their process in a super non judgmental very friendly way. And what ends up happening every month is that somebody has a problem that someone else has already solved. And it really mixes up who may be the problem solver versus who may have the challenge on any given month. And then we kind of capture what the promising practices are and we publish them on our website which you can go to a child welfare playbook. States love to go second. People are afraid of being first it's scary it's risky but they love to go second and so anytime I can find a state that went first they have a great definition of a relative they have a great form for family fighting they have a great set of questions for their placement desk. We capture that and share it back out with other 17. And so I found that to be a really effective way of like building genuine relationships with the decision makers and the leaders on the ground but also being useful because you know we've done user research on this and when a state wants to know what other states are doing on a particular topic. 100% of our user research participants said that they Google it. And that's a real slow way to figure out what 52 other systems are doing and the new solution is email Marina. Soon next year we're going to be launching some dashboards on the website which will actually let you see in real time like, hey, what other states have tuberculosis test requirements I thought everybody had that oh I'm one of three states that's a really interesting peer pressure to stop doing a thing that everybody thinks that everybody else is doing. So I will have to say, I am like so full support of this model. When the pandemic hit, and like child welfare is like 90% in person function right pre pandemic. And so you have to walk to the courthouse you got to get paperwork signed you got to go find call the foster parents move a person in. And so there was a lot of like, we don't know what to do when people went into shelter in place, and we took exactly Marina's model from learning it from her and being able to say hey, how do we stand up a whole command center, where we publish over 30 different playbooks of doing the same exact thing where people are like we can't recruit foster parents, because it's a pandemic. And then we were like, Marina and Marina was like, well, in this one state they already have grandma on the phone and send PowerPoint paper slide and that's for the orientation and training. There's already, you know, New Mexico who was doing some virtual stuff there was Washington State who had online courses. And so altogether, you actually get the entire spectrum that was needed. And one week. So one week, this national problem of we have to halt our recruitment for foster parent actually was debunked. And we actually saw that people were not like once one software company called binti was doing these applications, we had 20 and one month they had 2500 applications 70% of which attended their orientation within 30 days, because now it was all online. And so this whole model of being able to pick something very specific very practical, how people learn from each other was instrumental for a child welfare getting through the pandemic. I'd love to move us it unless other panelists want to jump in I'd love to move us to some questions from the audience and please do anchor yours in turns out that sharing what works works. And I think anyone here wants to get in on these sharing circles of debunking myths. I suspect we have three, at least three eager partners and teams behind them. I want to get to the, to one of the first questions is really gets that kind of scarcity mindset that questioner said gardener says child welfare lacks resources to achieve its mission at both its front and back end. You know how will other agencies resources be secured to support those missions and I'd love to open that up to anyone who wants, would like to jump in. Mike, is this a resource question yeah go for it. I can help. So, one thing that I really see here is, there's a lot of problems that individual child welfare systems do not have the resources to do, but that everybody has the literal same problem. So like one project that my working group is working on right now is data driven foster parent recruitment for kids that don't have kinship placements. And I think that is just like talking to actual kids you might think like, of course you should use data to recruit foster parents but running that data analysis, and then acting on it and having a multi year data driven plan is more resources than any individual child welfare system has, but they all have that same exact problem. And so what we are doing we have a team of amazing, amazing data scientists at Radical Innovation for social change team at University of Chicago. And they were working with five states, we're doing the data analysis to show like what's the gap what kind of families do our kids need the most when they're entering care what school do they go to what language do they speak, so that we can recruit families that match the needs of those kids assuming they have no kinship placements available. And we can then make that model available to every state so they always have a real time to do list and we can collect data like, let's say I need a Vietnamese speaking family that could take a six year old boy in a high population city. How long on average does it take to recruit a family like that 22 months 24 months. That's the sort of data that we can easily start playing together nationally but it's very difficult for individual child welfare systems to figure out, especially some states like the state of California, for example, it's 58 different systems inside California and individually, you know, San Francisco may have a lot of money, but a lot of smaller counties may not have the resources and so I think, really that's where I'm excited is to say, what can we do collaboratively together that we could then share back out with the rest of trouble fair to to the rising tide lifts all folks. And one of the things I'll add is that there are other buckets of money that I wonder how creative we can get, for example the American recovery plan, provided states with 350 million, excuse me 350 billion dollars right. And as we were thinking through what can help you the 20,000 young people who just aged out on October 1, because the moratorium expired. The money might have a solution. And so current interpretations fit all of those who have aged out and the lack of supports that they have. So child welfare agencies can pull down some of that 350 billion dollars that some of it has not yet been used. They'll have to advocate for it, but there is a potential there. But I think one of the challenges that we have some time if it doesn't say foster care if it doesn't say kinship care that sometimes we might overlook it. So how might we start thinking about, you know, those in foster care those connected in our field as regular American citizens, who we can leverage some of these other bigger buckets of dollars to be able to go ahead and create interventions. I want to ask the panelists and anyone jump in one of the questions is what, what are your thoughts about how the child welfare workforce impacts our ability to implement solutions. Maybe Amber, you would start this one off. How the child welfare workforce impacts our ability to implement solutions. Well, I think that the child welfare workforce is really big and there's all different humans who show up to do this work. I know when I started social work, there's a lot of jokes about like there's a reason you're in social work. And I'm like, yeah, that's true. We're not talking about it. But I think that like how we can impact the work is because we all bring our human selves into the work. This is human services. And so I think in some ways, you're going to have someone who's going to go above and beyond and do amazing and then you're going to have someone who's just not in it or in it for a reason that maybe isn't going to benefit families and could potentially impact programs. And I think how our workforce impacts them is different, and it can be positive and negative but it's not one way or the other it's a whole spectrum. And I think that, you know, there's, there's work to be done, like doing this work and doing it well means that you're on the journey and you're doing the work for self too. And so I think if you find yourself into a lot for doing the work, there probably is a reason that you're doing the work. And it means that you keep doing the work. If you're tired, you take a break and when you need to quit you quit. You know, maybe that's every day if you're quitting every night, right, but you're showing up and still doing the work so does it impact it yes, specifically how you know I don't know I look around my office, well my office is my home now, but at work, I would look around when I worked in CPS. There are certain people I would not feel good about showing up at my doorstep. And there are certain people where I'd be like come on in, look at look at this beautiful mess, you know, so I think, yeah, yeah it impacts it and that probably isn't the most straightforward answer but how. I appreciate it and I want to if anyone else wants to hop in on this the workers in the in the system jump in I do think it's something we observe in other stories I think sixes work pulls out interviewing the families. We found in other areas of public service, really asking the frontline workers for things that they see that are barriers and blockers for families like I think as you said Amber very few people. And get into this to be rich and famous and sometimes the learning lives with some of the frontline staff so when I was like to comment on this work workforce question. Yeah I used to this came up a ton at the VA and other governments to work. A lot of people think there's like an evil dude on the 11th floor, it's like designing evil trap foster care and denying veterans their benefits and I kind of say to them like, that'd be if there was an evil guy on the 11th floor because I just like put a chair under his door and can't get out, and then I can fix it, but a lot of it is because it wasn't designed at all. And I think when you think about the workforce just as you have to center the families and the children, you also have to really spend time with that workforce. CPS workers are really concerned with children not dying and not being abused and they are afraid, very afraid, and they, you know, rightfully so of accidentally missing something. And that's where all their incentives and their framework is aligned and you have to recognize that when you want change like prevention work, you have to give them safety and guardrails and and structure for changing that because otherwise if your goal is to prevent abuse or prevent child death, it's hard to then also give slack on maybe a gray area or an area that there isn't clear guidance on and I think there's a lot of work and support that could be provided there. I want to echo that I was going to say I almost felt like this was a trap question because the problem is not on the actual workers is, and there's problematic behaviors for sure. But it's the, it's the conditions in which we ask people to work within right, and the, and what drove the creation of our system, you know, in the colonies times we took from Britain. At that point when we were working with people foster care is a lot of poverty issue 74% of the case are neglect. When we, when we adopted those mental models from Britain, they're literally were laws in the books and 1601 that said, there's the worthy poor and there is the unworthy poor. So we have, we have a culture already in America about who has earned the right for case management support, based on how compliant and how willing they are to follow what you're saying right. These are systemic issues conditions that we have put people in that is going to force their behavior to act in a certain way. I think this is like a really rich conversation and I know our questioner did note that in the state they work, they're suffering from a lack from really hundreds of vacant positions so what used to been a team of many as a team of few and how do you really engage families and children when you don't have enough workers which I'm going to guess is a case in many places through the combination of the pandemic and retirements. I want to move us on to a question that I think is going to excite this group. We would like to learn more about these requirements like recycling how did they get put in there in the first place and how can we find other ones like this. Yeah, I think the best technique there not only you have to crawl through the real process because like if you interview someone broadly and ask like what are the burdens and foster care you're not going to find the same things as you would if you actually tried to become a licensed foster care yourself for example, or you sat on another people being licensed, but you also got to ask the five wise which is a technique where you say like why, and then they give you an answer and then you ask why five times in a road try to get to the root source. So recycling came from an explanatory paragraph in something called the model foster home licensing standards that was attached to the family first act. And what happened was a few well meaning states copied and pasted the guidance, instead of sort of like rewriting and implementing it, and that's how you end up with requiring a cycling and then it's not until you talk to some families on tribal reservations that hey we don't have recycling in the traditional sense and you, you didn't let me get licensed as a result of that that you're like oh whoa oops nobody meant to do that and there's unfortunately sort of like probably 100 different ways that a requirement can and then a lawsuit. A water cooler rule, a thing you know whooping cough pandemic in 1980 that nobody ever revised the rules for so asking the wise I think is really critically important and that's something I pretty openly do with my working group is let's say I find like a thing like recycling and nobody's quite willing to undo it. I find like which of my 18 chess pieces is maybe most willing to undo it or most well poised to remove it and then once you get one you can start using the positive peer pressure to say hey, you know, California has a medical report that you fill out yourself instead of requiring you know the doctor like let's use that to help other states remove that that really big barrier and rethink it. Go ahead, Amber. Oh no I just wanted to add to what Marina was saying because I think that that like the family first it's like, like everything else, really good intentions but then when you break it down and ask those wise and consider equity in those wise. You, you realize there's a lot we can change because it might be might be really easy for some one person to go get a TB test and one person to go get a divorce decree and one person to go get their vaccination records for their kids and the rabies or dogs. But then you add all of this things together and now you have 80 things that are enormous. You think this is a common theme in child welfare but for folks who are working in other public systems, this is true across the board that something well intended in an era where the internet wasn't invented or something well intended. And it's a little for for musical theater fans like fiddler on the roof, you know, why do we do this, I don't know, but it's a tradition and then you can kind of ask people like what could you find it. Find the law where we started this tradition or the regulation and it doesn't always make sense but even just doing that exercises, something that as many of our audience of folks have pointed out in a thin, you know with a workforce that's already stretched thin, you're taking on an extra project to the man to try to figure out where why this, you know, claws got in there and to take the effort to get it out. So I think creativity here but this is a common pain point across government benefit delivery and really shows up for families in the burden of time in a way that I think we wouldn't put put on other communities across the country. I want to get we're coming close to time I have a few more questions. I want to ask kind of digging in on the perspectives of families. Questioner says with in communities with lots of poverty and trauma and very few resources and support some kids end up staying many, many years in foster care do you guys have ideas on how to break this problem down. I think it's real simple when there's a poverty issue, cut a check. Like, if the problem is you don't have enough money, like let's give people money to keep the family together and then we begin the journey of, let's figure out if there's an opportunity for trainings and skilling and new jobs and there's a lot that's, you know, we have a cafeteria food worker shortage right now truck shortage right now we have infrastructure bill that I believe is going to hopefully create jobs for many people right and hopefully part of the build back butter plan will have some retraining. I think the fact is is that somehow we made it okay in America to take a person's child away, because of a poverty issue. When we're spending that money anyway and sometimes in some cases even two to three times more than we would have just spent if we would have just gave the family money and said let's get on a journey together. I'll put six so anyone else want to hop in or I do want to ground into some questions we have about disabled children in foster care and their placement rates and really the distinct challenge of children with disabilities. I do I have some I have some thoughts there which is again when you kind of dive in there was a particular state I won't I won't name them but you know they were working with a really old it system which almost every state has in child welfare. And the only option for tagging that a child had a disability of any kind was you could pick medically fragile, that was your choice so if you had asthma medically fragile diabetes medically fragile in the ICU on with the hospital permanently medically fragile. And then they asked potential foster parents like will you take a medically fragile child and most people say no to that, because it sounds like you know a full time job. When you start breaking that down into would you take a child with asthma. Then people are like oh absolutely teaching me how to use an inhaler and it's no problem and so part of that I think in most states to this day, children with disabilities of any kind are really at a disadvantage because they're put in a large of a group. I'm really excited about things like Washington's recruitment targeted recruitment team and Cody's work to say like hey, there's a kid with type one diabetes. Maybe there's a group of people that would not be foster parents under other circumstances but they have a kid or two or they themselves have type one diabetes and would be like, oh, I can absolutely handle and rock that situation. You can start doing targeted recruitment there, or for children with truly extensive medical needs, doing more targeted recruitment around retired nurses or nurses would have flex schedules or different situations like that, instead of just saying like, you know, not against billboards and radio ads but doing general foster care and recruitment I don't know that that helps really serve the kids that that most need a particular kind of home, and then also resourcing kinship providers because maybe that child with medical needs could be with his grandma if grandma had some additional wraparound services and shockingly there are some states that don't authorize kinship providers to get any additional services so if that child needs an aid or something like that. Definitionally you will remove them from grandma and place them with strangers, because that stranger is able to get that kind of wrap around care and no states, I know some of them are working on it now but like that's a real nut to crack. I asked each of the panelists were coming to close here to give us kind of a clip a parting shots. But I'm going to preface it so that we get what there's one questioner says like is the child welfare system really picking up from failures of other public policy, whether it's housing mental health, health care I think. Six to you got to this in your kind of pointed remarks about poverty. So maybe just going down the line Marina amber into six to one either you know something from your work, something you'd like to close with one wish you have something you wish the audience knew about your, what you're doing. Just a minute each. I think what I wish people knew is that like this ends up being a practical problem it feels overwhelming, and there are yet there are lots and lots of not just low hanging fruit but as we say like rotting fruit on the ground. And would love it if folks checked out our website at child welfare playbook.com and in the coming months we're going to have a bunch of new as I mentioned like state by state dashboards where you might be able to see for your state maybe your state so requires a fax machine for your state to go form, you might be able to help fix that and so I really think like the more everybody can find a role to help the better. So thanks for coming today. I'll just add that I think that feeling is of overwhelm is real. And it's okay. And I feel it too. And what helps me is stuff like this today. It's talking to people hearing different stories. I'm just wondering at your working group the inspiration that I get from this is just it fuels me. And it takes that fire so keep it burning. Thank you. You know, one of the things I'll say is that you know, I make a conscious choice to be in child welfare every day. And people are like well if you're trying to solve the issue. What did you want to solve all these other issues that bring people into child welfare the poverty issue the domestic violence issue right. I'm not saying a family's issue. But what I have to say, because child welfare is a Petrie of America's problems on steroids right that so finding solutions here actually proves it in the toughest kind of environment, and then you're able to back out. When you look at the build back better plan one of the things I was excited about is that there's like $60 million for youth subsidized jobs right with another 12 million, and I wish these prices were higher but they are what they are 12 million for wrap around service, the concept of providing intense wrap around for you for a young person to be able to participate in the workforce as a teenager that came from things that we were doing in child welfare, and being able to show those examples. So there are many things that you can do in child welfare to plant the seeds for what should be done in America. So, Amber, Marina, I'm so grateful to be in conversation with you if you guys are interested in what this problem solving looks like we'll make sure we share out some of the links that they've been coming to you we can maybe pop them back to everyone email you want to if you want to go in deep and see what one state is doing in power the publicly tell the story of this kind of detailed wonky reform inside Rhode Island and how sometimes it's not an IT system it's a staple that you need to get people licensed to innovation takes a sometimes surprising form so really grateful to be here with all of you hosting at New America and if you were in some other sector and you hear this kind of sharing across states or this centering in human center design. These are tactics for solving problems that go beyond the child welfare system so I hope you'll get in touch with this amazing set of panelists and thank you thank you for your time. Thank you audience.