June 2019Vol. 20, No. 5Print issueSpotlight on Child Welfare Workforce Development

Issue Spotlight

• Conducting Comprehensive Workforce Needs Assessments in Child Welfare

  Conducting Comprehensive Workforce Needs Assessments in Child Welfare

  Written by Megan Paul, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Center on Children, Families and the Law, and Courtney Harrison, CLH Strategies and Solutions

  Staff recruitment, selection, and retention are persistent challenges for many child welfare agencies. Agency directors recognize these challenges but often lack the capacity or strong relationships with human resources (HR) to hire and keep the right child welfare staff. The lack of evidence-based practices to address child welfare workforce issues compounds the situation. The Quality Improvement Center for Workforce Development (QIC-WD) was created through a 5-year cooperative agreement with the Children's Bureau to advance knowledge about evidence-informed workforce interventions, test a variety of interventions in real-world settings, and examine how workforce stability is related to outcomes for children.

  The QIC-WD partnered with eight child welfare agencies (including state, county, and tribal systems) to test the effectiveness of promising workforce interventions. Each site identified an implementation team made up of agency leadership, caseworkers, supervisors, HR professionals, quality assurance/continuous quality improvement staff, and training administrators. The QIC-WD provides workforce, implementation, and evaluation specialists, known as a WIE team, to work with each site.

  The QIC-WD created a continuous workforce development process (adapted from the implementation and evaluation approach developed by the Permanency Innovations Initiative) to guide its work selecting, implementing, and evaluating workforce interventions. The first phase of this process is exploration, which includes a comprehensive workforce needs assessment to identify a specific workforce problem, who it affects, why it exists, and barriers or facilitators to addressing the problem; a theory of change for how to improve it; and an intervention to address it. Exploration is followed by the installation, initial implementation, and full implementation phases. Each phase includes significant teaming and evaluation components.

  Many types of data are used to inform the assessment, such as HR recruitment, hiring, and retention metrics; agency records, such as exit surveys or past evaluation studies; organizational culture and climate survey results; and data on agency readiness for change. The WIE teams work with each site to provide context and additional qualitative information not available through existing data sources.

  The QIC-WD learned a variety of valuable lessons about this process:

  • The assessment takes months to complete because it is a data-driven process where one question often leads to more questions.  
  • Agencies vary in the extent to which they track the necessary data to accurately calculate employee turnover. In some cases, HR and program staff have limited experience working together and are not fully aware of all the available data across the two departments.
  • Very few public child welfare agencies have a unique identifier in place to link employee HR data to child welfare case outcomes.
  • Conducting a comprehensive workforce needs assessment is new to most public child welfare agencies.

  The assessment is only the first step in a continuous workforce development process, yet it is crucial because it is the foundation for the implementation and evaluation activities that come next. For more information visit the QIC-WD website (https://www.qic-wd.org/) or attend the Children's Bureau Evaluation Summit in August 2019.
  
  For more information, contact Michelle Graef, project director for the QIC-WD, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Center on Children, Families and the Law at mgraef1@unl.edu.

   

   

   

   

   

• Georgia's Multi-Disciplinary Child Abuse and Neglect Institute

  Georgia's Multi-Disciplinary Child Abuse and Neglect Institute

  Written by Judge Michael Key and Jerry Bruce, colead faculty for the Multi-Disciplinary Child Abuse and Neglect Institute. Judge Key is the juvenile court judge for Troup County, Georgia, and a past president of the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges. Jerry Bruce is a former juvenile court judge and the director of Georgia's court improvement program.

  We all talk a lot about system change. In fact, our child welfare legal system can be described as a system that is about system change in families. And anyone with experience in this system understands that it is very difficult to create the conditions for change in families if everyone in the family has not bought in. We've all experienced the frustration of trying to work on change in a family dynamic when one or more of the necessary parties are not present. We're frustrated because we know by experience what's needed for successful change in families: an honest assessment of strengths and weaknesses, a plan (developed with participation by all parties) that sets forth realistic and attainable goals, a data-driven measure of progress, and mutual accountability. Silos are for storage, not for growth.

  Yet, we accept siloed approaches as the norm in our work on our own child welfare legal system. We have conversations and conduct training in a sort of isolation. There are trainings for judges, trainings for attorneys, trainings for agency staff, and trainings for court-appointed special advocates (CASAs) and guardians ad litem (GALs). Each constituency has its own concerns, its own goals, and its own way of measuring success (usually more by intuition than by evidence).

  As the major organizer and funder of statewide trainings in Georgia, the Georgia Supreme Court Committee on Justice for Children (our state court improvement program), in consultation with the judges who make up our court improvement initiative, made a decision to move away from supporting siloed training toward a multidisciplinary approach with a univocal best-practices message. One of the major components of this new approach is our Multi-Disciplinary Child Abuse and Neglect Institute (MDCANI).

  Modeled on the Child Abuse and Neglect Institute of the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges, MDCANI is an intensive, 2-day training on every aspect of a dependency case and is wholly informed by nationally accepted best practices. The first phase of MDCANI deals with the first 75 days of a dependency matter, from the decision to remove a child through the initial review hearing. The second phase (now in the planning stage) will address the issues that arise from initial review through the final order closing the case.

  Because many people throughout the state find it difficult to come to Atlanta or other centralized trainings, we bring MDCANI to the local jurisdictions to ensure we have involvement from all classes of stakeholders. Ideally, we train two jurisdictions together so even the local practices of a particular jurisdiction are open to discussion. We have judges, attorneys, agency staff, CASAs, GALs, and other professional participants together in the same room for 2 days of intensive training and conversation.  

  We begin our discussion with an overview of federal legislation and the foundational constitutional liberty interest in family integrity. Reference is made to this material throughout the training. We also present detailed data that take us beyond what stakeholders think about how they're performing by looking objectively at local and statewide outcome measures. Because we can tell participants what their data are, but not why their data measures look like they do, this module forms the basis for frank conversations about local practice. Because we have everyone present in the same room, there is a high level of mutual accountability. At the close of the training, we ask participants to identify steps to improve practice in their jurisdictions.

  Since the fall of 2017, we have provided MDCANI to jurisdictions representing just over 50 percent of our statewide population. And although we have not had sufficient time to do a thorough study of outcomes in these jurisdictions, we hear from participants that these trainings are changing practice in their courts. 
   

• Why Workforce Development Matters: Child Welfare Workers Making a Difference Day by Day

  Why Workforce Development Matters: Child Welfare Workers Making a Difference Day by Day

  Written by Katharine Briar-Lawson, professor, National Child Welfare Workforce Institute, and Mary McCarthy, coprincipal investigator, National Child Welfare Workforce Institute
  
  Across this country, thousands of child welfare employees go to work each day thinking about the day ahead and how they can best support families who may be struggling with violence, depression, trauma, substance use, homelessness, and poverty. These women and men find the work of engaging families and children through child welfare systems deeply compelling and meaningful. Few jobs and careers bring as much opportunity for using finely honed skills, community networks, and teamwork to support healing for families and children. In fact, practitioners may find such work constitutes the pinnacle of their careers.

  However, there is a paradox here. Although child welfare work is important and highly impactful, the fact is that some child welfare agencies struggle to recruit caseworkers and lack sufficient systems to ensure their safety, retention, and well-being. Agencies and workers are confronted with demanding caseloads and are often tasked with making life-and-death decisions about safety and risk, traumatic stress, and public oversight and scrutiny. Staff turnover, which is sometimes as high as 40 percent a year, is more than a fiscal issue for an agency; it has a direct impact on case outcomes and to the safety, permanence, and well-being of children and families. Caseworkers and supervisors who experience secondary trauma and insufficient support may carry scars, like the children and families they serve.

  Consequently, workforce development is much more than a recruitment and hiring issue. Reducing turnover increases the chances of stability for families and permanency for children, improves the timeliness of investigations, ensures greater contact between children in care and their families, and supports effective service delivery (National Child Welfare Workforce Institute [NCWWI], 2018). It facilitates a child welfare system that can focus on supporting families and providing resources that help restore family functioning and promote child and family well-being.

  Workforce development is a top priority for the Children's Bureau. In fact, since its inception in 1912, workforce development efforts that recruit and support a strong and skilled cadre of caseworkers and supervisors to serve the most vulnerable have been a consistent focus of the Children's Bureau. So how do we begin to understand and address the factors that underlie the workforce crisis currently impacting our child welfare systems? One way is by clarifying for the general public what child welfare workers do. When asked, the general public may say that child welfare workers take children away from their parents or accuse parents of being unfit to care for their children. While it is true that there are times when children may need to be brought into care to protect their immediate safety, the vast majority of families are engaged with the child welfare system due to child neglect, not abuse. Since 2017, NCWWI has been working with the Children's Bureau to educate the public and celebrate child welfare work being done across the country. September has been designated as National Child Welfare Workforce Month, and efforts to publicize this event nationwide will be a focus of NCWWI in the coming years. 

  Other focal areas within tribal, voluntary, and public child welfare agencies are the importance of organizational culture and climate, including workload and work conditions, workforce competencies and skill sets, university-community partnerships that support workforce preparation, career ladders, ongoing professional development, high-quality supervision, and inclusive management. Many states have been using title IV-E funds for years as an important workforce development strategy to support social work students and child welfare staff returning to school. At least 34 states have nurtured these robust partnerships between schools of social work and agencies. NCWWI has been working intensively with jurisdictions and tribes across the country on leadership training, university-agency partnerships, education and transitions to work for new employees, and organizational health.

  Currently, NCWWI is working to foster partnerships with eight jurisdictions, tribes, and schools of social work in a systemwide, outcome-focused change effort. These include a systematic assessment of the health of an organization through a comprehensive organizational health assessment. The findings of the assessment will be used to develop and implement an organizational intervention, embed leadership training into agency training systems, work in partnership with a school of social work to prepare graduates for child welfare practice using tailored educational programs and long-term supports for the transition to work, and inform an embedded continuous quality improvement process as well as evaluation data to measure progress and assess outcomes.

  The Quality Improvement Center for Workforce Development (QIC-WD), another initiative funded by the Children's Bureau, is engaged in research on effective strategies to attract and retain child welfare workers. Its partnerships with eight jurisdictions and tribes will provide important knowledge to guide the development of evidence-based and evidence-informed recruitment and retention strategies. Its team is also examining research from multiple fields and collecting information about workforce trends and what works in areas including staff recruitment and retention as well as agency culture and climate (QIC-WD, 2019).

  The national conversation about the child welfare workforce and the urgency to "create the conditions for strong and thriving families and communities where children are free from harm" (Milner, 2019, para. 10) reinforces the message that meaningful, effective work with vulnerable children and families is coveted as a career option by many. Developing more preventive services, including initiatives through the 2018 Family First Prevention Services Act, and utilizing practitioners' family-centered and culturally competent skills earlier on can help families before their stress and impoverishment take an often irreversible toll. Moreover, the child welfare system's expanded focus on prevention will also bolster services, programs, and collaborations in the health care, legal, education, child care, early childhood education, and social services fields.

  Attention to primary prevention and early intervention is a community issue and requires concerted, collective efforts among all stakeholders to build systems of family support, capacity building, and community-based child protection. These intentional efforts, fostered and supported by the Children's Bureau, offer a strong foundation to support our current and future workforce, the essential component for achieving excellence in our child welfare system.

  References

  Milner, J. (2019). "Strong and thriving families and communities are our best prevention strategy." Children's Bureau Express, 20(3). Retrieved from
  https://go.usa.gov/xmE2U.
  
  National Child Welfare Workforce Institute. (2017). Why the workforce matters [infographic]. Retrieved from http://ncwwi.org/files/Why_the_Workforce_Matters.pdf (130 KB).
  
  Quality Improvement Center for Workforce Development. (2019). An overview of QIC-WD literature review [blog post]. Retrieved from
  https://www.qic-wd.org/blog/overview-qic-wd-literature-review.
   

• Becoming a Community for Strengthening Families: The Words We Use

  Becoming a Community for Strengthening Families: The Words We Use

  Written by Jerry Milner

  At the Children's Bureau, we've been thinking quite a bit about the words we use in child welfare and what they convey. We think the words we use are important and carry connotations about how we perceive our work, the families we serve, and the manner in which we practice our crafts. We think words reflect beliefs and can affect the way we behave. We also think language is a powerful vehicle for creating and sustaining the mind shift necessary to reshape child welfare in the United States.

  At our National Conference on Child Abuse and Neglect, I recently challenged attendees and the field—including the Children's Bureau—to consider stopping the use of certain words and to start to use other words. The words I requested that we stop using included foster child, birth parent, foster parent, client, and consumer. I challenged all of us to replace those words with words of empowerment, words that communicate respect, and words that remind us of our common humanity. I would like to add case to that list and to extend the challenge again.
  
  Rather than foster child, consider using a child living in foster care.
  Rather than birth parent, consider using parent(s).
  Rather than foster parent, consider using resource parent or family.
  Rather than case, client, or consumer, consider using the name of the human being.
  
  The reason for the charge is simple. Words matter. Words reveal how we view our work and those with whom and for whom we work. Words describe the culture of where and how we work. Words can convey empowerment and respect or disempowerment and difference. Words can desensitize us to the often harsh realities of those we serve and stand in the way of treating people with dignity and respect. In order to stay relationally connected with the children, youth, and families we serve, we should carefully consider the words we use to describe them and their circumstances.

  When I worked in the Alabama child welfare system many years ago, we began changing the words we used in our day-to-day work. As I recall, it did not happen as part of a planned effort. Rather, it happened spontaneously as we became clearer on the important values we held and wanted our work to reflect those values. As part of implementing a statewide overhaul of the child welfare system due to a class action lawsuit and moving toward a family-centered approach to child welfare, we found that the words we had traditionally and habitually used did not match the underlying values of our new way of work. In turn, we made conscious efforts to discontinue using terms that were not strengths based and family supportive, such as dysfunctional families, problematic families, clients, and cases.

  Partly because of that simple shift in terminology, coupled with broad retraining of the workforce to view families differently, we changed our perception of what our roles were in relation to the families we served. When we spoke of them and to them in more humanistic terms, we were better able to form the helping relationships that underlie the field of child welfare. Gradually, the expectations of our reformed system required clear demonstrations of the value of dignity, respect, and respectful language within our child welfare workforce. 

  The results? Family team meetings became more inclusive and effective, family time for parents and their children in foster care became more sensible and supportive of their relationships, and time spent between social workers and family members became more supportive and encouraging. Oh, and children were safer, if our data were any indication.

  Getting to that place was not solely attributable to changing the words we used. It was necessary to change the culture of the system to do that, but language is a major part of any culture. We could not logically practice one way and talk in contradictory terms.

  Ours is a difficult field of service. It is emotionally demanding and can be physically dangerous. While it can be greatly rewarding, it can also be incredibly stressful. It is not a materially rewarding field. We see others' trauma and experience our own. And we must sometimes deal with tragedy. 

  I believe that we are driven to do the work we do because of the value we place on human life and human beings. In the midst of sometimes witnessing the worst that humans can inflict on each other, we also have the privilege of seeing families and children challenge their difficult situations and win. Our commitment to our values defines and sustains us as a workforce, and the words we use should reflect those values accurately. 

  As the child welfare workforce for the United States, we can drive the changes that are needed in our system to reach and support families before they encounter insurmountable difficulty and relive the trauma that often travels with them over generations. We can protect children and respect the integrity of critical relationships that, if nourished and supported, can lead to healthier adults.

  Choosing words that reflect these inherent values that we all share can go a long way in identifying ourselves as a community whose mission is to strengthen families and nurture healthy children. It can better position us to stay connected to our mission and treat families and each other with the respect and dignity we all deserve. It can help define the culture of the work and the work places we inhabit. Choosing words that identify our partners—and us—as a community that is focused on a common vision will position us to do what all healthy communities do—care for one another.