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Council of Family and Child Caring Agencies (COFCCA) Annual Meeting
Thursday, May 6, 2004
Thank you, Jim, for that kind introduction. And good afternoon everyone. Jim, you have been a wonderful CWLA Board member, generously giving your time and sharing your expertise and insight into the work of the League. Thank you!
I'm happy to be here today, and I'm grateful that we are able to face the challenging issues of the day together in this relaxed and beautiful setting. A challenge is always a little more bearable when you can share it with colleagues whom you admire and respect. That's why you belong to COFFCA, and why many of you belong to CWLA.
I'd like to begin with a story - one I have told before, but one that so wonderfully makes a point I want to share today, that I will risk that a few of you will be hearing it for a second time.
It seems that a visiting lecturer was speaking to a group of businessmen and women on the subject of risk management - a subject that we're not unfamiliar with.
To drive home one of his points, he asked for a volunteer from the audience. He asked him the following question:
"Imagine that I have a huge steel I-beam here - 25 feet long and 6 inches wide. If I put it on the floor in front of this audience, would you be willing to walk across it for $50?"
"Of course I would", said the volunteer.
"All right," said the lecturer, "now let's imagine that the I-beam is now 75 feet long and has been suspended high above the ground between the two sides of a gorge, with a 300 foot drop. Would you be willing to walk across that same I-beam for $50?"
"Of course not," said the volunteer.
Raising his voice dramatically, the lecturer continued. "Now imagine," he said, "that I am on one side of the gorge and you are on the other - and I am holding one of your children over the edge. If you don't come across the I-beam and get your child, I will drop him. Now will you cross the beam?"
The volunteer hesitated for a long moment before making his reply - actually, a question. He then said, "Before I answer let me ask, which one of my kids do you have?"
I tell this story to make a very important point. You are unlikely to ever meet an individual who says that he or she does not care about kids. Politicians of every stripe are famous for kissing babies and wanting to pose surrounded by pretty children. All of us truly do want the best for children on some level. But the way people express that seems to vary a great deal.
The man in my story was being asked a very clear question: Exactly what steps are you willing to take to help a child? What kind of priority do children have for you when the going gets rough; when there are choices to be made? And his answer revealed what may be an even harder question - WHICH children are you willing to help?
Jim Garbarino talked at our national conference a few years ago about what he calls circles of compassion. He suggested that we can measure our humanity by how large we draw our circles. Maybe we care passionately about some of our children but less about others. Maybe we care about all of our own children, or about our own and all the others in their school and social group. Maybe we care about children up to a certain age, and we're not too sure once they get past that age. Or maybe we care about children fairly inclusively, but we rule their families out of our circle of compassion.
The truth of the matter is that the vast majority of parents would do whatever it takes to get across that I-beam; but as a society, perhaps through our benign neglect, we don't.
Now I know that all of you here are people who draw your circles of compassion large. You're all advocates for children and young people and their families. Unfortunately, your ability to do your job is constrained by how people at various levels of government draw their circles, and what steps they're willing to take to help a child. And, since this is a democracy, that has a lot to do with how voters draw theirs - how successful we have all been at educating the public.
Though I've worked on the local level as well, the federal government's decisions are the ones that affect me the most in my job at CWLA. I'd like to begin by talking about events at that level, then move to the state and the individual levels in turn. Let's look at some of the steps our federal government has taken in recent years, and the ones they're talking about today.
In the mid-1990s, federal lawmakers observed that lots of U.S. kids were hanging over the abyss because the child welfare system was not meeting all of their needs. The federal government's response was ASFA, the Adoption and Safe Families Act, passed in 1997. Its aims were admirable: safety, permanency, and well-being for all our children. Its outcomes, seven years later, have not been uniformly admirable, for a number of reasons that should have been apparent from the beginning.
Now, I have seen at least two excellent outcomes. Because ASFA and other federal initiatives that began even earlier put a high priority on adoptions, and put some financial incentives behind it, we have seen an impressive nationwide increase in adoptions from foster care. The numbers doubled over six or seven years. This is a very good thing.
Second, we now have a set of indicators for evaluating child welfare systems nationwide that can help to produce consistency in the way we go about our work and in the way we measure our results. We have a national yardstick for the very first time. And that's a good thing too.
Unfortunately, when that yardstick was applied, in state after state after state, our systems failed to measure up. This would have been no surprise to David Liederman, who predicted it back in 1997, and it's no surprise to any of us. The fact is that the ASFA legislation failed to provide additional resources to back up its new timelines and other mandates. Then the economic bubble of the late 1990s burst with a bang. Agencies have been struggling to meet new mandates when there is not only no additional federal money, but their state budgets are increasingly more constrained. No wonder we are seeing what we see.
And still, good things keep on happening! Parents take advantage of a second chance and learn how to better nurture and protect their children. Young people are graduating from high school and college this month who would have dropped out years ago if you or someone who works for you had not provided an unforgettable interruption in their lives. I first heard that phrase from a New York school principal named Lorraine Monroe, who likes to call whatever point she's most determined to prove today "the Monroe Doctrine." One of her doctrines is that young people respond to adults who believe in them - not easily, and not at first, but over time, if you hang in with them. You've all seen it happen, because you're all believers.
I believe in miracles too. I'd like to tell you about just one of them, a Florida policeman named Tony Potter.
Tony and his four siblings were placed in foster care when Tony was three because their father went to prison and their mother returned to her native France. Tony grew up separated from his siblings, in more than 10 different foster homes. He was physically and emotionally abused in some of those homes. But one foster family cared about Tony and stuck by him, and later on, so did his wife Crystal. He chose a career in law enforcement, and he vowed that he would do his part to ensure the safety of children.
He went out of his way to make all the children he encountered feel important and safe. He often helped families who had broken down on the road, even in his off-duty hours, to ensure their safety and to calm their fears. He played with all the neighborhood kids and visited the schools as a police officer. He was a great father to his own son, Lake. He showed unconditional love for children, for his family, and for his friends, and he was loved and admired by many in his community.
I happen to know this story because Officer Tony Potter passed away a few months ago at age 40, of a sudden illness. Because his greatest desire was to help children, his family requested memorial donations to CWLA in lieu of flowers, and we have received a number of gifts in his memory. His widow, Crystal Potter, has given us permission to tell his story.
It's just one among many. The miracle is that on the local level, good things have been continuing to happen for thousands of children and young people and their families. They happen because of what individual foster parents and social workers and administrators do, in your agency and other agencies like yours. Though a Martian reading the news would surely conclude otherwise, our successes are still far more frequent than our failures. This is true because of the sacrifices you make, and those the people who work for you make - sacrifices that you may not be able to sustain indefinitely. I'll have more to say about that in just a moment.
So while we do make good things happen for children, every day, the fact remains that on the national level, although the goal is lofty, the right steps are not being taken. So thousands of children remain stranded on the precipice. Some have even tumbled into the void. When the safety net begins to fray, the smallest bodies fall through first.
Now, because tragic stories tug at everyone's heartstrings, and because situations like those we saw in Florida and New Jersey last year embarrass people in charge, Congress and the Administration are again calling for reform. You all know as well as I do that it could have been almost any state that wound up in that spotlight. And you also know the solution that the states have been offered most recently by this administration - the solution formerly known as block grants. They're not calling it that this year, but we all know it when we see it.
Fortunately, Congress has agreed to defer action until a date after the Pew Commission has released its recommendations, scheduled for May 18, and for all practical purposes, until the elections are over. We are playing a role in the Commission's process, and we hope to play an even larger role in disseminating its results. For now, I cannot anticipate its results. I can, however, give you CWLA's position on these matters, briefly and simply, before I move on to say just a little about the state and the individual levels.
- First, the United States must preserve and expand the federal guarantee of Title IV-E Foster Care and Adoption Assistance, without turning it into block grants. A child's safety, permanency, and well-being should not be an accident of geography.
- Second, we must take on a comprehensive reform of the child welfare system, so that states and child-serving community agencies have both the flexibility and the new federal investments they need. Flexibility without new investments is a bad bargain. At best, it would purchase short-term gain, with long-term pain. One need only read through the New York Program Improvement Plan to understand the need for these additional investments. Yes, evidence-based practice will help. And system and management improvement will help. But it is hard for anyone to pass the "straight-face" test who claims we are making an adequate investment in our most vulnerable kids.
It is for this reason that the Administration's proposal is not national reform, because it is not informed by the evidence base or by practice wisdom, and it does not offer the new investments we need to protect our children and strengthen our families. It certainly does not fairly and adequately reflect what we have learned from the Child and Family Service Reviews completed to date.
The eminent members of the Pew Commission are balancing many factors as they develop recommendations for better ways to finance our systems. They fully respect the complexity of the issues, and so do we. Jess McDonald, who accomplished some real reforms as Illinois' child welfare commissioner and is directing Pew's Fostering Results Initiative, likes to say that child welfare financing is not rocket science. It's MUCH harder than that.
Nevertheless, the basic outlines are clear. The child welfare system is not broken. It was never fully built in the first place. We need to build it. We need to give it the resources and the respect that are accorded to all the other first responders in every community, like police and firefighters. Our role is every bit as challenging, and every bit as vital.
State Level: Arizona
Now, one of the advantages of working at the national level is that you can always look out across the country and find examples of people who are solving even the knottiest problems. No matter what challenge we face - and we face so many of them! - I know there is somebody in this vast nation, with all its wealth and all its concern and ingenuity, who is developing a solution. Our Government Affairs Division, our Research to Practice Initiative, our National Framework team, and our far-flung consultants are all out there every day looking for solutions that they can hold up and encourage others to adopt.
I don't mean that anybody has all the answers, of course. I do mean that we can always learn from each other. We can learn from trouble, and from triumph too.
When a state finds itself in the national spotlight, whether it is because of extraordinary challenges or extraordinary accomplishments, that glare is likely to produce a certain amount of "hothouse" effect. The climate for children is quite likely to improve. Focusing that national spotlight is one of the things CWLA does best - trying to seize the moment, all the while avoiding knee jerk, simplistic solutions.
In the mid-90s we published a child welfare data book, the forerunner of our online National Data Analysis System. It showed Alaska in last place on a number of important measurements. The following year, Alaska's Governor came to our national conference to thank us, because his legislature had responded with significant new appropriations.
At our 2004 national conference in late February, one of the keynote speakers was Janet Napolitano, who took office as governor of Arizona in January 2003. In less than a year, Gov. Napolitano erased a billion-dollar state budget deficit without raising taxes or cutting funding for public schools, child protection, or other vital social services. In setting out to reform the state's child welfare system, she told us, she looked first at the mission of that agency and then considered what it would take to be sure that the agency could carry that out. She realized immediately that child welfare workers were the key to success, and that they could not succeed without the proper support.
It was clear that they needed reasonable salaries, reasonable caseloads, adequate training and supervision, and state of the art tools, including assessment tools. It was also clear that they needed community support, and that communities would be most likely to support child welfare services if they felt ownership of their mission and their outcomes. She convened citizens' commissions to assess the status quo and recommend improvements. She authorized 104 new case manager positions for this year, about half of which have already been filled, and extra pay for workers with master's degrees.
She advocates for implementing a continuum of services - based on the needs of the child - whether that be community-based non-residential or residential care. So Governor Napolitano's thinking begins where CWLA's Making Children a National Priority begins: with the universal needs of children. However, our priorities document is subtitled A Framework for Community Action, because we realize that everything comes back to the local level, and to the individual needs of specific children. So we're back to that one child, hanging over the gorge.
Decisions that are made at the federal and state level have a great deal to do with whether or not anyone is going to walk the walk that rescues a given child. Those decisions can make it likely that someone will be there, and that this person will be caring, qualified, and adequately equipped to do the job - or they can make it highly unlikely. Even when it's unlikely, though, it happens quite often, as all of you know.
Workers sacrifice their own self-interest to help yet another young person get a grip. Agencies sacrifice their financial self-interest, and step out over the void - sometimes, until their governing boards pull them back. We get so accustomed to miracles in this line of work that we take them for granted - and the public does too, to the extent that it knows about them at all. Accomplishing the seemingly impossible is heroism, and I'd be the last person in the world to discourage it. But it comes at a high price.
Vicarious Traumatization
When we have asked agency administrators to name the issues that are of greatest concern to them in managing their agencies, three issues have consistently loomed large for public and private agencies alike:
- the challenge of recruiting and retaining competent staff members,
- the lack of human and financial resources, and
- the quality of the services they are providing -- particularly the difficulty of providing the services that fit the needs of a particular child and family, at the right time, with the right intensity and the right duration.
Now obviously, these three challenges are very closely related. When administrators talk about resources, they're talking primarily about human beings - case workers and other dedicated workers who can implement programs and sustain relationships that meet the needs of our increasingly troubled children. When they talk about designing and evaluating programs, they're talking about putting those people into programs that work and can show they work. Evidence should give the agency a claim on resources to keep the programs - and the people - going. Then, and only then, can we accomplish our mission.
So, the challenge of meeting the increasingly complex needs of children and families is intimately connected to meeting the needs of staff --what we often call the workforce crisis in child welfare. But what about the mental health of the people who staff our systems? This is a set of issues that doesn't come up very frequently at meetings of this type, so it might be worth some of our time.
In terms of mental health, most of us are the lucky ones. We are the ones whose bright beginnings equipped us with optimism and resilience, so we could survive the ups and downs in our daily lives. A fascinating and relatively new body of mental health research, however, is suggesting that some of us may not be adequately equipped to survive the downs and downs and downs, the compounded losses, in the lives of our clients. This research deals with a phenomenon called vicarious traumatization.
Beginning several decades ago, this phenomenon was noted in a number of different groups at different times before the similarities were seen to form a pattern. It was seen in therapists working with Holocaust survivors-in some cases therapists working with Vietnam veterans, with their notoriously high rates of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder-and then in therapists as well as police officers and others who work with severely abused children. People who assist in disaster relief, like firefighters, emergency medical technicians, doctors, nurses, and clergy also experience symptoms of vicarious traumatization. Sometimes even researchers who immerse themselves deeply enough into one of these issues can fall victim to the syndrome. In every case, individuals absorb more pain and more loss than they can stagger around under, and something has to give.
Bear in mind that this isn't rare, and it happens to male and female social workers and administrators alike. Even emotionally healthy human beings are not equipped to handle endless amounts of pain. And in some professions, there seem to be endless amounts to go around. Overload happens.
Moreover, not all the people who are drawn to helping professions are among the fortunate and the strong. Some professionals have early traumas that are re-awakened by having to deal with painful material at second hand. People who have experienced some of the pain their clients suffer may be the most effective healers ---but they may also be particularly susceptible to vicarious traumatization.
When this kind of second-hand trauma becomes overwhelming, two kinds of outcomes are likely: what I'll call, at the risk of greatly oversimplifying the research literature, burnout and numbing.
When the overload is too great, some helpers burn out. They can't take any more. They retreat for safety, and the profession has lost another member. This is a tremendous hazard for child welfare agencies, where staff retention, as we all know, is a major challenge.
A second individual, faced with the same degree of overload, may simply go numb. He may look like he's still there, but there's nothing behind the smile. These are the walking wounded. They survive, professionally, by practicing denial - by refusing to admit the pain and the horror into consciousness.
Does any of this sound familiar, to any of you?
Now before I get too grim, I want to stop to remind myself, and you, that there are solutions to all of these challenges. We can advocate persuasively for additional resources, and we can demonstrate that good things happen when we use them well. And one of the best things we can do with the money we do have, in both publicly funded systems and private ones, is to provide training and support for our workers.
Child welfare workers, foster parents, police and justice professionals, and others who work with traumatized children need top-notch supervision and support. Those who have a positive outlet for the pain that they have to absorb in the course of their work can survive and grow stronger. A national study of 1,000 women therapists with advanced degrees and many years of experience, published in 1999 in Professional Psychology, showed that some who had been working with large numbers of sexual abuse survivors for decades were emotionally healthier than others with less exposure. Their own belief systems and personal support systems provided the strength they needed.
Vicarious traumatization is not inevitable. The solution is for all of our systems to recognize how traumatized many of the children and families we work with are, to assess our own support systems as well as theirs, and to realistically plan for the impact of trauma on professionals who work with these families. As well as, of course, adequate treatment for the kids and their families.
Then we can provide reality-based training as workers come in, and access to ongoing professional support as they go along. We cannot wait to provide this support until a child dies hideously or workers begin to fall out in large numbers. It has to be done proactively.
Clearly, the first step is to prevent trauma to children. That's why we need the full array of services, from primary prevention to aftercare and reintegration. Still, many of us have built our careers or our agencies at particular intersections along that continuum, and we may not have much power over what happens before children arrive at our doors.
The second step is to acknowledge that trauma happens and respond intelligently to its effects, in children, families, and helping systems.
- Bring it out into the open with staff,
- Provide informal and formal supports for your staff as they may struggle with the emotional impact of their work,
- Empower your staff to make a difference by giving them the tools they need to succeed, and
- Celebrate your successes as an organization and the individual successes of your staff - even the small wins - they add up!
Now I believe that collectively, as a field, we know the characteristics of programs that work - and we also understand clearly the work we have before us to bolster our workforce - and it is those two things together that allow us to awaken the miracle of resilience. The children in our systems have suffered many losses, but they are not losers. Every one of us knows people who started out with all the strikes against them and went on to become assets to society, like Tony Potter and Detroit's Judge Greg Mathis, who was sentenced by a sympathetic judge to earn his GED in lieu of further jail time.
In almost every case, these individuals can name at least one adult who captured their attention-one of Lorraine Monroe's "unforgettable interruptions." Each of us has had such interruptions in our lives when we needed them most, and each of us has been that kind of interruption for more than one child. We have somehow inspired young people to change the direction of their lives - and connected them to other people and resources that could help them do so.
Let's NOT take miracles for granted. Let's give ourselves and each other full recognition for the lives we have directed onto the right path, for the unique young people who are no longer hanging over the precipice because of something we did. But let's also reserve some attention for the road that leads to the precipice. It runs through Washington, DC, and through New York's statehouse, and through each of your own city councils and county commissions. That's why you belong to COFFCA; that's why you're here; and that's why I'm here, representing CWLA.
So I will close with one final story - appropriate for the season as it focuses on the game of baseball.
It involves a little boy at the park one spring day all by himself, throwing balls up in the air and trying to hit them. As he tossed and swung, he kept up a running commentary to himself: "I'm the best hitter in the whole world! I'm better than Sammy Sosa! I'm better than Derek Jeter! I'm better than Barry Bonds!"
After a while, though, when he kept swinging and wasn't hitting any of the balls, he paused long enough to rethink his situation and then changed his patter as he threw the ball in the air one more time, only to miss once again. "I'm the best pitcher in the whole world! Nobody can hit what I pitch. I'm better than Roger Clemens! I'm better than Kevin Brown! I'm better than Kerry Woods!"
I see this as a story of the resilience we must show every day in our work - our work with individual children, matching their resilience stride for stride - and our work in Albany and Washington as advocates for our issues and our cause!
So continue the good work you're doing, ladies and gentlemen. Continue producing, or co-producing, miracles. But please remember to advocate for young people and their families. Tell the public, and tell your elected representatives: Investments in children always grow.
Thank you very much.
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