Op-ed: Child welfare solutions needed at the community level
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One of the few statistics that seem easiest to find about child welfare in West Virginia is that it is the state in the nation with the highest level of children removed from their homes and the highest level of children in state custody. I would be eager to hear a wide cross section of people address why they think this is.
Some national-level leaders who I greatly admire for their work, such as Kevin Campbell (familyseeing.org) and Jerry Milner (familyjusticegroup.org), articulate bringing children into the foster care system contributes to more trauma for them and that much more could be done to keep children with their families.
In West Virginia, for several years, there seems to have been a lot of effort to try to "improve the system of care for children." These include increasing efforts to place children with kinship/ relatives as a "first resort" and a federal waiver to the Medicaid program to provide services to "severely emotionally disturbed" children in their communities. Some community models work with the needs of mothers with substance use disorder to reunite with their children and connect to supportive services. Many of these are proving successful in their scale/ pilots. However, the barrage of new incidents and referrals seems to outpace the solutions.
I find myself feeling like solutions might best come at the community level. Despite the best intentions and leadership at the state level, the local communities seem to take the brunt of the daily challenges and are removed from the theories and models at the "system levels."
By conducting a series of listening and learning sessions in Wood County, getting to know what various people and services do and how they interface, a valuable set of perspectives emerges. Additionally, several of our local foundations have banded together around initiatives to combine their resources in attempts to help address these community issues. One is in the area of substance use disorder, and the other is foster care. The United Way Alliance of the Mid-Ohio Valley, McDonough Foundation, Parkersburg Area Community Foundation and Sisters Health Foundation are the partners.
The premise of their efforts around foster care are: 1) by deeply learning the local dynamics and understanding the needs and gaps, they could conceivably pool resources or direct resources to key areas that could have an impact; 2) helping the local providers of an array of services to these children and families look at their service delivery and response to needs and gaps, and helping with accountability and effectiveness; 3) convey messages from the local community to the various levels of government about what is discerned and recommended.
Organizing the community to participate in such work and dialogue is challenging. Daily obligations make it hard to get people together in meaningful ways and opportunities. The urgency for the young people impacted by the foster care system, and their families, makes this vitally important. We are determined to find the ways, and we seek the community's help. Please contact me at stuck715@gmail.com or visit the website: www.woodcountywvfostercare.org to engage.
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Steve Tuck is a retired chief executive officer of the Children's Home Society.