Building Brighter Futures for Native Families
How one IV-E alumnus found her calling through advocacy and mentorship
As a child welfare social worker with Napa County’s Department of Children and Family Services and Title IV-E alumnus, Shirley “Kippi” Begay wakes up every day knowing that she has found work with purpose. A former Care Coordinator with the Native American Health Center in Oakland, Kippi, who is San Carlos Apache, Navajo, Hualapai and, by her own account, Urban Indian, helps to build brighter futures for Native children and families in her community.
Like many child welfare professionals, Kippi has direct experience with the system, having been placed into care when she was just two months old. For Kippi, this was a nurturing arrangement. “I had a great childhood. I had a great home, a great family and mother. She did all the things that we look for in ICWA [Indian Child Welfare Act] placements. She cared for me as her own, she gave me culture, she gave me tradition.”
All the same, living in dependency came with unique challenges that left Kippi hesitant about pursuing child welfare as a career. Instead, she took her mother’s advice and tried her hand at nursing school. Though clinical work turned out to be an imperfect fit, she found the social welfare aspects of nursing engaging and was soon looking for opportunities that more closely aligned with her interests.
A Passion for Social Welfare
Through family and friends, Kippi learned of a case manager position with the Native American Health Center (NAHC) and jumped at the opportunity. Soon, she was “doing case management work with our most underserved populations: our unhoused, our dual- and triple-diagnosed.” The leap would turn out to be transformative in more ways than one.
“Having gone to nursing school, I understood a little bit about social impacts on health.” But more to the point, Kippi realized, “I am these people. I’m Native American, I grew up in the Bay Area. I’ve seen and experienced some of the same struggles the community has and they gave me a job. I was like, great, I can do this.”
To support her work with the NAHC, in 2010 Kippi enrolled at San Francisco State University to pursue a B.S. in health education with an emphasis in community-based public health. While working at NAHC, Kippi met Michele Mass. A licensed clinical social worker, Mass (an enrolled member of the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians) quickly became a mentor to Kippi and, recognizing her dedication to social welfare, encouraged her to consider a pivot to social work.
I had learned so much about myself, my family, my community, Native people at large...I realized I could be an asset to the child welfare system.
“[Michele] would constantly say, you’d be a great social worker, you would do great in a Social Work program, why not pursue this?” Mass even made the first pitch for Title IV-E. “[Michele] kind of hand-delivered Title IV-E to me,” Kippi recalls.
But for Kippi, this was a complex proposition. “I actively avoided it. Working in the Indian community was where I really started to understand our history, the traumas we experience and how they manifest. Working at the NAHC, I got to learn a lot about myself and my family, and I just wasn’t ready for the field [child welfare social work] without having fully resolved all the things that I experienced growing up as a dependent.”
Learning Through Advocacy
After completing her bachelor’s degree, Kippi relocated to the High Desert to pursue new opportunities. This would turn out to be a formative moment. “I had Michele in my ear saying ‘Title IV-E,’ so I continued to look into it. I found CSU San Bernardino and the application for the program. At the time, they were encouraging applications from Native American students and former dependents who lived in the High Desert. I was kind of the poster child.”
The time finally seemed right. “I just felt like it was a sign. I had learned so much about myself, my family, my community, Native people at large, and it had been so healing for me. So I was ready to look at Title IV-E as an opportunity...I realized I could be an asset to the child welfare system.”
Kippi enrolled at CSU San Bernardino and, with the support of a Title IV-E stipend, began pursuing her MSW. During her degree program, Kippi took every opportunity to advocate for more substantive engagement with Native perspectives across the MSW curriculum and to deepen her commitment to Native youth and families. “Every paper, every project, even my research thesis was written about Native populations,” she recalls.
Creating Lasting Change
This unflagging dedication catalyzed lasting change at CSUSB. Partnerships with local Tribal communities were revitalized, ICWA education was expanded for all students and Native students like Kippi were given the space they needed to participate in off-campus trainings focused on serving Native families.
Since completing her MSW, Kippi has continued to create real change at CSUSB. In 2021, she piloted a brand-new course in the School of Social Work, “Social Welfare of American Indian/Alaskan Native Peoples.” That course is now a permanent offering and is open to students from across the university, including current and future Title IV-E students.
When the work gets hard, that reminds me why I’m here.
“I questioned many times whether child welfare social work was what I should be doing,” says Kippi. “But the way [faculty and staff] responded during my Title IV-E program gave me the momentum to keep going.”
Built on a foundation of dedicated advocacy, that momentum has plenty room to grow. “Child welfare work is hard. But the thing I’m passionate about–working with Indian families, training social workers, sharing knowledge around ICWA with my peers and the communities I serve–that keeps me going. When the work gets hard, that reminds me why I’m here.”