Building a New Future for Child Welfare, One Human at a Time
Wendy Wiegmann on the IV-E Education Program
Quick Summary
- In a recent talk at UC Berkeley, Wendy Wiegmann, Ph.D., made a moving and urgent case for the California Title IV-E Education Program.
As in nearly all fields, digital tools of all stripes are now standard-issue in the world of social work and child welfare. But even as such tools offer tantalizing new efficiencies, they are in many ways a poor fit for the uncertainties and gray areas that make up the challenging reality of child welfare services.
In a recent lecture hosted by UC Berkeley Social Welfare and the California Child Welfare Indicators Project (CCWIP), Wendy Wiegmann, Project Director at CCWIP, offered a powerful reminder of this discrepancy, highlighting the weighty and specifically human stakes of child protective work. Delving into the complex and often painful history of child welfare policy in the United States, Wiegmann argued that it is still people–passionate, committed and dedicated–who must “step into the gap” for child welfare.
Throughout her talk, Wiegmann emphasized the complex nature of child welfare as a professional practice. On the one hand, it is a field that often attracts those with an earnest desire to make a positive difference in their communities. Like Wiegmann herself, many who enter child welfare have harrowing, first-hand experiences with parental neglect and abuse, and choose the profession to support young people facing similar challenges. On the other hand, it’s a field whose outcomes have long been characterized by stark racial disparities, with Black and Indigenous children experiencing higher rates of protective intervention and removal than their white peers.
What will it take to bridge the distance between our best hopes for positive change and the persistence of dispiriting outcomes? For Wiegmann, the answer lies neither in flashy new technologies capable of delivering tidy answers at a keystroke, nor in the abandonment of the child welfare system altogether, but in the uniquely human ability to hold multiple truths in our heads at once. It takes someone with the commitment and skill to work with involuntary clients without immediately falling back on the coercive power of the courts; it takes someone who can empathize with, respect and even trust a parent but still be willing to determine that their child is unsafe in their home; it takes someone ready to walk with another through the worst days of their life on the belief that change and reunification are possible.
Saying yes to these challenges is no small matter. And that’s where Wiegmann believes California’s Title IV-E Education Program becomes so important. IV-E students receive the training necessary to effectively tackle the complex challenges that characterize the field.
Thinking and feeling is how we make the system better.
-Wendy Wiegmann, Ph.D.
By streaming committed individuals into BSW and MSW programs and providing the financial support they need to thrive, IV-E lays the groundwork for a different kind of child welfare system. Community-based, well-resourced, anti-oppressive and oriented toward family reunification, this is a system where hard-working people are trained and empowered to turn old paradoxes into new models for success. This is a future that no machine can simply drum up out of a database and deliver as a search result. It is one that social workers will create together with the children, families, and communities they serve.
In Wiegmann’s words, “thinking and feeling is how we make the system better.”