Envisioning Sustainability in Child Welfare

Balancing personal well-being against workplace stress can be tricky in any profession. But in child welfare, where the job often means guiding families through some of the darkest moments of their lives, it can feel like a daily struggle. From managing complex case plans and child removal proceedings to responding to abuse and neglect, child welfare professionals face high risks of burnout, secondary traumatization and other serious stressors. Left unaddressed, these pressures can drive turnover and weaken workforce resilience.  

These issues were front and center at the 2026 Title IV-E Summit, held on April 24 in Burlingame, California. This year, the Summit brought together more than 250 Title IV-E students and child welfare practitioners from across the state. Together, they explored the theme, “Sustaining the Work: Building Well-Being for Families and Social Workers.”

Breaking Down False Choices: 

Across five breakout workshops and two plenary sessions, conference participants worked together to imagine new approaches to this rewarding and impactful but often challenging field. The aim was to envision a child welfare system where better outcomes for children and families go hand-in-hand with more sustainable forms of professional practice for workers.

At first glance, these goals might seem opposed. If workers prioritize their well-being by setting clear boundaries between their personal and professional lives, won’t their ability to respond to challenging child welfare cases suffer?

During her plenary address, Kendra Jackson, a former foster youth who now serves as the statewide juvenile justice and education specialist within the Office of the California Foster Care Ombudsperson, made it clear that this is a false opposition. “If you are out here towing the children and towing the families,” Jackson asked, “what happens when you stop? Who tows the tow truck when the tow truck breaks down?”

The metaphor was clarifying. If child welfare workers don’t have the institutional support they need to show up well in the work day after day, how can they meaningfully support children and families? For the Title IV-E students in the room, some of whom have already entered service as interns with county and Tribal child welfare agencies, it was an important and timely lesson about what it takes to build an impactful career that lasts.

Power Sharing as Sustainable Practice:

Dionne Puckett, a visionary equity strategist, organizational change consultant and former Title IV-E recipient, made a similar case when she took the Summit stage. For Puckett, self-care and other personal well-being practices are important, but they don’t always get at the root causes of unsustainable work patterns. “When you think about self-care, what’s the thing that you do for yourself? And I don’t want to hear pedicures every two weeks,” Puckett quipped.

I’m so excited for the experiences that our communities will have because the thoughts, the ideas and the hopes in this room are really going to make change

Dionne Puckett

In her address, she made an impassioned case for a form of child welfare practice based on power sharing. Child welfare workers, Puckett noted, have tremendous power to alter the course of a child’s life. By creating systems where that power is proactively shared with clients, we not only build a system where children and families play a more active role in creating strategies of repair that work for them, we also relieve the social worker of some of the burden of their own authority.

Here and in other presentations throughout the day, the message was clear: we do not need to choose between healthy families and healthy workers. Safety and well-being for one does not need to be purchased at the expense of the other.

New Possibilities for Child Welfare Practice:

By centering collaboration, shared power and collective care, we can lighten the load on workers and keep families at the center of their own stories. Conversations like these help to ensure that as the next generation of child welfare professionals enters the workforce, they’ll be primed to build a professional culture that treats sustainability for workers and clients as a single, shared goal.

Reflecting on her conversations with Title IV-E students at the Summit, Puckett was able to see that culture just around the bend: “I have been so encouraged sitting in workshops and listening to the different voices that have been shared today,” she remarked from the podium. “I’m so excited for the experiences that our communities will have because the thoughts, the ideas and the hopes in this room are really going to make change.” 

The 2026 Title IV-E Summit was made possible with the generous support of the California Department of Social Services and the National Association of Social Workers-California Chapter.