Community Support as Family Maintenance: How One IV-E Student is Helping us Understand Resilient Family Systems
Odin Dailo’s professional path didn’t always point toward child welfare. As an undergraduate at UC Santa Barbara, Odin spent his days studying cell biology, working toward a career in laboratory science. But when the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020, something shifted. As Odin watched his friends and classmates struggle against eviction and other forms of housing insecurity, he realized that his calling was in service to his community.
With the support of a Title IV-E stipend, Odin found his way to social work. Today, as a newly minted M.S.W., he’s not only working to build brighter futures for children and families, he’s helping to improve child welfare practice statewide through original research focused on supporting stable, resilient family systems.
Committing to Community
“My trajectory was really a product of the pandemic,” Odin says. “Once COVID hit and before the [eviction] moratorium, a lot of my classmates ended up living in vans or hotel rooms just to finish up their degrees. It was tragic.” Odin knew he wanted to be part of the solution. After graduation, he took a position with a local non-profit as a housing navigator, helping Santa Barbara locals find safe, stable places to live in a notoriously tight housing market.
“It was a hard job, but I could actually see the impact in my community. When I talked to clients face-to-face and ended up housing them, I could see the impact of my work in real time.”
Odin wasn’t the only one who noticed his alignment with this new pathway. “After some conversations with my program director,” he recalls, “she told me, ‘Odin, I think you’d be very good at this. If you really want to bump up your game, I think pursuing a master’s would be good for you.”
He took the recommendation to heart. With the support of a Title IV-E stipend, Odin enrolled in the M.S.W. program at CSU Bakersfield, eager to make a difference in the community that had raised him.
“I came from Bakersfield. I wanted to pay it forward by working within the community. If I could take the experiences I’d gained and help the people around me, the people who helped to shape me, why wouldn’t I?”
Understanding Family Maintenance
During his M.S.W. program, Odin developed a particular interest in the challenges that parents face when they reunite with their children after court-ordered separations. “I noticed some shell shock that happens when parents reunite with their children after this six- to twelve-month window where they’re working pretty much exclusively on themselves,” he explains.
“They’re getting housing, they’re getting sober, they’re going through classes, then all of a sudden, boom, you have your children back. Now you have to be able to juggle all of these things and support your children, some of whom are pretty high needs. Some of them have therapy upon tutoring upon extracurriculars, all on top of their mental health and prescriptions.”
“Parents struggle,” says Odin, “Parents really, really struggle.”
Odin wanted to better understand how parents navigate this difficult transition and whether standard child welfare interventions do enough to support them in the wake of reunification. So for his M.S.W. capstone project, he decided to take a closer look at the Kern County Department of Human Services’ Family Maintenance (FM) program, which aims to support sustained family reunification after a period of mandated separation.
Working collaboratively with a child welfare professional, parents who move through the FM program complete a range of classes designed to help them feel more capable in their ability to parent their child. By imparting specific skills and strategies, the program aims to reduce the risk of unhealthy disciplinary practices and enhance protective factors within the family as a whole.
Odin’s goal was to assess the efficacy of this program, highlighting its strengths while identifying areas for improvement. “What I wanted to see in this evaluation was two-fold: One, did the program give the tools necessary to better parent their children, and two, did the program wrap them around with resources and protective factors to make sure their reunification is stable and lasting.”
Connecting Individual Change to Community Support
Through surveys conducted with program participants, Odin uncovered a striking pattern. While most of those who completed the FM program showed an increased likelihood of implementing healthy parenting practices, they nonetheless felt that they lacked the support they needed to maintain a protective family environment in the long run.
“We saw a swift change in personal behavior,” says Odin, but parents still reported feeling uncertain about where to turn for help when times get tough. “One of the moms,” he recalls, “she felt kind of alone in parenting her children. She felt like she had to grind day in and day out to make sure that her children were fed and happy. Despite going through all of the hurdles to complete the program, she still felt pretty alone.”
Odin’s research suggests that while the FM program is effective at supporting individual behavioral change, there is still room for improvement when it comes to addressing the broader, structural factors that influence how and whether parents can create safe homes.
"Our programs can do more...to make families feel like they have a system supporting them rather than policing them"
-Odin Dailo, M.S.W.
Though based on just one small sample of program participants, these are significant findings. As Odin explains, “Our programs can do more…to make families feel like they have a system supporting them rather than policing them. Individual responsibility is only one part of making a happy, healthy, sustainable family. If we don’t tackle the community support aspect, as well, we may suffer in the long term with continued impacts to children and recidivism back into the child welfare system.”
These insights are helping Odin see his work as a child welfare social worker with Kern County Department of Human Services with fresh eyes. “I want to affect things at a macro level. I want to look at policy, considering what systems we can change and create to make communities feel supported.”
Grounded in considered research and working alongside his colleagues (many of them also Title IV-E alumni), he’s helping to lay the foundations of a child welfare system that helps families flourish, for good.
