| An East African
family was referred to CPS following the birth of their
fifth child due to concerns about hygiene in the home.
With the help of an interpreter from a refugee resettlement
agency, CPS worked with the family on household cleaning
products and access to other local resources. This relationship
with CPS and other child welfare workers ultimately
led the refugee mother to end an abusive relationship
and move with her children into subsidized housing.
“CPS was extremely helpful to fund the assistance
that the family required to understand how they could
successfully function within the U.S. system.”
[1] |
This example, from the new BRYCS Child Welfare Toolkit,
Refugees
and the U.S. Child Welfare System: Background Information
for Service Providers, highlights the type of positive
collaboration that can occur when refugee service providers
and public child welfare agencies work together to serve newcomer
families. Increasingly, public child welfare agencies are
recognizing their need to collaborate with agencies serving
refugees and immigrants so that services to families from
diverse backgrounds occur in a language and culture they understand.
Similarly, refugee and immigrant service agencies are recognizing
their need to better understand child welfare laws and services,
and the resources each discipline can offer the other. BRYCS
continues to support and encourage this type of innovative
collaboration through publications such as our Cross
Service Training Guide, and the Child
Welfare Toolkit mentioned above.
A recent child welfare study by the General Accounting Office
(GAO) found that 29 states (58% of respondents) identified
growing cultural diversity as an emerging issue likely to
affect children and families served by the child welfare system
over the next five years. [2]
Child welfare officials we interviewed also said that
the growing cultural diversity of the families who come
in contact with the child welfare system has prompted the
need for states to reevaluate how they investigate allegations
of maltreatment and the basis on which they make decisions
that could result in the removal of children from their
homes. Child welfare officials in several states reported
that the current protocols for investigating and removing
children from their homes do not necessarily reflect the
cultural norms of some immigrant and other minority families.
These differences include limitations in family functioning
that may be caused by poverty, the environment, or culture
as opposed to those that may be due to unhealthy family
conditions or behaviors. In response to growing cultural
diversity, several states we visited stated that they are
revising their protocols to account for religious and language
differences among families who come in contact with the
child welfare system.[3]
Despite recognition by more than half of responding states
of the growing significance of cultural diversity, only 3
states (6%) report implementing diversity or cultural initiatives
to improve services to children and families. [4]
Nonetheless, several communities have quietly begun to address
newcomer needs in the child welfare system, creating a roadmap
for more culturally sensitive services where little existed
before.
In St. Louis, Missouri, a city of about
350,000 people, Frances Johnson of the Missouri Department
of Social Services Children’s Division, and Lara Fallon
of the International Institute of St. Louis, have worked together
over the last several years to develop a service collaboration
now described as “New Americans and Child Protection:
Collaborative efforts to keep new American children safe in
their home and in their community.”[5] This collaboration
was influenced by an influx of Bosnian refugees to St. Louis
and resulted in a variety of case-level and community-level
service efforts, including:
- joint child abuse hotline responses;
- cross-service trainings and job shadowing;
- a joint “Child Protection and Refugee Workgroup;”
- child protection documents translated into 8 languages;
and
- Scout troops for New American children.
Most important, notes Frances Johnson, is remembering that
while this service collaboration benefits both agencies, it
ultimately benefits newcomer families. Click
here for the full interview with Frances
Johnson.
New York City, with more than 8 million
people, poses a more vexing challenge in both the number of
people and the number of cultures, but committed advocates
and child welfare personnel have made significant progress
over the past several years. Ilze Earner, Assistant Professor
of Social Work at Hunter College, notes that the momentum
in New York for improved child welfare services to newcomers
has come primarily from immigrant advocacy groups, rather
than refugee service providers. Click
here for the full interview with Ilze
Earner. While St. Louis exemplifies more of a ground-up
model with direct casework improvements, New York City demonstrates
more of a top-down systems level approach to change, with
grassroots instigation. Providential changes in New York’s
child welfare system—moving from a citywide model to
a community-based model—and the passage of a local language
access law created a receptive environment for the Immigrant
Advisory Task Force to recommend changes to the NYC child
welfare system. The Task Force has achieved initial goals
of:
- developing a standing immigrant advisory committee to
the Administration for Children’s Services (ACS);
- developing a caseworker handbook and training curriculum
on immigration and language issues; and
- improving language access and data collection.
Whether addressing change from the case level up or from
a systems level down, both St. Louis and New York City started
with the simple yet often difficult task of getting staff
from the disciplines of child welfare and newcomer services
to sit down and talk to each other. While approaching newcomer
issues slightly differently, both St. Louis and New York City
continue working to improve language access, casework collaboration,
cross-cultural staffing and training, and data collection.
These programs are at the forefront of innovative approaches
to serving newcomer families. BRYCS recommends that refugee
and immigrant serving agencies play a central role in this
process [6]
by providing reimbursable services to public child welfare
and other mainstream agencies, including:
- interpretation and translation;
- cultural expertise on family and community relationships;
- cultural competency training;
- culturally-appropriate alternative services, such as parenting
support and education, anger management, adjustment services,
and in some cases health or mental health services and supports,
etc.;
- assisting with referrals to federally-funded refugee foster
care programs, where appropriate.
In addition to being a resource, refugee and immigrant service
providers likewise need information and education about child
welfare services and systems. BRYCS’ new publication,
Refugees
and the U.S. Child Welfare System: Background Information
for Service Providers, addresses this need directly
by:
- providing an overview of the U.S. child welfare system;
- addressing how to help refugee clients referred to CPS;
- providing tips on building bridges with the child welfare
system; and
- including tools for trainers, common identifiers of abuse
and abusers, a child welfare flow chart, and a child welfare
worksheet for refugee serving agencies to gather critical
information from local child welfare providers.
The recent GAO report on challenges faced by state child
welfare agencies noted “collaboration and coordination
of services” to child welfare clients as one of the
top 5 important challenges identified by states. [7]
In the words of Frances Johnson, “Start small, but as
you progress, you will find that you can do more and more.”
A task that at first seemed overwhelming has progressed incrementally
and now appears monumental in its achievements. As St. Louis
and New York City are demonstrating, collaboration and coordination
on services to newcomers can make a tremendous difference
in the lives of the children and families they serve.
The featured
search lists the most up-to-date and useful resources
related to this topic available for free download. Additional
resources available free or for a fee can be found here.
|
