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New Mexico is known as the Land of Enchantment and that certainly holds true. In the four years I had the joy of living and working there, I experienced some of the most enchanting and captivating sunsets, starry nights, diverse culture and acts of community of my entire life. Known for its vivid culture, delicious food, rich history and rural, laid-back lifestyle, New Mexico is a place like no other.
I had traveled to New Mexico for several years before living there — that’s where my extended family has roots. Despite regular trips, living there full time offered a deeper perspective and allowed me to see first-hand the provision of the child welfare and foster care services.
Elisa Kawam
As the leader of a large advocacy-based nonprofit, I had the privilege of working with the local child welfare agencies on a variety of endeavors that served the community, including training events, advocacy efforts and overarching strategic planning. During that time New Mexico was ranked 48th for child wellbeing and the joke often was “Well, at least we aren’t living in the South,” where states often occupied the 49th and 50th places.
Shortly thereafter, we collectively ate our words and dropped to 50th place nationwide. This was a tremendous wakeup call for everyone working in the child welfare sector and represented a pause point to not only generate ideas, but to work quickly to implement them.
In my position, I was not part of the core brainstorming team, but was able to observe this reworking of child welfare and am offering such insights here with respect to foster care specifically.
My intention is to propose ideas from an outside, unbiased viewpoint. Both my calling and training is in social work and I live my Code of Ethics in and out of the office. Part of this Code includes precepts on social justice, cultural humility, the importance of the social environment and reflecting on power structures as they relate to inequities.
I am also a critical theorist who employs feminist and structural critiques in order to think about how to act, be, serve and ultimately plan better in serving those who need it the most. I propose my insights here to generate ideas and with the hopes that others may also find them useful during their strategies and programmatic planning.
Challenges
One of the major challenges in New Mexico is the lack of access to resources. This is often due to scarce funding but also due to a confluence of factors related to lack of training, too few experienced professionals, the frontier nature of the state and lack of access to high-speed technology that allows for basic social services to happen with the least delay possible.
Additionally, New Mexico is home to several unique and diverse cultures that have ancestral ties to its lands and peoples. Often, there are long histories of intergenerational and historical trauma; when those not native to such cultures attempt to build rapport and assist with formal services, despite all the best intentions, it may be perceived as elitist, white and hegemonic in nature. Thus, building trust and rapport takes extra time, patience and dedication from those at all levels of child welfare.
With the national salary average hovering in the mid-$40,000 range for a child welfare worker (holding a master’s degree), such long-term dedication may be economically challenging and mentally taxing. Staff attrition is a known issue in child welfare that impacts foster care placements disproportionally in licensing, home visits, cultural appropriateness and in the needed support for children and caregivers during times of transition.
Paths Forward
While the challenges are great, they can be mitigated with proper policy, oversight and leadership. When the gubernatorial guard changed in New Mexico and Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham took office in January 2019, she ushered in an entirely new set of leaders who have been able to see governmental work with fresh eyes. The culture building is time-consuming and reminiscent of treading water, but nevertheless effective and impactful in the way we conduct child welfare and foster care work. Current Secretary of Child Welfare Brian Blalock has been a forward thinker and has been laying the groundwork for programmatic improvement agency-wide.
To sustain changes to child welfare work, we must fortify foster care sectors for the long term. This can be done in a variety of ways including: 1) workforce development, 2) community connectivity, 3) development of kin placements, and 4) trauma-informed training.
High-quality workforce development, at its core, is the notion that the people doing the work on the front lines must be educated, trained and compensated well. This means that this should start in high school with seminars and workshops that introduce the next generation to careers in child welfare and foster care.
After high school, universities and colleges must commit to having Title IV-E programs that serve as pipelines for trained entry-level workers ready to start in child welfare immediately after graduation. This requires a commitment from institutions of higher education to seek out faculty and adjuncts who have specialties in child welfare and for accrediting bodies to support this work in kind.
Workforce Development
In the field, foster care workers must receive continued training, effective supervision, higher salaries and lower caseloads. I am aware that such changes would require additional monies. However, this funding should be considered an investment into the future and should be publicly funded and managed. Manageable work, increased salaries and supportive supervision would pave the way for decadeslong foster care professionals who could potentially save/serve thousands of families from separation over the span of a career.
This cultural shift in the workforce should certainly occur in New Mexico, but it should also occur nationwide given that pay is often too low, supervisors often too stressed and client needs simply too high for anyone to take a breath and think through best practices and long-term outcomes.
Community Connectivity
This development of the workforce must also accompany solid grassroots organization that supports the community as its own living, breathing entity. The community is where the real work happens and where we must look for supports and strengths.
Often this means working with community leaders, elected officials, faith-based members and local business owners to support the work of child welfare for the long term. Social isolation is one of the hypothesized root causes of many societal ailments we see today specific to mental health, addiction and traumatic symptoms. We are people in relation and must fully embody that in foster care work.
Development of Kin Placements
Community connectivity leads to the third main practice point of simply recruiting more kin placements. Congregate care, group homes and institutionalized care should be seen as last resorts. Many scholars agree that kids do best when they are with family, close to schools, churches and places that look/feel familiar to them.
Working with kin may also assist in the transmission of nuanced cultural/ethnic traditions and concepts and in many respects feeds two birds with one scone. We, as a community, should advertise to nonkin as well but need to double back to address the gap in kin placements overall.
Trauma-Informed Practice and Training
And finally, and perhaps most difficultly, foster care must adopt a trauma-informed practice that starts from the ground up. This should include mandatory trauma-informed training for all professionals who work in foster care and child welfare regardless of role, title or education.
Focusing on an understanding of interpersonal, intergenerational and historical trauma would mean that we (as professionals) need to address healing across generations and over time. We must focus on adult/parental trauma and see that homelessness, addiction, worsened mental health and agency, and isolation may in fact be coping mechanisms for unaddressed trauma histories.
We must adopt practices with contracts and bidding for services whereby referral agencies are also trauma-informed and where families are treated with respect, dignity and empathy. We must acknowledge that extended family often have vicarious trauma and as such should promote their healing as well with listening, attention and therapeutic services.
Trauma-informed frameworks honor that life happens and blame is not effective. Simply pivoting from saying “what did you do” to “what happened to you” may be the start of true healing and human recognition for the families we serve in foster care.
Within the department itself, we must commit to a culture of quality control and best practice programming. Program and outcome evaluation researchers should be housed within the agency and relied on to assist in what changes to make to programs and what the outcomes may be.
Again, the need for more funding, more people and additional support at all levels is resounding in my head at all times and must be fortified by trauma-informed policy and policy champions within local and state governments. I am, notably, leaving out many aspects of foster care that would take much more time to convey, including aspects of racial disproportionality, poverty, immigration and political partisanship. Topics that each require their own deeper detail, it would not be proper to discuss them here as such.
These challenges and ideas are endemic to New Mexico but may also be applied to other child welfare agencies across the country that have similar struggles and complex client needs. And so I leave you with an adapted Greek proverb that gives me strength and fuels my passion for this work: The true meaning of life is to plant trees whose shade you will never enjoy. We have the skills, we have the people, and we have the research to change foster care — all that is left is for us to plant the seeds.
Elisa Kawam is a trauma-informed social worker, scholar, educator and yoga teacher. Her passion is breaking cycles of trauma and promoting healing across the life course.
