Since law school, JooYeun Chang has made a career bent on transforming the formidable child welfare system, tackling it from various roles that have spanned sectors — from nonprofit legal and policy advocacy to public service as director of Michigan’s child welfare system to the federal level as acting assistant secretary for the Administration for Children and Families.
Chang, who emigrated from Korea to the United States at age 3 with her family, said that from a young age she wanted to pursue a profession that aided vulnerable children. She assumed it would be in education, which she saw as society’s “great equalizer.”
It was only when she took an internship in the public defender’s office in Miami during law school that she was introduced to the child welfare system. Many of the kids she was helping to defend had been in foster care, a system she was not yet familiar with. That sparked an interest that would ultimately define her career.
After a 3-year stint as managing director at Casey Family Programs, Chang transitioned into public service as the senior deputy director of Michigan’s child welfare system. Her tenure was marred by the death of 16-year-old Cornelius Frederick, who died after staff members in a residential facility laid across his torso to restrain him. Three staff were charged in connection with his death; Chang cut ties with the for-profit company that managed the group home, Sequel Youth and Family Services.
From there, Chang was tapped to be acting assistant secretary and principal deputy assistant secretary of the Administration for Children and Families of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and guided the rollout of $72.2 billion in pandemic relief aid to children and families.
Now, in her current role as program director of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation’s child welfare and well-being program, Chang aims to use the foundation’s charitable dollars to back organizations and jurisdictions that are transforming the system upstream, such as by addressing historic racism and inequities and reducing the system’s overreliance on child protective services.
The interview
Where do you see Doris Duke making the greatest impact?
I have a bias toward the child welfare system, having a long history of working in it. A lot of us in the field have thought about prevention from the standpoint of preventing foster care placements. What I’ve heard from parents is that it is not good enough. They want to avoid any unnecessary interaction with the child protection system, including investigations and rethinking mandated reporting policies. I think that the system is in a unique place where it can actually go beyond improving the system to actually transforming the system to meet both a child’s safety needs and the integrity and support of the families within the structure of their own communities.
Doris Duke is really excited to lean into that space of system transformation. Thinking about prevention more expansively than just preventing foster care but also to really prevent any unnecessary system involvement. And to do that transformative work in partnership with system leaders, community providers and the families themselves who are impacted. That’s where we’re really focused on our investments of time, energy and money.
What do you see as Doris Duke’s role in supporting child welfare prevention?
To create a new system — in which fewer kids are coming to the attention of child welfare and more families are able to care for their own — you need thought leaders, you need researchers and evaluators. You need people who can hit the ground running and start up a new program. You need to constantly study whether those programs are working for whom and how to improve that. These are big undertakings, and I think jurisdiction leaders if they have the vision and the will, that’s enormous in and of itself, but they need that extra push. The foundation’s role is to do that kind of plus one.
What I became clear about after having worked in state government, federal government and foundation, as well as nonprofit advocacy, is what foundations aren’t. We’re not the biggest funder in town. We are not the ones on the ground actually doing this truly extraordinary work that dedicated public servants do every day. But what we can do is offer all of those people a helping hand. We can bring resources to them, and we can supplement where the funding isn’t quite there yet.
Why did you decide to leave the public sector?
The public sector is something that you have to give your all to. I felt like I did the best I could. I gave everything I had when I was serving in those roles. But it makes it really hard to balance family life. I served as best, and as long as I could, but yeah, I had to take care of some family matters myself.
You’ve worked in child welfare for a long time, an area rife with emotions, both good and bad. What was the hardest moment of your career?
By far the hardest moment was the death of Cornelius Frederick, who was a young teenage boy who had been in Michigan’s care — my care — when he died. He was killed while in a congregate care setting by the staff who were hired to care for him after he threw his sandwich at another child. Sitting in his hospital room while he was on life support, seeing the anguish of his remaining relatives, including the sister who had to say goodbye by video because we were in the middle of the pandemic, his aunt who came to say final goodbyes, was the hardest moment and something that I still think about pretty regularly.
I think about Cornelius because I need to remember that this system we have is not a net-neutral proposition for the kids we serve. The kids who are in the system don’t want to be part of it; they want a family. Every child deserves a family. Cornelius is a reminder to me of the urgency with which I do this work of system transformation because we can’t sit by and just accept incremental change when there are hundreds of thousands of kids in our system today, millions who are reported into our system every year, and they demand that we do everything we can with a sense of urgency to make an impact.
What was a rewarding moment?
It was the day before Thanksgiving probably two years ago [as Michigan’s child welfare director]. I was on a ride-along with one of our investigators. We were answering a call from a WIC worker who was concerned about a 19-year-old mother who was going through her infant formula very quickly. This young woman was a ward in our system and had aged out of foster care and now she was getting involved again this time as a parent. What’s sad to me is that the WIC worker called that into the abuse and neglect hotline. What was heartwarming, was the warmth and compassion the worker showed this young mother. The young mother had burst into tears when we entered. The worker said we are here to help, to make sure everything is okay. It turned out the reason she was going through formula so fast was that she had an infant and a toddler. We also learned that the landlord hadn’t fixed the broken refrigerator and that all the food she was saving for dinner on Thanksgiving had spoiled. The worker came back the next day, on Thanksgiving, the worker’s only day off that week, and brought this young mother all new groceries so she would have a Thanksgiving Day meal with her family.
The story epitomizes both what was wrong with our system, which is that we overly rely on CPS and the hope of the system that there are workers like this woman who took time out of her own holiday to make sure that this family had what they needed.
The Details
Residence: Split between Maryland and New York City
Title: Program director, child well-being program, Doris Duke Charitable Foundation
Hobbies: Running, yoga, reading
Recent reads: “Gilead,” by Marilynne Robinson
First paid job: At 16, watching kids at YMCA in Raleigh, North Carolina
Previous employment: Acting assistant secretary and principal deputy assistant secretary for the Administration for Children and Families of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS); Senior deputy director, Michigan Department of Health and Human Services; Managing director, Casey Family Programs
Education: Bachelor of Arts degree, North Carolina State University; Juris Doctor, University of Miami School of Law
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Brian Rinker is a San Francisco-based freelance writer and journalist. He covers public health, child welfare, digital health, startups and venture capital. His work has been published by Kaiser Health News, Health Affairs, The Atlantic, Men’s Health and San Francisco Business Times. Brian received master’s degrees in journalism and public health from UC Berkeley.
