I remember the tension in the room. Not the kind you rush to resolve—but the kind that tells the truth before anyone is ready to say it out loud.
At the Ten of Ten for Kids convening, there was a question sitting underneath every conversation: What do families actually need to thrive? Not what systems say they need. Not what policy papers outline. But what is real.
And I remember the wigs- literally. I wore a purple wig. We were asked to go outside into Minneapolis and just observe. To feel what it meant to be seen. To notice how people looked at you or didn’t. To pay attention to what shifted in the body.
By 2017, I was already a decade into “systems change work.” And what stood out most in that room was the lack of political analysis. The lack of a grounded understanding of racialization. The absence of race and racism as a structuring force. Whiteness was omnipotent. We were, collectively, in the infancy of understanding.
There was not yet language to fully name the system. Not yet a shared analysis of how racialized harm operates across it. Not yet a clear connection between what we were calling “child welfare” and the long arc of surveillance, control, and family separation in this country.
But even in that absence—something was being planted.
Because what became undeniable, even then, was this: the family policing system we were calling “child welfare” was not built for thriving. It was built for control.
What Shifted
I left 10 of 10 with relationships that refused to let me look away. But more than that, I left with a deeper commitment to grounding this work in a racialized analysis. Because without it, we are just rearranging harm.
I stopped believing that reform alone would get us where we needed to go.
I stopped believing that better training inside a harmful system would produce justice.
I stopped believing that proximity to power would lead to liberation.
And what Alia made possible—through its work and through 10 of 10—was the beginning of something more expansive. It created space for radical imagination.
It pushed us to think beyond systems as they are—and toward what could be. It opened the door to conversations that we have now at Mining For Gold about Afro-futurism. About the possibility that the future is not something we inherit, but something we build.
It also planted the language of the “un-system”—the understanding that what we are trying to build already exists. That families and communities already hold the structures of care, connection, and accountability that systems attempt to replicate—but never fully can.
That shift led to the founding of Mining For Gold in 2020. Not as an organization focused on fixing systems or parents—but as a space committed to excavating truth. Because systems are held in place by narratives. And if we don’t shift the narrative, we will continue to reproduce the same outcomes, no matter how many policies we rewrite.
We began to name things differently. We began to call termination of parental rights what it is—a civil death penalty. We began to name the system not as “child welfare,” but as family policing. And once we named it, we could no longer pretend we didn’t understand its function.
The Decade
The last ten years have not been linear. There have been risks—real ones. Choosing to speak plainly about racist systems that reward silence comes with consequence. There have been moments where the work felt ahead of what people were ready to hold.
10 of 10 planted seeds. Shortly after, Mining For Gold was born in 2020. And alongside that, deeper partnerships and cohort-based work began to take shape—including the work in Waupaca, Wisconsin, and broader cohort models that centered collective learning, truth-telling, and practice.
I also stayed deeply connected to Alia’s work—serving as a guide for the leadership cohort and participating at the board level. From 2018 through 2024, that relationship helped catalyze so much of who I am today, both intellectually and politically.
Through that thought partnership, we grappled with what it meant to move beyond policy and beyond reform. The relationships built in that space—the tension, the questioning, the pushing—helped shape how I came to understand this work more deeply. Because this work is not just technical. It is relational. It is political. And it requires us to see what we have been taught not to see.
Impact
Impact, for us, is not just measured in numbers.
It is measured in the moments where someone says, “I thought I was the only one.”
It is measured in the shift from shame to connection.
It is measured in the building of base—people coming together, not just to share, but to organize.
Through our work, we’ve engaged with thousands of leaders across systems. We’ve supported organizations in rethinking how they approach families—not as cases, but as relationships.
We’ve contributed to narrative shifts that are now being picked up more broadly—language that was once resisted is now being spoken more openly.
We’ve seen policies challenged. Legal arguments reframed. Practitioners begin to question the very systems they are part of.
And we’ve seen new leaders emerge—people who were once positioned as recipients of services now stepping into roles as organizers, advocates, and builders of something different.
That is the kind of impact that sustains movements.
What’s Needed Now
Not much has changed. And that is hard to say—but necessary to name. We are still operating within the same fundamental structure. We are still seeing surveillance and separation. We are still seeing resources flow into systems that require harm in order to function.
The question of “what forward means” is not simple. Because forward cannot mean deeper investment in the same system. What is needed now is not more adjustment. What is needed is alignment.
We need to center our approaches, strategies, and ideas in an understanding of racialized trauma—not as an add-on, but as foundational. We need to protect the spaces where truth can be spoken without consequence. We need to scale community-based approaches rooted in relationship, not control. We need to stop investing in systems that produce separation. And we need to build power—real power—among those most impacted.
This is not about improving family policing. This is about abolishing it in all of its forms—and building something else in its place. What gives me hope is the people.
Hope is not a feeling. It is a practice.
Closing
Ten years ago, we were asked what kids and families need to thrive. We know the answer.
The question now is—are we willing to build it?
---
Author Bio
Corey B. Best is a Black father, community organizer, and founder of Mining For Gold, a movement-building organization advancing justice-centered practice and abolitionist approaches to family policing. His work centers lived realities, racialized analysis, and base-building to challenge systems of oppression and build pathways toward collective liberation. Since 2020, Corey has engaged thousands of child- and family-serving leaders and communities in transforming practice through relationship, narrative change, and accountability.
No Comments Yet
Let us know what you think