The latest news & thinking from Alia...

I have had the unique opportunity and privilege to work with Rock County Human Services, while also interning with Alia as part of my MSW program. Rock County first began working with Alia in 2018, starting with the facilitation of workforce wellbeing and resilience groups for CPS. At that time, the core of Rock County’s CPS was broken and had a lot of work to do related to our internal culture, relationships, and practice. In 2019, Rock County entered into a partnership with Alia to create Rock Families First, a movement focused on eliminating racial disparities in child welfare and transforming the child welfare system. Through my first MSW internship that I did with my place of employment (Rock County), I was able to jump into this project work from the get-go and see the process unfold. Now, in my second and final internship, I am interning with Alia as we are in the final transformation phase for Rock Families First in 2024, while still working for Rock County. I’m not only part of the organization in the trenches of the messy and amazing work, but I am also seeing the grit necessary behind the scenes from Alia to help guide and support the organizations leading these transformational efforts in various areas across the nation. To say I have experienced a few waves of change between 2018 and 2024 in Rock County would be an understatement!

Even the work of system transformation continuously evolves. Across the nation jurisdictions far and wide speak about the increasing complexity of the work and the need for new approaches and skills to equip themselves so they can best support children and families. You can trust Alia for being the leaders behind identifying new ways to help systems empower and support families.  We hear you! And here is an answer to that call! During the past year, Team Alia prioritized the development of Dear Workers, a family engagement resource for workers in child welfare to understand the context of their position and to prepare then to bring family voice and power to they system. What we know to be true is that workers strive to be in right relationship with families to create conditions needed for change.  Thanks to the generous gifts from funders, Team Alia working alongside curriculum designers, parents impacted by the child welfare system, system experts, and professionals in the field to create a learning framework made especially for front line workers whose daily interactions and decisions working directly with children and families have lifelong impacts.

We have all been in situations at work when someone says something that feels offensive toward a particular group identity, the person doesn’t realize it, and no one who is involved and/or experienced it says anything. Statements that feel offensive are called microaggressions and a recent experience around this has encouraged me to share reflections about it.

Part of Alia’s system’s improvement work involves case consultations with a lens of healing and belonging. We call these consultations Healing and Belonging Labs, and they are much different than case consultations child welfare workers may expect. Our Healing and Belonging Labs involve Team Alia working with a small group of agency staff, supervisors, and collateral contacts to discover underlying dynamics and untapped solutions for difficult youth or family situations.

What is transformational leadership and why is it effective? Transformational leadership is a leadership style that promotes positive change by inspiring and motivating those who follow, to achieve a shared vision by showing up with authentic passion and consideration for all individuals involved. There are 4 I’s in transformational leadership:

Do you want to know one of the best ways to effect change? How we use language is a small, challenging step that yields significant results. Really? That may seem a weird place for us to start. The role of value-laden language has a massive impact on how we are perceived and how we make others feel.

The Human Services Department, including Child Protective Services, in Rock County is advancing a partnership with the community to build a system of support that will eliminate racial disparities in family separation. Rock County is addressing its racial disparities which show up most deeply with the Black community in Beloit. With support from Alia, this work focuses across multiple coordinated centers of effort including: 1) advance a wellbeing and supportive culture across Rock County Human Services, 2) shifting CPS practice toward a Family First approach, and 3) bringing forth an empowered Black network to support growth and stability for families in Beloit.

Each year, hundreds of thousands of dollars are spent throughout the United States raising awareness about children in foster care. These campaigns are intended to pull at the heartstrings so that people are called to action. Unfortunately, the picture (nee I say myths) these campaigns paint of unloved and unwanted children frequently epitomizes the toxic narrative that is decimating families under the veil of child protection. I’d like to offer my own counter-narrative to some of these myths so that we may begin to get the story straight.

At Alia, we work with leadership teams across the country to deepen their connections with one another, align with their organizational missions, visions, and values and create new solutions together. One effective avenue to approaching this work is our Breakthrough Sessions, which provide an immersive experience for teams to explore specific content areas or tackle agency-specific challenges in concentrated blocks of time. In a recent Breakthrough Session with a leadership team, the concept of collective wellbeing was a primary focus. We often say that wellbeing begets wellbeing, so when a leadership team is functioning well (i.e., treating each other well in person and behind the scenes, supporting each other, aligning on the work they do, keeping each other informed, and being human together) their culture filters through to the rest of the organization’s staff.

Over the past 18 months, Team Alia has been methodically analyzing our learnings from our first eight years in operation and are using those insights to take things to the next-level, which has allowed us to produce our best outcomes yet!

“In organizations, real power and energy is generated through relationships, and the capacity to form those relationships is more important than tasks, functions, roles, and positions.” – Dr. Margaret Wheatley

Emerging from the lock-down of the pandemic, the chronic distance-keeping made us all appreciate proximity to others. At Alia we have always prioritized connection, but only after the pandemic did we intentionally commit to investing our in-person time toward play. With 27 staff in seven different states, we gather as a full staff only three or four times a year and so each hour together is precious. Yet we all agree, playing together returns dividends!

If you’ve experienced an in-person Alia event, you know we delight in treating our guests with great care. We find when there is focused work to be done, meeting your needs and eliminating distractions makes thinking innovatively easier as you bring your whole self to the challenge at hand. A constant source of refreshing drinks, daylight pouring in, your cellphone out of reach, and a beautiful notebook with your name on it just ready for your brilliant reflections are just some of the conditions we create for you to focus on work in front of you (rather than what’s going on back at the office or at home).

When the 3-year, 4-state, 5-jurisdiction Alia UnSystem Innovation Cohort leaders plus the professional and lived expert guides were goal-setting early in 2018, one important question we had to answer was, “How do we know if our aspiration is good enough?”

Workforce resilience and wellbeing work is not easy. It’s more than simply walking through a breathing exercise, using a tool, or taking more hot bubble baths. It requires a space for helpers, activists, and others who work with the most marginalized communities to process the pain, secondary trauma, and significant barriers of the work. And, as a facilitator, it involves taking in and listening deeply to what is shared.

Have you ever had a youth who bounced around from home to home to home, and finally this home seems to work? Or maybe the youth has moved from group home to residential, then back to a group home, and then back to residential again, and they seem to only “do well” when they are in a residential setting?

Am I an abolitionist?

Imagine if building a community for children to thrive is as easy as drawing three concentric circles. In the centermost circle is love, consistency, security, and stability laying the groundwork for children to thrive. In the next circle are protective factors – what parents and caregivers need to create the conditions for the inner circle.

What’s possible? How far can we take this? Would that really work? If only we could… <fill in the blank with an audacious dream or ideal scenario>.

It’s not Go, Set, Ready. It’s ready first.

Dr. Margaret Wheatley, organizational effectiveness expert, poet, biologist, author, and historian reminds changemakers of a fact which we should not need to be reminded: we are people, not machines.

If you work in or around the child welfare system you are likely involved in an effort to change it.  One part of the change process is getting crystal clear on why change needs to happen, exactly what change is being implementing, and why we believe it will work.

Let’s start with a one-question quiz:

We often hear that Minnesota is a great place to live…if you’re white. Wellbeing statistics favor white people in Minnesota and that includes experiences with the child welfare system. Black and Native children are removed from their homes at rates 5 and 16 times higher, respectively, than white children.

One thing most people can agree on is how important it is to keep children safe and families together.

Reflecting on the week, you can always tell yourself two truths:

Frederick Douglass delivered an Independence Day-themed speech to the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Association on July 5, 1852, in New York. He spoke directly to both the freedom and courage and the oppression and harm inherent in this national anniversary.

Earlier this year Texas governor Greg Abbott labeled gender-affirming care for minors as child abuse and called on professionals to report parents to child protective services for providing this care to their minor children. Bans to gender-affirming care are in effect or being considered in more than 20 states across the country.

Recently, I’ve been trying out some new topics for presentation in an effort to be more direct about the challenges we are facing in child welfare and the incredible effectiveness of the on-the-ground solutions we are using in demonstration projects (seeing reductions in out-of-home care averaging in excess of 70% and residential reductions of more than 50%).

After months of waiting, the Supreme Court delivered a decision on Brackeen vs Haaland, a vote determining the constitutionality of the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA). It passed and ICWA remains intact. Tribes retain sovereignty over their people, family connections reign as sacred, and remaining rooted in the culture you were born into is a fundamental right.

At Alia, we carry forward the lessons learned from the 5-team, 14-jurisdiction, 3-year UnSystem Innovation Cohort.

In 2016 upon moving back to the United States after 7 years abroad, I got in touch with Amelia Franck Meyer, my former MSW licensing supervisor, to reactivate my local social work connections. Maybe she knew someone who was hiring and could look beyond my gap in recent work history?

Major economic and injustices remain, yet this trend is worth highlighting: a White House report shows micro improvements in the employment prospects of Black Americans.

Sometimes there are already answers to the questions we have – known, proven applications for solving our current problems. Yet sometimes a solution is unknowable because it’s never existed, and we must therefore design our own way to address challenges.

When adults are able to meet the needs of their families – starting with the most basic such as quality housing, food, healthcare, and childcare – it creates a solid foundation for safe and healthy child development. Conversely, multiple family stressors increase the risk of parental overload. This, in turn, increases incidences of child abuse and neglect and child welfare involvement.

Storytelling is the approach we chose in performing a mini equity audit for the Ramsey County, MN, Children and Family Services Department leadership team.

We love our all-staff, in-person retreats! Yes, to get work done, but to play a lot, too. Because HOW we work together is just as important as WHAT we do together.

You may feel at times (as we sometimes do) a tendency to self-protect when in discussion around themes of anti-racism. We may feel the need to protect ourselves from harm, exposure, punishment, or shame, which in turn can flip us into fight or flight mode.