BJ Walker

There are few things more ominous than contact with the child welfare system, especially for Black parents struggling to stay on their feet.

Child welfare agencies can and should move their efforts further upstream, stopping the traumatic and harmful sorting through families that currently happens at their front door. That is the highest and best outcome that could result from any of the reform work emanating from inside child welfare systems — changing how they work with families at their front door. 

In child welfare, host homes can be a community-based solution to address families who need help with their children, writes BJ Walker. 

The absence of racial equity in our child welfare system is a national problem rooted in historical and structural sins of our country, the authors write.

Every morning when you wake up as a child welfare director, you are scared for somebody else’s children, and not just because you worry about abuse and neglect. You worry because the government established standards and protocols for working with these kids would be unacceptable for anybody but somebody else’s children.