Paul DiLorenzo

After two previous columns on workforce, I have a few final thoughts on how we can recruit talented, committed team members. Though schools of social work were once a source of training and mentoring for aspiring child welfare professionals, some professors are encouraging their students to steer clear of what they perceive as the toxic work. 

Most social workers who are thriving will point to their agency leaders as a source of inspiration and motivation.

Instead of demonizing child welfare caseworkers, we should support them in ways that encourage optimism and good faith, writes Paul DiLorenzo.

Our current child welfare system has a primary design flaw: failing to account for the importance of human connections.

Mentoring is by no means the single answer to our workforce crisis, but could be the key to keeping one more social worker on the job.

Any idea to replace child welfare must include what comes next — including a system of innovation, not just ideology.

Paul DiLorenzo warns against investing too much faith, and money, in AI solutions to child welfare's problems

Paul DiLorenzo writes about the lack of effort to educate the modern child welfare workforce about the history preceding them

As it stands, Paul DiLorenzo writes, we are underestimating the potential capacity of many communities and overestimating their current ability to help.

Child welfare is different than business, but there is something to be learned from the reality of rolling recessions.

To better reach families, we should have our own version of The Three Graces: opportunity, competence and empathy. 

For child welfare to better serve the behavioral health needs of kids in out-of-home care, we need to enact various solutions.

When combined, government and community efforts to support the complex economic and health needs of families are stronger.

The next iteration of child welfare work should take a page from the recovery community, writes Paul DiLorenzo.

Paul DiLorenzo describes six circles of uncertainty in the child welfare system that create an orbit of frustration for families

Rushing the development of family support centers will lead to the creation of satellite offices for child welfare, and ultimately revert to the “good enough" standard of care, writes Paul S. DiLorenzo.

Justice in the child welfare system cannot come at the price of child safety, including interview practices, writes Paul DiLorenzo.

When government policies hold a group in disfavor, the child welfare community can do more to speak up for families, writes Paul DiLorenzo.

Supervision is the heartbeat of a child welfare agency and in many places, it is on life support. It used to be one of the strongest pillars of our profession, but in recent years the supervisory role has found itself looking for a clear purpose or relevance to our goals of improvement and transformation.

Community collaborations in child welfare require an understanding of the values behind an effort, writes Paul DiLorenzo.

When a community’s is focused on the well-being of its members, everyone takes the safety of children more seriously, writes Paul DiLorenzo.

Paul DiLorenzo describes three conversations that child welfare leaders in every state should be having as 2022 begins.

In Jacksonville, Florida, Family Support Services' solid reputation, attention to the detail of building relationships, and its plan for a new Family Resource Center make it likely to be a success, writes Paul DiLorenzo.

Child welfare is complex and professionals who write about the field should focus on substance over blame, writes Paul DiLorenzo.

Paul DiLorenzo envisions the role of chief trust officer as nonprofits in the child welfare space engage the community more intensely

Child advocacy centers offer a space of shared responsibility and clear mission for child safety and healing.

Paul DiLorenzo laments that fact that tremendous community innovations in child welfare is not a focal point of efforts to reform the system

Family support programs go beyond the practice of serving one family at a time. There are multiple moving parts. Our effectiveness lies in the broader engagement of our neighbors. The model’s elegance is in collective action and connectivity of child, family and community.

As a part of their efforts to engage families, many child welfare agencies sponsor community events. These happenings are designed to build social capital, to provide an opportunity for residents and stakeholders to meet each other and to create a network of supportive relationships. 

Early in my career, a supervisor told me that the dirty little secret in child welfare was that the system tends to reward those who persevere in their jobs by pushing them further away from kids and families.

One benefit of an extended career in child welfare settings is that you begin to understand the concept of capacity. I’m not offering this as sage advice or cynical wisdom, nor as a pup social worker who is naïve and imagines that every family and every system can be set on the right track. 

Many years ago, I served in Pennsylvania state government and among my responsibilities was the development and implementation of family resource centers (FRCs), which are community-based family support programs that provide easily accessible services in a culturally relevant manner.

In child welfare we are prone to distraction. Through the decades we’ve become excited by multiple trends and legislation addressing safety, family preservation and permanency, assuming they would resolve the complexities of our work with families.

In “The Great Gatsby,” F. Scott Fitzgerald captured the idea that in America, our historical class divisions always influence, linger and manipulate the present. He wrote in the novel’s last paragraph: Gatsby believed in the green light … that year by year recedes before us.

As we consider a new federal child welfare team, we should recognize the exceptional work of the current Children’s Bureau, especially its leaders Jerry Milner and David Kelly. They advanced smart, progressive and commonsense policy and practice designs for child welfare agencies focused on the development of community-based family support efforts.

Classic experiments in the 1970’s demonstrated that it’s not so much adverse events that result in deleterious consequences, but rather a lack of perceived control over those events. Subjects in these experiments who learned that they could not influence their challenging situations eventually gave up trying.