The Lakota historian Joseph Marshall III said that “success is rarely the result of one fell swoop, but more often the culmination of many, many small victories.”
The notion of one day at a time never meant much to me, until it did. Get today right. Learn from your mistakes, as well as your modest accomplishments. Mostly, take the small victories and wisely build on them. The reflective journey serves us far better than the finish.
That mentality has fallen out of favor for some when it comes to child welfare, who would rather declare the current system unimprovable and start anew. I believe that the past decades have shown that the cadence of change might just be the opposite.
The foundation on which we build a new and different approach to child welfare should be informed by our past mistakes, best practices and noteworthy improvements. I’m not suggesting we put off what needs to be done, but making the argument for clarifying what specifically needs to be done next.
This case for achieving marginal goals is not an excuse for ignoring our flawed history or minimizing the urgency of the present. There is no reason to delay our obligation toward fairness and justice. But we also have the responsibility to get things right, with programming that is solid, and consumer-driven, assuring that no family falls into the cracks. As philosopher Lao-tzu said, great acts are made up of small deeds. Each of those small deeds represents an opportunity to learn and build a new path forward, one day at a time.
The idea that we will achieve everything, amid wildly dynamic and unpredictable environments, seems counterintuitive. Why not consider the value of building blocks? This is referred to as the “aggregation of marginal gains,” a term originally used in bicycle racing, and now business. Build on what we learn along the way — leading to innovations like iPhones, airbags and medications.
I’m reminded of the term “no wrong door,” something I heard over 30 years ago, when one of my responsibilities in state government was to stand up a network of family support centers in Pennsylvania. We were looking for ways to strengthen families through supportive community-based programming.
I have since worked with states that were incubating accessible and respectful approaches to family support. They had integrated programs, and even waived regulations so that caseworkers and nonprofit partners could directly provide food, clothing and shelter for families, understanding instinctively that this would ease the tension and anxiety for a parent, thus reducing the likelihood that children would be removed because of neglect accusations. We learned a great deal.
Three decades later, this is still a topic of conversation. But that doesn’t render the steps taken thus far a failure. We have developed a significant number of family centers in this country. Many are providing evidence-based home visiting programs for new parents. We changed the conversation about cross-sector efforts and incentivized the number of nonprofits that refocused from residential care to prevention. Family support is no longer a novelty. We expanded collaborative upstream efforts with knowledge and confidence.
I’m not optimistic that we will ever arrive at a government-led version of “no wrong door.” There are too many regulations and ridiculous restrictions in the way. But consider how many more neighborhood-based nonprofits, schools and faith communities, with blended funding, have opened their doors to parents and children, breaking down traditional challenges into bite-size tasks.
My current role in philanthropy allows me to learn from our community partners and their micro-systems of family support. One church with whom we collaborate has as its 2024 version of “no wrong door” called Open and Closed Doors, a reference to the Revelations 3:7-13 admonition that what God “opens no one can shut, and what he shuts no one can open.” Yes, a few people abuse the spirit of open hand and heart. But the congregants keep learning and finding ways to maximize community outreach.
After many years of supporting families, these types of locally driven organizations have made us smarter about simplifying support for them. We are more likely to choose service delivery designs that go further upstream, changing the culture and embracing strengths-based approaches. There is a shift from prevention which implies risk, to family support which recognizes the hierarchy of need shared by all families.
Recently, I’ve been thinking about the 2020 Building Communities of Hope effort initiated by Casey Family Programs in 2006. The goal of 2020 was to safely reduce the national number of children in foster care by half by the year 2020.
While some critics see this initiative as a failure because we have not seen a 50% reduction in foster care, I do not. The 2020 vision was well-conceived and resourced. I worked at the foundation at the time. Like myself, many of my colleagues embraced the numerical goal as audacious and aspirational. Our North Star was perched on the premise that we could assist jurisdictions in creating or changing the culture, not just strategies.
We encouraged states and communities to reimagine and enhance their alliances with families, maximizing their chances of keeping kids safe at home. States created goals and programming that reflected a priority for reducing entries and increasing exits from foster care. Public agencies and nonprofits designed fresh partnerships that favored enhanced family support programs, not out-of-home care. These changes have endured and Casey’s work continues to evolve.
As states and the philanthropic community accumulated lessons learned, they were able to influence public policy at the federal level, giving rise to waiver demonstration projects and the Family First Prevention Services Act — incremental but still significant evolutions for child welfare. Rather than a leap into the unknown, states educated legislators with information gathered through a curated process.
Though many places have seen significant reductions in foster care, some as high as 60%, it didn’t happen in every state. The original goal was not achieved, but there was a measurable change in the nation’s conversation, culture and actions related to child welfare.
The lessons from all of this? Incremental, well-planned actions intended to help us learn, reflect and evolve can have less flash, but far more endurance.
