public policy

Raise your hand if you’ve ever felt intimidated, shy, excessively nervous, restrained or unwilling to make your opinion known. If we were in a room together, there’d probably a lot of hands in the air!

Last year, I took my longstanding class at U.C. Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy, Journalism for Social Change (J4SC), online. With the help of edX, a platform for Massive Open Online Classes, or MOOCs, we were able to teach thousands of students from around the globe how to produce solution-based journalism that drives social change.

How well I still remember one of the anthems of my generation: “For the times they are a changin’.” And how applicable these words continue to be, especially in our world of Child, Youth and Family Services.

In the summer of 2012, the State Legislature enacted Senate Bill 1013 which mandated that the California Department of Social Services (CDSS) launch a broad-based, stakeholder process to determine how to reform California’s foster care system.

I’ll be the first to admit that I write this post with a pre-existing bias about the importance of public policy.  As a former Congressional staffer, I witnessed from an insider’s perspective the transformative power that advocacy can have in creating systemic change, especially when undertaken collectively.