Season 4
Last episode, we explored the science and art of how stories really work, how they activate our brains differently than data alone, how they create emotional resonance that moves us to action, and how the strategic craft of storytelling can shift hearts, minds, and ultimately, change systems. But here’s the question that’s been lingering for me throughout this season: We’re not the first people to face entrenched, harmful narratives. We’re not the first to ask how culture changes, how minds shift, how systems bend toward justice.
So what can we learn from those who came before us? From the abolitionists who reframed enslavement as a moral crisis? From the labor organizers who shifted “individual failure” to “collective exploitation”? From the civil rights movement that transformed “separate but equal” into a demand for dignity and belonging? What lessons have our elders left us about how narrative power actually works in the messy, sustained work of social change?
Today, we welcome Rinku Sen, executive director of the Narrative Initiative and social justice strategist who has spent the last several years in the archives, studying these questions.
Rinku and I will explore: How modern narrative change efforts can honor the strategies and lessons learned from the social justice movements of the past; What it means to build narratives that don’t just shift policy, but fundamentally change culture and power dynamics? And in our current moment of deep polarization and information saturation, how we move beyond broadcast messaging to the relationship-building that actually changes hearts and minds?
Welcome to Episode 8: Hearing Our Elders to Build Better Narratives Today
We’ve spent this season talking about narrative change. How dominant narratives shape our mental models, culture, and consequently, systems. How dominant narratives determine who belongs while locking certain families out.
But here’s the question I’d like to start with as we enter our second narrative arc of building better narratives in this season: Do stories really work?
As Jess Moyer would remind us, “Narratives are made up of lots of different stories. So narratives are patterns in stories. And when we tell stories, we are sometimes intentionally, but often unintentionally, reinforcing particular narratives, or in other cases, contesting particular narratives by the kinds of stories that we tell and the ways that we tell those stories.”
So, can telling a different story about an overloaded parent actually change a caseworker’s behavior? Can a personal story shift a legislator’s vote? Can storytelling, something that feels soft, artistic, almost naïve, create the kind of measurable, systemic change we need?
Today, we’re getting into the mechanics. The neuroscience. The evidence. Because if we’re asking people to change how they communicate, to challenge narratives they’ve held their entire lives, we need to show them why it matters. Not just philosophically, but measurably.
This is Episode 7: Do Stories Really Work?
We now know the child welfare system has a long shadow thanks to the history lesson Prudence Beidler Carr shared with us in episode 4. We also heard powerful stories and testimonies from Valerie Frost, Dr. Pegah Faed and others in episode 5 about what happens to individuals and families in those shadows.
Yet, the dominant narrative in our society still suggests that the system exists to protect children from harm. Yet, as we will hear today from our guest Claudia Rowe, a veteran investigative journalist and author of Wards of the State: The Long Shadow of American Foster Care, over half of all children who have been in foster care end up in the criminal justice system. That is a mission not just unfulfilled, but actively harmful to those children and families, and it costs society—and taxpayers—billions in incarceration, mental healthcare, and lost potential, money that could have been invested in strengthening poor and overloaded families to keep them together in the first place.
This is today’s challenge for journalism and all of us as readers. How do we push beyond the simple, often sensational headline to tell the whole story, connecting the dots between how our systems have come up short, their real-life impacts on kids and families, and the solutions that may exist as an alternative?
Today, we welcome Claudia Rowe, who takes us beyond the narratives of ‘monsters’ and ‘heroes’ that dominate headlines and public discourse. She reveals the immense responsibility of journalism to challenge the dominant narratives it often helped create, and the years of patient, contextual work it takes to truly understand a life shaped by systemic trauma.
Welcome to Episode 6: Shining Light on the Long Shadow
For the past four episodes, we’ve been building a foundation. We’ve explored what narratives are, how they work, and why they matter.
We’ve heard how dominant narratives limit our ability to see families clearly and respond to them compassionately.
Today, we’re shifting from the conceptual to the personal. Because dominant narratives don’t just exist in the abstract. They don’t just live in policy briefs or academic journals. They manifest in people’s lives. In doctor’s offices. In school meetings. In a mandated reporters’ decision about whether to call CPS or reach out with support.
They shape who gets to tell their story and whose story gets told for them. Who is seen as an overloaded parent who needs support, and who is labeled as a risk. Who is offered a helping hand, and who has their children taken away.
Today, you’ll hear from people who have lived inside these narratives. People who have felt the weight of them. People who have fought to reclaim their truth.
This is Episode 5: How Dominant Narratives Manifest for Individuals, Families, and Communities.
What happens when a deeply embedded cultural narrative, a story we tell ourselves about unfit parents and unsuitable homes, is codified into federal law? This is the central question that inspired today’s episode. Before we can till the soil and reimagine the narratives and policies that may grow from it, we must first understand the ground we are standing on and how history formed its roots.
Prudence Beidler Carr, Director of the American Bar Association’s Center on Children and the Law, joins us to trace this historical arc that created the modern child welfare system. When I first saw her presentation that she has delivered across the country titled “How Poverty Became Neglect in Federal Law and Policy: A 1961 Magic Trick”, I was both troubled and inspired, so I wanted to bring her on the podcast to explore the narratives and policies that led to the conflation of poverty with neglect and created a legacy of racial disproportionality and systemic harm.
Our conversation asks us to confront difficult questions: How did narratives of ‘unfit’ parents move us from a federal government that invested in families’ economic stability to one that conflated poverty with child neglect? What were the consequences of those harmful narratives and policies for Black and poor families? In turn, how have those legal and policy histories shaped dominant historical narratives in our country? And what might it take to challenge a policy framework that was built upon a false narrative?
Join us for a deep dive into these questions and the hidden history and narratives that built the child protection system.
So far this season, we’ve tracked the big picture, the public narratives that shape our culture. We’ve examined the harmful patterns where radical individualism intersects with caregiving that turns collective crises into personal failures and therefore shrinks our sense of shared responsibility. But today, we’re going inward.
Because these dominant narratives don’t just exist out there in policy or the media. They live inside us. They are the scripts we recite when we look in the mirror, when we look at our neighbors, and when we decide who belongs and who doesn’t.
Jess Moyer and the FrameWorks Institute remind us that these are internalized, creating mindsets that act as filters. Today, we turn inward to examine those internal filters, our mental models, the deeply held beliefs that too often divide us and limit our own capacity for change.
Today, we are asking: What happens when those filters limit us? What happens when the stories we tell ourselves keep us from seeing our own power, or the humanity of the person standing right next to us?
This is Episode 3: The Stories We Tell Ourselves.
Jess Moyer and her metaphors from our first episode still have me thinking. Tilling the soil for social change. Not persuading, not convincing, but rather creating the conditions for new ways of thinking to grow.
But what exactly are we tilling? What lies beneath the surface that needs turning over? What happens when individualism tells us that a child’s outcomes are solely about their parents’ choices? When “care matters most” shrinks what children need down to the walls of a single home? And if narratives are patterns in stories, and framing is about the choices we make in telling those stories, how do we actually make those choices? What does it look like to be intentional about the soil we’re preparing? Understanding these concepts is just the beginning.
Today, Jessica Moyer, Senior Principal Strategist at the FrameWorks Institute, joins me in studio as my co-pilot on our journey to go deeper into the mechanics of narrative change. How do we actually do this work? What are the communication traps that keep us stuck? And how can we make strategic choices in our framing that shift culture and policy? If you’ve been wondering how to apply these ideas in your work, your conversations, or your community, this is the episode where we dig into the how.
Welcome to Episode 2: “We Need Both”: The Science and Stories of Strategic Communication
Over the past three seasons of Overloaded we have explored the forces that overload families, from poverty to social isolation, systemic racism to mistrust of our systems. But this season, we’re looking at something more invisible, the stories behind these forces and how stories shape what we believe, how we act and who we hold responsible.
When those stories get stuck in the past, in fear or in harm, they strengthen those forces and shape the systems and conditions that overload families instead of supporting them. If we want to change outcomes for children and families, we first have to understand the narratives that define how we see them. Those narratives inform our policies and priorities and inspire or shutter what’s possible.
Changing those narratives takes intention, courage and collective effort. Together, we can tell a story that uplifts instead of blames, that prevents harm before it happens. In season four, we’re taking apart the stories that define our families, our communities and our future and building better ones together.
You will hear from the inspiring changemakers that I had the honor of interviewing this past summer at the 2025 Prevent Child Abuse America national conference for their podcast The Shift: Voices of Prevention.
In this episode and throughout the season, you will hear Dr. Nadine Burke Harris, Dr. Bruce Perry, Desmond Meade, Oregon State Representative Annessa Hartman, Samantha Mellerson, and Tshaka Barrows of the Haywood Burns Institute, and Jessica Moyer from the FrameWorks Institute.
The Overloaded: Understanding Neglect podcast returns for its fourth season to change the narrative on how we think about families overloaded by stress and the systems that too often come up short in their greatest times of need.
Too many families experience an overload of stress related to financial insecurity, social isolation, lack of support, or the impact of systemic racism and interpersonal trauma. When overloaded, families need empathy and support, yet dominant, often harmful narratives lead many to meet them with suspicion or mistrust.
Every season of Overloaded has explored those stressors like poverty and social isolation that overload families. But this season, we’re looking at something more invisible, the stories behind those forces; and how stories shape what we believe, how we act, and who we hold responsible.
When those stories get stuck in the past, in fear, or in harm, they shape the systems and conditions that overload families instead of supporting them. If we want to improve outcomes for children and families, we first have to understand the narratives that define how we see them. Those narratives inform our policies and priorities and inspire or shutter what is possible.
Changing those narratives takes intention, courage, and collective effort. Together, we can tell a story that uplifts instead of blames, that prevents harm before it happens. In Season 4, we’re taking apart the stories that define our families, our communities, and our future, and building better ones together.
Season 3
In this final episode of season 3, I invited Kate Luster from Rock County to help us bring many of the strategies from this season together. As you have heard throughout this podcast, too many children and families, especially Black families, are being investigated and separated by child protective services.
As part of our Strong Families, Thriving Children, Connected Communities initiative, we review the data from all the counties across Wisconsin to see what counties are meaningfully addressing issues like racial disproportionality or reducing the number of children separated from their families and placed in foster care for reasons of neglect. This past year, Rock County jumped off the page as we saw a significant decrease in the number of children entering foster care. We wanted to know why and how this had happened. So we reached out to Kate, and she shared the story of Rock Families First, which we will explore today.
While you are listening to Kate, I encourage you to look for examples of how she and Rock County bring to life many of the strategies that you heard earlier this season. How have they disrupted system mindsets? How have they reimagined engagement and embedded community leadership? How have they invested in their workforce? Then, ask yourself, how might we do something like this and where can we start?
As I listened to Bryan Samuels in our last episode, I thought a lot about communities that drove their own transformation by collaborating with and changing the systems that should be serving them. Whether it’s the Harlem Children’s Zone that disrupted intergenerational poverty through community-driven Promise Academies, medical centers, and after-school and job training programs. Or here in Milwaukee where the Lindsey Heights Neighborhood Initiative increased homeownership, household income, and access to healthy food and quality healthcare through its Innovation and Wellness Commons all while empowering its residents rather than displacing them. In turn the community saw a decrease in crime and vacant lots as it trained more and more community leaders.
We’re talking about systems and community transformation that’s more than statistics—though the numbers are powerful. But the true magic isn’t in the data—it’s in the strategies that these communities used to drive real change.
In today’s episode, Bryan will share the 5 key strategies from Chapin Hall’s report “Systems Transformation through Community Leadership” that were developed from reviewing how people and leaders from communities like Harlem and Lindsey Heights changed the odds from the ground up for the kids and families that live there. I encourage you, as Bryan does at the end of today’s episode, to follow along with the bulletins as he brings these 5 key strategies to life. You can find the link in the show notes.
Over the past three episodes with Marlo, Sixto, Anthony, Bryn, and Samantha, we have explored how we might unlock the power of lived experience through true collaboration. Whether through shifts in our mental models as Marlo and Anthony proposed, or through policy and practice changes as Sixto and Bryn shared, or through power-sharing and trust-building as Samantha demonstrated, I hope that you discovered pathways that will lead you to better collaboration with people with lived experience. In these final few episodes of this season, we are going to attempt to bring many of these lessons all together.
I invited Bryan Samuels back to the podcast for the next two episodes to help us do that through Chapin Hall’s years-long review of the best strategies and lessons learned that you can find in their report titled “Systems Transformation through Community Leadership.”
In this first episode, we are going to explore why systems transformation through community leadership is needed, and why the conditions are right now. Bryan will also introduce the 5 key strategies to advance Systems Transformation through Community Leadership.
In the second episode, Bryan will share how to bring these 5 key strategies to life in our communities through shifts in our practices, policies, relationships, and mental models.
Last episode, we learned from national leaders Anthony Barrows, Sixto Cancel, and Bryn Fortune about the power of lived experience through Intersectional Professionals, Ambassadors, and Parent Leaders. Today, we will explore the impacts of a Parent Partner here in Wisconsin.
The history of peer support goes back long before we had formal systems like child protection or mental health. People in ancient societies overcame hardship like religious persecution or famine by coming together through shared experience and creating shared solutions. However, the rise of organized peer support comes in response to many systemic abuses and failures in the 19th and 20th centuries. Inhumane conditions and treatment of people living in asylums with mental health disorders led to groups like the Quakers and later people like Judi Chamberlin to create survivors’ movements that would transform how people with lived experience could organize their voices and advocacy to improve the systems that harmed and failed them.
People struggling with addiction felt judged and stigmatized by the systems that were supposed to help them, so Alcoholics Anonymous was created with peer-to-peer support at its core to validate and empathize with each person’s experience. It wasn’t until fairly recently that these peer support and mentor models were translated to child welfare. So I wanted to learn more about the model that is being implemented in Wisconsin.
Parents Supporting Parents is a peer support program designed in Iowa for parents involved in the Child Protection System that is now implemented here in a handful of counties across Wisconsin.
Samantha Copus is a mother to two children and identifies as a person in long term recovery. Samantha has a variety of lived experiences ranging from mental health, substance use disorders, domestic violence and being a mother who had a child in the child welfare system, all which qualify her now to serve as a parent partner in Jefferson County as part of the Parents Supporting Parents program.
In our last episode, Marlo Nash shared why lived experience is so critical to our work before she talked about the many lessons learned from this past year’s Wicked Problems Institute national convening titled “Unlocking the Power of Lived Experience through True Collaboration,” hosted by Children’s Home Society of America and the Jordan Institute for Families at the University of North Carolina. One of those lessons came in the form of a memorable question – “How do we do this for real, for real?”
Well, today you will get some answers in the form of practical frameworks, strategies, and actions from the three national experts that presented at the Wicked convening. You will hear from Sixto Cancel, Founder and CEO of Think of Us, Anthony Barrows, Founder of the Network of Intersectional Professionals, and Bryn Fortune, Founder of Fortune Consulting and Coordinator for the Nurture Connection Family Network Collaborative.
Unlike last episode’s conversation with Marlo, our episode today was recorded during last year’s Wicked Problems Institute. Each expert brought their unique lived experience along with the models, projects, and strategies that they have developed and/or implemented, so I hope you find practical tools that you can use in your work, organization, and systems to unlock the power of lived experience.
Lived experience, lived expertise, context experts… For the past many years, we have seen a movement towards including or elevating or integrating the voice of lived experience into our work. But what does that really mean? What does that mean for the person that has lived through the child welfare system? What does that mean for the people working in the system? What are we trying to accomplish or change, and how might we do this better?
If you have considered any of these questions or find yourself at a loss as to what the answers might or should be, then you’re in the right place. Over the next three episodes, we will be exploring these questions, many lessons learned as our guests worked through these questions, and the strategies designed and implemented by people with lived experience who, today, are leading others with lived experience.
Today’s episode, along with next week’s, will share what was learned during this year’s Wicked Problems Institute national convening titled “Unlocking the Power of Lived Experience through True Collaboration,” hosted by Children’s Home Society of America or CHSA and the Jordan Institute for Families at the University of North Carolina School of Social Work.
Today you will hear from Marlo Nash, managing director of CHSA, who led the planning and execution of the convening.
In the first half of last century, American children and families faced a crisis. Invisible threats paralyzed society as viruses such as polio paralyzed children, claimed lives, and left communities in despair as they searched for solutions. In response, widespread quarantine shut down schools and public places to prevent the disease from spreading; and iron lungs were used to treat people already impacted by severe respiratory paralysis. But then came a groundbreaking prevention strategy through vaccines, massive public health campaigns, and the mobilization of resources to protect every community and get people back to living their lives without fear. Vaccination efforts eradicated polio from the United States 50 years ago and drastically reduced the burden of other deadly diseases, saving millions of lives, restoring hope for the future, and creating a blueprint for how bold prevention measures can transform society.
Today, children and families face another crisis. In 2022, over 7 million reports of alleged child abuse or neglect were made to Child Protective Services. 3 million families were subsequently investigated, and around 85% of them were living at or below 200% of the federal poverty line. Ultimately, of those 7 million reports, 550,000 were substantiated for maltreatment, or somewhere around 1 of every 10.
How might we apply a similar public health approach that was used to address our polio crisis to address this crisis where too many families are overloaded by stress and vulnerable to child neglect, CPS investigations, and family separation? As we heard last episode from Jennifer Jones, Prevent Child Abuse America has a bold vision for what this could look like: an aligned and comprehensive primary prevention ecosystem that would empower all children and families to live a purposeful and happy life with hope for the future. One of its core aspirations is promoting economic stability, so that all families have the quality housing, childcare, and healthcare that we all need to thrive.
In this episode, we’ll explore how guaranteed income programs and other economic supports that alleviate financial stress might help us move further upstream as an important part of that prevention ecosystem. Over the past six months, I have met many leaders of guaranteed income programs across the country. This journey began when the Bridge Project arrived here in Milwaukee to provide unconditional cash assistance to 100 low-income, pregnant mothers in Milwaukee for the next three years. Today, you will hear my conversation with two of these leaders who I’ve learned from on this journey, Blake Roberts Crall and Dr. Allison Thompson, as we explore the potential of guaranteed income programs as part of this primary prevention ecosystem.
Last year, 39,325 reports of suspected child neglect were made to Wisconsin’s Child Protective Services. In other words, every single day 108 people across Wisconsin felt worried enough about a child to take the time to report them with the belief that they or their family would receive some support or intervention to ensure that the child was safe and well.
Of those nearly 40,000 reports, 88% were unsubstantiated for maltreatment. In fact, over 26,000 or 2 out of every 3 reports of neglect were screened out, which means that they don’t receive any form of service or response to the concerns that the person that reported them had for them in the first place.
These are often reports of struggles with economic insecurity as 85% of families investigated by CPS are living at or below 200% of the federal poverty line. A teacher is concerned because a child comes to school without a winter coat in January or didn’t have dinner last night or shared the that they recently lost their home. But poverty doesn’t equal neglect, and Child Protective Services wasn’t designed to provide services or the resources to prevent neglect, it was designed to intervene once neglect has occurred. So the question becomes: How might we create a better alternative to reporting overloaded families to Child Protective Services, so that they receive the targeted support and resources that they need to thrive?
How might we empower teachers, police officers, social workers, doctors and nurses who are on the frontlines of supporting overloaded families to build trust through referrals and connections to prevention services and resources rather than suspicion through reports to Child Protective Services?
I invited Jennifer Jones to have this conversation today to explore these challenges through the work that she and Prevent Child Abuse America are leading to build an aligned and comprehensive primary prevention ecosystem in the United States.
Over the past 30 years, we have seen a 60% decline in physical and sexual abuse of children across the United States. At the same time, we have only seen a 10% decline in child neglect. We have also seen poverty remain stubbornly persistent while learning that 85% of families investigated by the Child Protective Services live at or below 200% of the federal poverty line. As we have learned over these years about the positive impacts of social connections on our well-being and ability to manage stress and crises, we have also seen social isolation grow across our country.
These realities have motivated us over the past three years of our Strong Families, Thriving Children, Connected Communities initiative and the first two seasons of this podcast series to build a shared understanding of neglect, its underlying roots causes, and the social and systemic critical pathways we may take to advance promising solutions. This year and this season of the podcast, we confront these complex realities where, too often, overloaded families are expected to beat the odds that have been stacked against them; and we explore how we might change the conditions so that we improve the odds for children and families to thrive.
To do that, we must ask, how might we transform our systems, create a prevention ecosystem, and center families as the experts they are and the changemakers they should be? And why now?
In season 3 of Overloaded: Understanding Neglect, we confront the complex challenges of poverty, social isolation, and systemic failures where, too often, overloaded families are expected to beat the odds that have been stacked against them. In this season, we explore how we might change the conditions so that we improve the odds for children and families to thrive.
Through conversations with national and local experts and changemakers, we dive into the innovative ideas that aspire to transform our systems through community leadership, build an aligned and comprehensive primary prevention ecosystem, and unlock the power of lived experience through true collaboration. Through the first couple years of our Strong Families, Thriving Children, Connected Communities initiative, which included seasons 1 and 2 of this podcast series, we were able to align the insights and experiences of those who know these issues best with the evidence that has shown promise in advancing meaningful solutions. This collaborative effort identified four critical pathways – Economic Stability, Social Connectedness, Community Collaboration, and Workforce Inclusion and Innovation – that will shape the future of our initiative that aspires to reduce family separations for reasons of neglect.
Join me, Luke Waldo, as I explore how we might change the conditions through systems transformation, a prevention ecosystem, and the power of lived experience with research and policy experts Jennifer Jones (Prevent Child Abuse America), Marlo Nash (Children’s Home Society of America), Bryan Samuels (Chapin Hall), Allison Thompson (UPenn’s Center for Guaranteed Income Research), local practice leaders and experts Kate Luster (Rock County Human Services) and Blake Roberts Crall (Madison Forward Fund), and Lived Experience leaders and experts Anthony Barrows (Project Evident), Sixto Cancel (Think of Us), Samantha Copus (Jefferson County Parents Supporting Parents), and Bryn Fortune (Nurture Connection Family Network Collaborative).
Additionally, we have the honor this season to share many highlights from this year’s Wicked Problems Institute hosted by Children’s Home Society of America and the Jordan Institute for Families at the University of North Carolina.
We believe neglect is preventable. Join us on Wednesday, January 8th when we premiere season 3 wherever you listen to your podcasts.
Season 2
After finishing this second season in which we released two episodes for each of our four Critical Pathways – one with policy and research experts and one with lived experience and practice experts – we’ve decided to share a bonus episode that may serve as a bridge between this season and the future of our Strong Families, Thriving Children, Connected Communities initiative and this podcast series. If you remember back to our first episode of this season, my team at the Institute shared the vision of our Critical Pathways strategy. In Gabe McGaughey’s words, “There are several high quality initiatives focused on prevention policy, and we don’t want to replicate or compete with any of those efforts, but rather connect and elevate them. And in doing so we hope we can accelerate the impact of a collective network.”
As we enter further into the Critical Pathways, broaden our awareness and understanding of the impactful work and systems change efforts happening across our state, and deepen our relationships with those doing that work, we hope to elevate the practices, policies, relationships and mental model shifts that are strengthening families and reducing child welfare involvement in their lives.
As I started this season talking with my Institute team at Children’s, I thought it would be fitting to finish this season in conversation with my Institute colleague at UW-Milwaukee, Josh Mersky, to further elevate one of those promising approaches. In our conversation, we discuss the research Josh has done with our partners from across the state on the impacts of Family Resource Centers and other universal programs that promote family protective factors and social connectedness. We also explore his journey studying resilience and protective factors and what he has learned about the impact of child neglect and, conversely, how social connectedness may reduce the risk of neglect or mitigate its effects.
Dr. Josh Mersky is a founding director of the Institute for Child and Family Well-Being and a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Helen Bader School of Social Welfare. Josh’s research interests include child maltreatment and other adverse experiences that undermine health and well-being over the life course. He is dedicated to working with local and state partners to translate evidence into real-world solutions that improve outcomes for vulnerable children and families.
Josh applies his expertise to the design, application, evaluation, and dissemination of effective practices, programs, and policies through Institute projects that include the Strong and Stable Families project that he will discuss today. I encourage you to check out our Institute for Child and Family Well-being website to learn more about those projects.
In Wisconsin, 72,942 reports were made to Child Protective Services last year alone. To make sense of that, 200 children are being reported every day because someone believes they are being abused or neglected. Every single day. To put that in further perspective, that comes out to about 1 out of every 17 children in our state being subject to a child protective services report. Imagine having someone call a government agency to report that your child appears to be unsafe. How might that feel as a parent? Now, of those nearly 73,000 reports, 51,000 of them (or 7 out of every 10) is screened out, meaning that they don’t rise to the level of maltreatment that would require an assessment to be completed by CPS. And finally, just over 3,000 children were separated last year from their parents from those nearly 73,000 initial reports. At the same time this is happening, we have nearly 40,000 non-profits statewide that support our children, families and communities, yet families too often need support or services that are unknown to them or hard to access. So how might we work smarter, not harder, to elevate solutions to ensure all families can access the help they need when they need it? How might we lead with compassion and curiosity to build bridges between service providers, community organizations, and the families we serve, so we can create a more equitable, collaborative, and impactful support network rather than a reporting network? I invited Julie Ahnen, Laura Glaub and Marc Seidl to have this conversation today to explore these questions as they have been on a journey of confronting the challenges of mandated reporting and mistrust of our systems.
In episode 2 of this season with Liz Weaver and Mark Cabaj, they centered the people closest to the problems that we are trying to solve. Liz talked about how their community change efforts driven by Collective Impact frameworks require that there is a balance of participants at the table, meaning that there are as many people with lived experience as professionals and government officials. Mark summoned the Polish constitution from centuries ago that brought us the words that have become synonymous with community voice – “Nothing about us, without us.”
Over the past many years, we have seen a movement within our family serving systems – from substance abuse to mental health to child welfare – to include those impacted most by those systems in the planning and decision-making processes. Organizations like Think of Us have been founded by and for people that have been impacted by the child welfare system. In Wisconsin, Bregetta Wilson, our guest from season 1, leads a team of Parent Leaders at our Department for Children and Families that has advised changes to our state’s child welfare policies and procedures. At Children’s Wisconsin, we have a Parent Advocate, Esmeralda Martinez, who we will be talking with today about her own lived experience that led to the child welfare system, and how that experience informs her role and the support she provides to parents that are living a similar experience to her own.
So how might we support and advance these movements to meet the promise of “Nothing about us, without us”? How might we learn from those with lived experience about what overloads families in the first place, so that we might support them before child welfare and family separation is needed? How might we create the power balance that Liz Weaver talked about where those with lived experience have the influence to make meaningful changes to the decisions and systems that impact them the most? And lastly, how might we support our lived experience partners so that we don’t overload them or cause harm?
I invited Esmeralda Martinez to answer these questions today through her experience and expertise.
20 years ago, I found myself jumping into a dry canal on a hot day in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia in an attempt to introduce myself to a group of kids who called the canal home. While my Spanish was in good form after two years designing programs for a nonprofit in Spain. My early attempts at communicating with youth who had been abused and neglected and were now living in the streets had gotten off to a rocky start. I learned quickly that my Spanish and even my ability to articulate what the kids had experienced that led them to the streets didn’t create the opening to enter into their community. So I stood awkwardly on the outside, respectfully observed from a distance and occasionally got an “hola, hermano”, as they assumed I was from the church. I was not.
Days later, a boy known as Choco asked if I wanted to play checkers with his friends. I accepted. I sat under the bridge, introduced myself and asked them their names. Before they even finished introducing themselves, I started my pitch as to why they should leave the streets. Nothing surprising here. The streets are full of danger like traffickers, drugs and disease. I even shared the data that made it clear that they would likely die of tuberculosis or addiction, or end up in jail before their 20th birthday. The kids didn’t flinch. Instead, Choco put his hand on my arm and said, “but the street is my family. They protect me.” In one of the more consequential decisions in my career, I fought my urge to argue with him, and again cite all the evidence as to why leaving the streets would be better for him in his future. Instead, I listened. What I learned in that moment would serve as the foundation of my work for the next two years in Bolivia, and in some ways for the past 20.
Our trusted social connections inform how we see ourselves in our world. If I wanted these boys to leave their only trusted social connections in the streets, I had to build trust with them. And kids see right through you, if you aren’t speaking their language, if you aren’t sitting in their reality with them. So I kept showing up, I kept listening. And soon I spoke their language. I understood that they didn’t want to hear about the dangers of the streets, but the safety of our community and new friendships, the opportunity of school, and most importantly, the promise that I would be there if things got hard. In that single social connection between me and that boy, the conditions that would in many ways dictate his future were changed.
In a way it was that experience and many like it over the years that inspired this podcast series. I wondered, how might we bring the language and expertise of policy, research and systems experts into the same space is the language and expertise of those most impacted by the policies, services and resources the former talk about? It’s my attempt at translating. I hope that there have been moments in these first two seasons that have helped translate the complexity of systems into how they impact the complex lives of real people.
That is my traditionally long-winded way of introducing today’s episode. And what I hope you will reflect on as you listen to two different conversations that we have weaved together for you. As you already heard in the opening clip, Diana Maya speaks Spanish. I chose very intentionally to give the same space to Diana’s voice as I do to all my guests, which means that she will tell her story without interruption. That also means that if you have to dust off your high school Spanish, you may find yourself in the shoes of the boys in Bolivia when I spouted projected outcomes or that of a mother sitting at a table with a half dozen professionals citing statutes right after her child has been separated from her. In the end, you won’t miss anything. I share in English what Diana says after she’s done, but I do hope that it’s an opportunity to reflect on how important shared language and social connection are to building trust, authentic engagement and the opportunity for meaningful change.
I have spent weeks thinking about this episode, what I have learned from listening to Diana and Jessika stories, the power of their connections with Amy and Ayesha and how we can change lives by listening to understand what someone has been through who they are, and who they might become if someone believes in them.
Social Connectedness came alive in these conversations. And one powerful moment I watched as Amy was brought to tears while listening to Diana tell her story. While Amy doesn’t speak Spanish, it was clear that she understood what Diana was experiencing and sharing in that moment. I want to thank that Diana Maya and Jessika Harleston, for sharing their stories with me. I also want to thank my colleagues here at Children’s Wisconsin, Amy Baldus, Ayesha Teague and Micaela Conlon-Bue, who have become part of Diana and Jessika stories do their amazing work and care. I encourage you to learn more about them on our podcast website.
On January 8th, we mark the 60th anniversary of President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. In his State of the Union remarks, he called poverty a national disgrace and described it as a societal failure. He stated, “The cause may lie deeper in our failure to give our fellow citizens a fair chance to develop their own capacities, in a lack of education and training, in a lack of medical care and housing, in a lack of decent communities in which to live and bring up their children.” He signed into law the Economic Opportunity Act later that year, which would create job training programs, Head Start early childhood education, and a domestic volunteer program – now known as Americorps. It would also attempt to combat racial discrimination, which had marginalized people of color from fair participation in our politics and economy. It would later inspire cash assistance and tax credits that have shown to reduce poverty such as TANF, the Earned Income and Child Tax Credits.
Policies, such as the Economic Opportunity Act, that strengthen family economic stability can go a long way toward reducing childhood adversity and supporting the relationships that help children thrive.
While progress has been made in Johnson’s War on Poverty, it’s clear that there are still many battles before us as child and family poverty have not been eradicated. As Mark Cabaj discussed in our second episode, we often solve one problem only to expose or create another in this infinite game. For example, with our economic safety net, many families find themselves on the benefits cliff as they make too much to be eligible for housing vouchers or cash assistance, but too little to pay for what they need for their families.
So how might we raise the floor on family economic stability, while lowering the ceiling on the cost of living? How might we better support overloaded families so that they may achieve economic stability?
I invited Jessika Harlston to have this conversation today to share her lived experience and her role as a Financial Employability Planner to explore these questions.
Jessika Harlston is a mother of 3 boys and a Financial Career Planner and Case Manager for individuals and families. In Overloaded, she shares her experience of becoming socially isolated that led to child welfare involvement, and then her powerful story of reconnection with her family and support system. Jessika shares that “so many people look at me as this woman who has it all; when in reality, I am just like everyone else. I cry like everyone else, I struggle like everyone else, and of course, I smile like everyone else.”
Earlier this year, Jermaine Reed hosted the Color of Child Welfare conference as he has since 2010, which included a keynote by Dorothy Roberts, the author of Torn Apart, from which Bregetta Wilson read in our first season. Ms. Roberts wrote an article last year titled, “Why End Mandated Reporting”, in which she makes this foundational statement:
“By federal edict, every state must identify people who work in professions that put them in contact with children – such as teachers, health care providers, social services staff, and day care workers – and require them by law to report suspected child abuse and neglect to government authorities.” Consequently, she states, “Poor and low-income families are more likely to come in contact with professionals who are mandated to report child maltreatment. Receiving social services, relying on welfare benefits, living in public housing or shelters, and using public clinics all subject parents to an extra layer of surveillance by government workers who are quick to report when they suspect maltreatment or a family’s needs for services.” As we shared in season 1, this system has led to the deeply troubling reality in which 53% of all Black children and 1 in 3 of all children in the United States are subject to a child maltreatment investigation.
How does our current system of mandated reporting discourage overloaded families from seeking the help that they really need due to fear of ending up in the child welfare system? How does it create moral dilemmas for the many helpers in our community – teachers, social workers, doctors and nurses – who feel compelled to report a family under the weight of the potential consequences if they don’t?
So how might we transform our mandated reporting system into community support and collaboration that lifts overloaded families up and over their challenges? How might we confront the biases that influence reporters’ decisions as to who to report and who to support? And how might we improve our systems and service coordination so that our helpers know who can help and how to connect them to the families that need them when they need them?
I invited Jermaine to have this conversation today to share his expertise and explore these questions. As an added bonus, Jermaine and I begin this conversation discussing his journey as a child welfare professional, which covers some of the topics we explored in the Workforce Inclusion and Innovation discussion we had last week with Tim Grove.
In 2021, amid a global pandemic, a national reckoning on racial justice, and human and environmental devastation from the opioid epidemic, gun violence, and climate disasters, Harvard Public Health published a feature called “The Age of Trauma”. In that feature, they describe these times as “the age of syndemics”, a theory that first emerged in the 1990s during the AIDS epidemic as a way to examine how social ills and medical illnesses collide. In other words, we are again living in a time when those who are most adversely impacted by social ills such as poverty, systemic racism, and trauma, are also most vulnerable to diseases such as COVID.
These syndemic times are devastating for our most overloaded families, which in turn puts even greater stress on the people who are serving and supporting them. In our mental health, child welfare, and family well-being systems, vicarious trauma, moral injury, and burnout have become more prevalent during the past few years as professionals were exposed to not only human suffering but also the impossible decisions as to whose suffering took priority when their resources limited their ability to meet everyone’s need.
These past few years have also exposed the lack of diversity and representation in our workforce, which led to a movement of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in and across organizations and systems.
In the face of these challenging times, how might we begin to address the long-standing underlying root causes of these syndemic times that overload families and, in turn, burn out our workforce? How might we create a workforce that is authentically representative of our communities, while also nurturing a work environment that honors and elevates the lived experience of our workforce?
I invited Tim Grove to help answer these questions by sharing his expertise and understanding of the impacts of trauma and moral injury within the child welfare system, and workforce culture through Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and trauma-informed care frameworks.
On May 3rd, 2023, Dr. Vivek Murthy, the U.S. Surgeon General, released a national plan to fight against our country’s “loneliness epidemic”. In his opening statement, he wrote:
“When I first took office as Surgeon General in 2014, I didn’t view loneliness as a public health concern. But that was before I embarked on a cross-country listening tour, where I heard stories from my fellow Americans that surprised me. People began to tell me they felt isolated, invisible, and insignificant. Even when they couldn’t put their finger on the word “lonely,” time and time again, people of all ages and socioeconomic backgrounds would tell me, “I have to shoulder all of life’s burdens by myself,” or “if I disappear tomorrow, no one will even notice.”
It was a lightbulb moment for me: social disconnection was far more common than I had realized.”
The research supports what Dr. Murthy heard, and the consequences of loneliness and social isolation are troubling.
Recently, about one-in-two adults in America reported experiencing loneliness, nearly 1 in 4 Wisconsinites report that they only sometimes or never get the social and emotional support they need; and even more troubling, caregivers of children, especially mothers and single parents, are more likely to experience feelings of loneliness. And that was before COVID-19 cut off so many of us from our support systems, exacerbating loneliness and isolation. Loneliness is far more than just a bad feeling—it is associated with a greater risk of cardiovascular disease, dementia, stroke, depression, anxiety, and premature death. The mortality impact of being socially disconnected is similar to that caused by smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day.
While these realities are cause for concern, I believe the fact that we are talking about social isolation and its harms is the first important step in confronting it, in shifting the narrative towards how we build and strengthen social connectedness. So how might we build a movement that brings people and organizations together to destigmatize loneliness and change our cultural and policy response to it?
I invited Linda Hall and Rebecca Murray to help answer that question by sharing their expertise on the underlying root causes of social isolation; the positive impacts of social connectedness on child development and family prosperity; and the promising and proven practices and policies that effectively strengthen the social connectedness of families that may be at risk of child neglect and family separation. Their work leading Wisconsin’s Office of Children’s Mental Health and Child Abuse and Neglect Prevention Board has prioritized social connectedness for children and families through research and advocacy, and the promotion of practices and frameworks such as Five for Families, the Five Categories of Social Connectedness for Youth, and Family Resource Centers.
While Wisconsin defines neglect as the failure, refusal, or inability to care for a child for reasons other than poverty, we can’t ignore the fact that 85% of families investigated by our child welfare system live below 200% of the federal poverty line. Earlier this year, Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago published a report on the impacts of poverty on child neglect and abuse. The message was clear. Income supports to families with low incomes, like those provided through the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program, reduce the risk of child maltreatment and the child welfare system involvement that results from it.
What if we were to think about programs like TANF that we commonly think of as anti-poverty programs as child maltreatment prevention programs that keep families together? How might we build partnerships across systems that empower the economic stability of overloaded families? How might we follow the evidence, even if it contradicts how we have always done things, so that we may change the conditions that overload families and make them vulnerable to our most intrusive systems?
Clare Anderson from Chapin Hall joins the podcast to share her expertise on the root causes and role of poverty and their intersection with child neglect, and the practices and policies that effectively address the economic needs of overloaded families that may reduce family separation for reasons of neglect.
In 2019, The New York Times published an opinion column entitled “Winning the War on Poverty. The Canadians are doing it, we’re not.” In the column, they note that Canada reduced its official poverty rate by at least 20% from 2015 to 2017. This accomplishment brought its poverty rate to its lowest in recorded history. My guests today, Liz Weaver and Mark Cabaj were part of this societal transformation. Their leadership and use of methodologies such as Collective Impact and Field Catalyst brought people living in poverty together with business, nonprofit, and government partners in hundreds of communities across Canada. By building authentic relationships, each community would learn from one another and build a shared understanding of what was at the root of their poverty.
So how might we learn from Canada’s transformation so that we might empower communities to overcome poverty or child neglect, and build wealth and child and family well-being? I invited Liz and Mark to have this conversation today to share their wisdom and why these approaches are so vital to community and systems change, how they should be and shouldn’t be used, and what they look like in real life so that we may create transformational change for our children, families and our communities.
Since you last joined us in season one, our team at the Institute for Child and Family Well-being has been busy learning from the experts that you heard here, community changemakers from across our state, and the latest evidence from lots of reading. Through that learning, we developed four critical pathways that will serve as roadmaps to help us focus our efforts, foster deeper relationships across systems and communities and clarify shared goals.
As a small team, we know that we can’t achieve our goal of reducing family separations for reasons of neglect across the state of Wisconsin on our own. So we hope through this podcast, convenings, and ongoing shared learning that we can serve as a catalyst of change. As my team at the Institute has learned this past year and a half, the evidence may take us and you to new places that lead to better outcomes for families. In this first episode, I talk with my team to introduce this season of the podcast so that they can share with us how we got here, where we’re going, and what you can anticipate hearing from our experts in season two.
In season 2 of Overloaded: Understanding Neglect, we will be confronting complex challenges like poverty, social isolation, and systemic racism that overload families as we explore our Strong Families, Thriving Children, Connected Communities’ four Critical Pathways, our roadmaps for discovering and developing innovative solutions to these wicked problems. Through the first year of our Strong Families initiative, which included season 1 of this podcast series, we were able to align the insights and experiences of those who know these issues best with the evidence that has shown promise in advancing meaningful solutions. This collaborative effort identified four critical pathways – Economic Stability, Social Connectedness, Community Collaboration, and Workforce Inclusion and Innovation – that will shape the future of our initiative that aspires to reduce family separations for reasons of neglect.
Join me, Luke Waldo, as I explore these Critical Pathways with research and policy experts Clare Anderson from Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago, Mark Cabaj of From Here 2 There, Tim Grove of Wellpoint Care Network, Linda Hall of Wisconsin’s Office of Children’s Mental Health, my Institute colleague Josh Mersky of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Rebecca Murray of Wisconsin’s Child Abuse and Neglect Prevention Board, Jermaine Reed of Fresh Start Family Services, Liz Weaver of the Tamarack Institute. Additionally, we will shine a light on these Critical Pathways through the lived experience experts of many of my close colleagues at Children’s Wisconsin’s child welfare and child maltreatment prevention programs and the caregivers with whom they have worked closely.
Season 1
In today’s bonus episode, we brought together some of our Overloaded: Understanding Neglect experts to thank them and celebrate our collective effort that led to this podcast series. But before we went out to celebrate, we sat down to discuss two topics that have become even more relevant, more top of mind for many of us. First, we explored the Legislation and Policy that have been passed, renewed or begun implementation this year. Then, we discussed the challenges and opportunities that we face with our Workforce within our child welfare and maltreatment prevention systems.
In today’s episode, our last in this series, we will be looking back at our previous seven episodes in an effort to elevate our key lessons learned to present a blueprint towards our ultimate goal of supporting overloaded families and reducing family separations for reasons of neglect. We will be looking at them through the lens of the systems change drivers that we have explored over the past many episodes, by looking at the impact of mental models – our beliefs and biases that influence our behavior – and the relationships and power dynamics that connect or divide us in our communities and systems, and how they influence the important policies, practices and allocation of funding and resources that support our systems change strategies and efforts.
In today’s episode, we will be looking at how we might move further upstream from our current child welfare system, with the intent of revealing current strategies, efforts and opportunities to prevent adversity from occurring for children and families. As we discussed in our previous episodes, we will be looking at the impact of mental models – our beliefs and biases that influence our behavior – and the relationships and power dynamics that connect or divide us in our communities and systems, and how they influence the important policies, practices and allocation of funding and resources that support our prevention strategies and efforts.
As you will hear today, there are many prevention strategies that currently exist that we believe, if employed more frequently and effectively, can dramatically lessen the overload that too many families in our communities are carrying. In turn, they can be the nurturing, responsive parents that their children need and deserve; and we can reduce family separations for reasons of neglect.
Today’s episode intends to provide a framework of systems drivers along with some concrete examples of how we might move our child welfare system towards a child and family well-being system. We hope that it provides an initial framework along with some inspiration as to how each of us has the power to influence systems change through the seemingly small acts of compassion and challenging our own biases. Through those small acts real change begins, especially in a system and society where historical inequities and trauma have deep roots that persist today.
How might we challenge those inequities in our policies and practices within our own organizations and communities? How might we share power, leadership and decision-making with those that we serve? And how might we learn from the policies and practices that have allowed families to fall or be separated before we actively supported them? Join us today to hear our experts share their experience with those questions.
In our first four episodes, we explored neglect, three of its underlying root causes in the forms of trauma, systemic oppression, and poverty, and their compounding challenges like housing instability, mental illness, and addiction that further overload families with stress, and can lead to child welfare involvement and family separation. Moving forward, we will shift our focus from the challenges that overloaded families experience to the challenges and opportunities that our complex systems, organizations, and communities face as we aspire to reduce family separations for reasons of neglect.
To begin this shift, we will explore the child welfare system over a two-part episode, beginning today in part 1 as we look more closely at how the system is designed and functions, how policies, which are often created by those furthest away from the most affected communities, dictate practice and resources, and how we are failing overloaded families by not effectively addressing the underlying root causes of neglect that we explored in our first few episodes.
Children thrive when they have regular interactions with responsive, caring adults. Families experiencing significant stressors related to financial insecurity, housing instability, or the impact of systemic racism and trauma can be overloaded with stress, interrupting those interactions. Over time, and without adequate supports, overloaded families can become vulnerable to adverse experiences, ranging from toxic levels of stress to involvement in the child welfare system, and even family separation for reasons of neglect. How might we support and empower overloaded families, so that they may overcome these challenges? How might we see families for their strengths and potential rather than as defined by their darkest moments?
Poverty, like neglect, is a constellation of complex challenges. We are too often investigating families for child maltreatment because other systems are failing. When this happens, a family that may have been experiencing temporary financial insecurity becomes more vulnerable to compounding factors such as homelessness and mounting stress. It’s in these moments that a family becomes vulnerable to a child welfare investigation and potential family separation. So how might we begin to address financial insecurity before it becomes poverty? How might we support families experiencing poverty before it leads to child neglect?
In Wisconsin, family separations disproportionately impact Children of Color. In 2020, Children of Color made up about 31% of Wisconsin’s child population, but 56% of the foster care population in out-of-home care. Nationally, 53% of Black children will experience a Child Protective Services’ investigation before their 18th birthday. In this episode, we explore these disparities and impacts of systemic oppression on children and families, and how these experiences intersect with trauma.
How do we define neglect? How is neglect interpreted and operationalized by our child welfare system, and how many children and families are separated because of it? What are the underlying root causes of neglect that overload caregivers with stress? In this first episode, host Luke Waldo explores these questions and the complexity of neglect with our research and policy, child welfare and child maltreatment prevention, and lived experience experts.
