Holistic Approach Needed to Foster Care, Experts Say

Janet Sassi

February 2009 / Fordham University

A major shift in social work’s approach to child welfare is necessary to stave off a crisis in foster care, experts said on Feb. 25 at a colloquium to welcome the Graduate School of Services (GSS) newest endowed chair.

“We must choose to change our paradigm,” said William C. Bell, president and CEO of Casey Family Programs and former New York City Commissioner of the Administration for Children’s Services. “Even today as we have embarked upon the 21st century, we still have a system that far too frequently sees lengthy separations between children and their parents . . . as being the desired intervention.

“We must be willing to see children in the context of a family, to see families in the context of their community,” he said, “We cannot adequately intervene to resolve human suffering through silo-based intervention.”

Bell was the keynote speaker at the GSS’ James R. Dumpson Colloquium, recognizing Brenda McGowan, D.S.W., the school’s newest Dumpson Chair in in Child Welfare Studies, and celebrating the upcoming 100th birthday of the chair’s namesake.

James R. Dumpson, D.S.W., who served as GSS dean from 1976 to 1990 and is renown for his pioneering work in child welfare, was on hand for the event. He will turn 100 on April 5.

“This appointment is a real honor for me,” McGowan told the audience of 150 faculty and social workers. “When I first moved to the city 40 years ago, his was one of the first names I heard as an important person in child welfare. I wasn’t sure I’d ever meet him . . . but I got lucky.”

Bell is head one of the largest foundations working nationally to improve public policy and practices in the country’s foster care system, which serves some 500,000 children. If the nation doesn’t change its current efforts in child welfare, he said, by the year 2020 approximately 7 million more children will have gone through the foster care system.

Also speaking were Gladys Carrion, Esq., (CBA ’73), commissioner of New York State’s Office of Children and Family Services; Gerald Mallon, D.S.W., (GSS ‘80) director of the National Resource Center for Family-Centered Practice and Permanency Planning; and Carol Wilson Spigner, D.S.W., Kenneth L.M. Pray Professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Social Policy and Practice.

Spigner said that the welfare of children is intricately tied to the issues of “gender, economics and race” in the nation, since almost all foster children come from groups that are systematically disadvantaged. Going back to the 19th century “era of the settlements,” she said, would set the right model by working not just for children but for more job opportunity, better healthcare and greater community-based decision making.

Finally, Bell urged the social work community to learn how to broker power to help enable legislation on behalf of the poor and underrepresented.

“Let’s not deceive ourselves. Gender, race and economics influence the [legislative] decision-making in this country,” he said. “And power concedes nothing without a struggle.

“Are we ready to struggle?” he asked.

Founded in 1841, Fordham is the Jesuit University of New York, offering exceptional education distinguished by the Jesuit tradition to approximately 14,700 students in its four undergraduate colleges and its six graduate and professional schools. It has residential campuses in the Bronx and Manhattan, a campus in Westchester, and the Louis Calder Center Biological Field Station in Armonk, N.Y.