Speed to Home: CWIS in 2024

Perhaps you have children. Surely you were one once.

Childhood is a concept we all share. When we are children, our very lives are dependent on our care takers. We are the only species on the planet that stays so dependent on our parents for so long. Most beasts get born and they better get up and get moving so they stay with the herd.? Not us.

Our memory of that time shapes our lives.

The children we have the great fortune to raise, well, I can tell you when I had mine something snapped into place. I realized that the only reason we are here on this planet is to care for one another. It’s the cycle of life. Usually, it works pretty well.

And sometimes it doesn’t. When that happens our value system come into play.

We believe, generally speaking, that children are our collective responsibility. That is the heart of child welfare. We rely on government to step in when a child is in harm’s way. Good people in systems all over this country work hard. Half a million children will go to sleep tonight in foster care. Many more will pass through the system in the months and years to come.

The fate of these children is known. They have the worst outcomes of any demographic profile: education, health, earnings, life expectancy. Worse all around.

We ought to ask, “Why?”. Lots of reasons. One is speed. The adults who manage child welfare manage it on an administrative schedule. For instance: “I cannot see you today but can meet you tomorrow at 2pm”. Or “Let’s plan that conference for mid-summer next year”. Adults are driven by the clock and the calendar. And we can wait.

But children are not little adults. They are driven not by the clock but by the urgency of their needs. Their most urgent need is ‘home’ – a place where they know they belong and where they know the people caring for them love them more than anyone else in the world. This is the foundation of a productive life.

Children in foster care have poorer outcomes because child welfare is not moving at the speed children need them to for securing ‘home’. We are just too slow.

One reason child welfare is slow is the state of their technology. In some jurisdictions, child welfare agencies are managing their work on index cards. Others are lucky enough to have technology but it's typically a mainframe system that was built 25 years ago. Think: f12, f12, f12, f12….

But the sky broke several years ago when the US government ponied up resources to fund new technology. It’s a tremendous opportunity to build new solutions that are fit for the unique purpose of child welfare and that provide a co-pilot for caseworkers, all for the purpose of leveraging speed to home for children who touch child welfare systems. We could be thinking in bold new ways that position the industry to keep up with the blistering pace of technological change we expect in the coming months and years. Our actions now should take child welfare out of the dark and into the light where they can see what each individual child needs, learn about what interventions work for different populations and apply those lessons rapidly, and see clearly, for the first time, the families they serve as comprised of whole people who touch many systems.

Regrettably, the current landscape of CWIS implementations is both familiar and bitterly disappointing. Decisions about the technology child welfare needs are being driven by technologists who do not understand the counter-intuitive nature of the work. Funding environments are driven by annual cycles. That means decision makers in procurement simply look for the cheapest option on the table, which blinds them to important concepts like long term savings that may be realized if we can leverage technology to improve outcomes for complicated families. Child welfare agencies, long accustomed to little more than scraps and leftovers to meet their technology needs, retreat to an “I’ll take what I can get” point of view. They’ll take something over nothing and know the risk of passing this funding opportunity. They gamble on a cheaper option, knowing they will be the ones to take the verbal lashing in a future funding year when they return to the trough to request a change order.

But for a single exception, every CWIS delivery in the country is off schedule and over budget by multipliers of their original allocation.

This is a multi-faceted heartbreak. First, we risk ending up with technology that does not work for child welfare, knowing we’ll wait another 25 years until funding is made available again. Second, tech and PMO firms are making a mint in the CWIS environment using funds that come out of the mouths of babes. We can overspend millions on technology but cannot seem to find funds for low-income housing – the presence of which, by all accounts, could reduce the number of children in foster care by up to 40%.

And the very most awful part: the children who need us the most in this country – the ones who need us to speed up their journey to ‘home’ – will continue to wait.

It’s not too late to pivot.

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