Foster America joined thought leaders from across the country last week to present at the renowned SXSW EDU Conference and Festival.
Held each year in Austin, Texas, the event featured hundreds of sessions to advance innovations benefitting not only educators but the children and families at the heart of their work. Foster America led an interactive workshop titled, “Schools, Foster Care, and Families: Innovating for Equity.”
Foster America’s workshop was one of only 400 submissions approved out of more than 1,400 proposals to present at the conference. SXSW EDU, part of the larger South by Southwest (SXSW®) family of conferences and festivals, has been a catalyst for innovation, experimentation, and learning in education for 15 years.
Our 90-minute workshop explored the connection between the education system and foster care. In many states, educators and other school personnel are considered “mandatory reporters” — those with a legal obligation to report suspected abuse or neglect — creating a direct, but seldom fully explored, relationship between education and child welfare.
Mandatory reporters account for more than 70% of calls to child welfare hotlines across the country, with educators and law enforcement as the most frequent callers. Yet there is a significant disconnect between calls made to hotlines and actual services provided to families. While there are 7M reports made annually, 5.5M of those are screened out with no further offer of support to the family.
Participants studied the steps along the prevention continuum, a framework for understanding the levels of support available to families before, during, and after involvement with the child welfare system.
The session was co-facilitated by Foster America Co-Founder and Executive Director Marie Zemler Wu, Collaborative Design Specialist Gabrielle Garcia, and Harvard Doctoral Resident Brendan Chan. Together, they led attendees through mock family scenarios, focusing on the critical points when informal support — or direct intervention — could have changed the family’s circumstances.
Foster America’s participation in the conference is a testament to our commitment to cross-sector collaboration as a core part of our strategy to transform the child welfare system. We believe no one system alone can meet the complex needs of families. Bringing together experts from interrelated fields is crucial to not only fostering a dialogue that challenges conventional siloed approaches to supporting families but turning those conversations into actionable steps forward.
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