“COVID: 19 really created unprecedented challenges that very few of us had ever confronted and probably in reality we weren’t really prepared for. [I]t was the ultimate crisis to test our ability to be collaborative problem solvers”

Now that we are in the middle of a pandemic, child welfare agencies are faced with the incredible challenge of immediately shifting to a virtual workforce;moving all of their staff and operations out of the agency, establishing policies and protocols, and procedures for how to support a virtual workforce. While also ensuring the safety and well-being of children and families in their care, and the physical safety of their workforce from the virus itself.”

“ISS-USA, International Social Service USA is the American member of a network of social workers and lawyers working in about 130 countries around the world. [W]e serve more than seventy-five thousand families a year in the network, we work on issues primarily involving children and families that are separated across the border.”

“In our field and in many helping profession fields we have been very slow in getting outside of single race ways of engaging human experience... and I just think we have been really slow and disconnected in research and the development of our knowledge from the way that many social workers and many of us as people live and the complexity that we live, and so we continue to slice and dice racially in these really grossly inadequate ways of trying to capture peoples racialized experiences.”

“So many people believe that people end up in this hoarding situation because they come from a family line that suffered under the Depression. Billions of people went through the Depression and they didn’t hoard maladaptively... But some hoard adaptively. [T]he difference between adaptive hoarding and maladaptive hoarding is not necessarily the amount you buy, but that you use it.”

“Clearly there is always going to be some degree of turnover in child welfare, however, this study found time and time again that it was not just that turnover happened, but how turnover happened.”

“Shared value is a management strategy in which companies find business opportunities in social problems. [I]t focuses on solving social problems but also getting some competitive advantage.”

"The goal of [drug courts] is promoting empowerment and self-accountability in regards to this process of healing and change.”

“I became really aware that the way we help parents, will ultimately impact the children that they have.”

“When [social workers] talk about families, we often mean mothers –the kid and the mom. We forget about the dads. [I] want social workers to understand how parenting and the parent-child relationship works for Latino fathers. This way we can be better integrated into the practice [social workers] are doing”