Reflections After One Year of The Legacy Project
Some Thoughts on this Newsletter (and on my MPhil Program)
First: my sincerest apologies for the long hiatus. Life had gotten extraordinarily busy on this side of the pond — moving homes, doing some traveling, and trying to incrementally advance with my master’s thesis — and I let this newsletter gather some dust. But no more. I’m back.
Second, I am deeply moved by all the messages I received from folks over the past few months, most of them along the lines of “hey, when will I see another newsletter?” It means a lot to me that y’all think so much about this project that you miss it when it doesn’t arrive in your inbox every other week. So thank you so much, for reading and for sticking with me!
Much has happened during my absence, including two notable milestones:
The one-year anniversary of launching this newsletter
The halfway mark of my MPhil program
In this newsletter, I’m going to offer a few thoughts on the above. Specifically, I’ll be talking about the next stage of The Legacy Project and some of the insights I’ve gleaned during my studies. As an aside, I initially intended on discussing the child welfare implications of the recent elections in the United States, but that section ran very (and I mean very) long. After some sage counsel from Leslie, I decided I’ll just turn that section into a newsletter of its own, to be published around January 20th.
Let’s begin. It'll be a ‘quick hits’ kind of newsletter, to get me up and running again, but I’ll cover a lot of ground. I’ll be mentioning this later, but just in case you miss it, please fill out this survey so you can help me build this newsletter in the months ahead!
(Note: I have an already-finished entry ready to go — my deep-dive into the various ways the foster care system impacts girls and young women — but I’ll save it for the next newsletter.)
One Year After Launching the Legacy Project: What’s Ahead
I launched The Legacy Project just over a year ago, with the first edition dropping in October 2023. It has been an extraordinarily rewarding experience. I’ve learned a ton, met so many folks through it, and incrementally hacked away at this newsletter’s main goal: to change the narrative around child welfare. Below are some scattered thoughts on the past, and mostly, on what’s ahead as I look toward 2025.
The Impact: I had lofty — perhaps unrealistic — goals for this newsletter. I aimed to build a massive audience by the end of 2024. Such an audience, alas, has yet to materialize. But this newsletter — this community — has had an outsized impact, well beyond its relatively small subscriber base. For example:
I have received dozens of emails from subscribers asking variations of one question: how can I help? Through this process, at least half a dozen folks have signed up to become Court Appointed Special Advocates (CASAs), where they’ll help advocate for children navigating the child welfare system.
One subscriber reached out and told me that they had never once shared they were in the foster care system growing up, but now are cautiously beginning to divulge that secret to people.
Many have reached out and asked me to weigh in on a policy or practice rolling out in their state. I even helped one person craft a letter of support for pending legislation in their home state. This newsletter, then, is at least making folks think about the system more than they had before, and that’s a start!
A Tricky Balance: One element of this newsletter that I have at times struggled with is maintaining a balance between my two audiences. Half of the folks that read this are experts, either having worked in this field for years or were in the foster care system themselves growing up. The other half knew next to nothing about the system before subscribing, so each newsletter offers something new. I’ve largely been guided by my own intuitions about what might not be understood about the system, and what folks would like to read. However, moving forward, I want to establish more of a dialogue with you, dear reader. Mainly, I want to ask: what do you want to read?
To answer that question, I whipped up a survey, and would be thrilled if you give me some feedback. This, I anticipate, will be the first of many surveys in the year ahead, but this first one will help me put together some newsletters that are a little more relevant. Thank you, dearly, in advance, for your feedback.
We Need Some More Positivity: I briefly scrolled through my published newsletters and realized something: the vast majority of them are negative. That is, I spend a ton of time highlighting the worst elements of the child welfare system, dedicating painstaking detail and personal testimony to its many failures. This perspective is motivated by an understanding that the system can be so much better, and that in many ways, it is failing children and families. But such a focus obscures the fact that there has been several positive developments over the years that have incrementally improved various elements of the foster care system. So, moving forward, I’d like to put a little effort into highlighting these wins — both big and small — because I don’t want to give the impression that nothing is being done. Failure to acknowledge progress means a failure to acknowledge the tireless work of activists, advocates, policymakers, and caseworkers who make progress happen. It is time I do that acknowledging myself.
A Legacy Project Podcast?: Many of you have reached out and suggested I produce an audio version of this newsletter, in conjunction with its traditional format. Your suggestions have been noted. Folks, from henceforth, each newsletter (except this one) will be accompanied by a recording of yours truly reading it aloud. It might not drop the same day as the newsletter in question, but I will strive to publish it within the next day or two. Please be patient as I figure out the logistics on how to do this as smooth as possible!
Two New Sections to Come: I conclude each newsletter with two sections: a blurb on what I’m reading that week, and a roundup of news articles from the past few weeks. I intend on adding two more sections on a rotating basis. These sections are as follows:
Notes from Abroad: As we shall see, I read a ton of papers and publications on the child welfare systems of countries all over the globe. Just this past week, I read papers about the role of financial support in preventing kids from entering foster care in Finland, on the experiences of children involved in the Japanese child welfare system, and on the historical development of the New Zealand child protection system. I figured some of what I read might be of interest to y’all, so I’ll share some insights from everything I read in this new section.
The Lived Experience Ledger: I want to get more voices from former foster youth incorporated into this newsletter. Fortunately, I know a ton of former foster youth, from all over the US, and so in future newsletters, you’ll be hearing from them in this new section. I’m still working out exactly what this might entail, so stay tuned!
One Year At Oxford: What I Learned about Systems Around the World
I have completed one year of my studies at the University of Oxford. My first year consisted of taking a medley of courses, ranging from Quantitative Methods to Poverty in a Comparative Context. Now, I am focusing mainly on writing my thesis, which has been advancing in a halting fashion (but advancing nonetheless!). I have sought to use my time out here to maximize my understanding of child welfare, so that when I come back to the states and begin my crusade for reform, I do so with a global perspective. I think I’ve developed this perspective, and I have over half a year more to keep developing it. Below are a few takeaways I have from studying child welfare systems around the world, as well as a short discussion on my thesis:
The Work-in-Progress Thesis: I’m still piecing this thesis together, but it has taken shape. All over the world, there has been this trend where countries with more punitive child protection orientations — characterized by legal investigations and interventions that occur after a child has been harmed — have been incorporating family support policies (or early prevention policies) into their child welfare systems. We see this take place in the United States, for example, with the Family First Prevention Services Act (FFPSA), which incrementally added early prevention elements into the nation’s child protection toolkit. Other countries have done the same — from Ireland to New Zealand — which is, facially, a promising trend. Before we celebrate, we should take a deep look at these policies, compare them, and see what led to their passage. That is precisely what I shall do in my thesis.
Specifically, I want to look at four countries: the United States, Canada, New Zealand, and Ireland. Each of these countries have historically been very heavy-handed in its child protection system (at least in recent history), opting to take kids from families rather than working to keep families together. Each shares a cultural understanding of what constitutes child neglect. And each, in the past decade, have passed early prevention/family support policies aimed at curbing the punitive approach to child protection.
But! When you actually look at the policies themselves, you see they are doing different things, sometimes dramatically so. One just frees up some more funds for prevention services, others create entirely new government agencies dedicated to supporting families. I want to explore these differences, and by doing so, create a more standard way to measure what constitutes early prevention.
I also want to see why these policies came to be. What made policymakers in these countries decide to pass policies that help families out, or at least designed to marginally steer their systems towards helping families out? Given the recent history in these countries — where many low-income families are deemed unworthy of being families — it is worth looking into what made policymakers change their hearts. So, in a nutshell, that’s what I’ll be looking at for my thesis.
A Global Struggle, A Persistent Challenge: Across virtually every country I’ve looked at, child welfare systems are struggling. This is true, especially, in Anglophone countries (the US, the UK, Australia, etc.), though not just these countries. Here are just some common challenges I’ve observed in several nations:
Poverty and Foster Care Entry: In the US, poverty explains so much about involvement in the child welfare system. Sadly, this is the case in several other developed countries as well. In the UK, researchers found poverty to be a ‘contributory causal factor’ for neglect, which itself is the leading cause associated with entry into foster care. This seems to be the case across multiple nations: in a diverse array of countries, poverty increases the risk of involvement in child welfare systems, either via increased rates of maltreatment or increased scrutiny. Obviously, this simplistic rendering of the issue flattens critical differences between countries, but it just demonstrates that poverty-driven neglect continues to confound policymakers all over the world.
The Tragedy of Aging Out: All over the world, kids who emancipate from foster care experience extremely poor outcomes. In Australia, in Japan, in Ireland, in Sweden, and so many other countries, children who age out must contend with a litany of challenges, such as lower educational attainment and increased incidences of mental illnesses. Systems still seem to struggle to safeguard the futures of the most vulnerable folks in foster care: emancipators.
Where It Applies, Indigenous Families Swept Up: In countries with sizable Indigenous populations, we see the same thing: a disproportionate number of Indigenous children involved in the foster care system. The stats are jaw-dropping:
As of 2021, Indigenous children in Canada accounted for just 7.7% of all children under 15 but more than half of all kids in foster care (53.8%).
In Australia, Aboriginal children are “placed in out-of-home care at a rate 11 times that of non-Aboriginal children.”
The Indigenous children of New Zealand — tamariki Māori — accounted for more than half of all children who entered foster care over the last decade.
Conclusion: Each of the above issues could be a newsletter in and of itself — and perhaps will be a newsletter sometime soon — but they all underscore that some of the most prominent issues confronting the US are shared by developed countries the world over.
3. Toxic Politics: As in the US, the politics of child welfare continues to be guided not by reasoned, cool, and calm debate, but by spasmodic jerks in attention, the result of scandals and crises (this is especially true in English-speaking countries). I discussed this in a previous newsletter when it come to the England, but in multiple countries, we see a similar dynamic unfold time and time again: a crisis occurs (such as the death of a child), the media jumps into a frenzy, and lawmakers rush out a policy that may address the initial crisis but invariably causes more harm than good. There doesn’t seem to be a mechanism to celebrate the system working well — that is, when it protects kids and keeps families whole — and all the incentives seem to drive coverage of the grimmest of stories. Whether its Australia, the United States, or England, child welfare seems to be beholden to the worst kind of politics. We should, we must, be able to rigorously investigate and prosecute the most tragic scandals (especially when it comes to the death of children) while not creating a system that simply funnels more families into the maw of foster care. Perhaps several countries can learn a thing or two from Denmark, which has had its share of scandals and tragedies, but “they have never reached the importance of setting sociopolitical agenda as, seems to be true, say, in England in similar cases.”
Conclusion
Again, I am so very appreciative of your patience! I promise I won’t leave y’all hanging for so long again. There’s a ton of things I want to write about over the next year, and I look forward to delivering impactful and relevant content to your inbox, twice a month!
Thank you for reading, and thank you for your subscription. I’ll forgo my traditional ending in favor of one last gentle reminder: please fill out this survey!
Ricky!! Yay!!!