In episode 216, we hear from US care reform leader, Sarah Winograd from Together for Families. Sarah speaks passionately about the complexities in child welfare and foster care as a system, how poverty contributes to family separation, and the problematic ways we’ve seen and judged birth families. She asks the hard questions- if most children aren’t coming into foster care because of abuse, what resources and systems are we investing in to keep those families together? What are we doing to intervene and stabilize families in order to prevent separation and keep children in families? Can the church do better?
- How Sarah became involved with vulnerable families and those in child welfare (4:56)
- Cross-cultural living in Belarus at a young age (5:32)
- The impact of early childhood experiences abroad (7:37)
- How do we see families experiencing poverty (8:22)
- Experience being a court appointed special advocate for children (11:16)
- Looking at the US Child Welfare and Foster Care as a system (16:15)
- Imagine being a case worker (19:19)
- How poverty contributes to family separation (22:59)
- The difficulty in accessing mental health services (26:04)
- One woman’s story (27:30)
- Engaging the community and leveraging a volunteer workforce (31:12)
- The role the church has to play (32:08)
- Breakdown of tax payer allocation towards human services in Georgia (35:38)
- These children have families (37:40)
- The opportunity for change (38:53)
- Investing more resources into prevention of family separation (40:17)
- Influential people on Sarah’s journey (46:53)
- Coming together to advocate for vulnerable families (49:30)
- Expanding our love and care to a vulnerable families and communities (53:57)
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