Beyond Tokenism: The Promise Of AntiRacist Community-led Approaches to Systems Change

I had the pleasure of interviewing for the Mosaic Foster Parents Cafe podcast two of the authors of a new article published in the Child Welfare League Journal that has got many of us in the child welfare system emphatically nodding our heads, YES.

The game-changing article is titled, “Beyond Human-centered Design: The Promise of Antiracist Community-centered Approaches in Child Welfare Program and Policy Design,” and it was written by two women whose amazing work I came across two years ago and who I have been admiring ever since.

Sonya Soni and Jermeen Sherman are doing the revolutionary work our human services systems so desperately need and they’re doing it across several vital mediums. They’re writing. They’re teaching. And they’re raising academic rigor to challenge the system on all fronts. Their lifelong work has culminated to this very moment, and I am so happy that I had the chance to speak with them.

Their article is full of research and case studies and is grounded in a simple but revolutionary premise: Our systems are not broken. But rather they are working exactly the way they were designed: to be reactionary rather than community-led, punitive rather than to promote health and healing. To prioritize power holders and saviour complexes rather than children, youth and families experiencing generational poverty and neglect at the hands of the system that claims to help.

We’ve all seen it. Social service agencies, particularly the child welfare system, hire so-called problem solvers who are not from the communities they serve. These consultants more often than not have ahistorical ideas and are apolitical to the context from which the folks they are serving live. They have academic degrees but no context. This results in agency leaders and policy leaders making life-altering decisions about needs and services without ever consulting service recipients, those with the most intimate knowledge of the problem at hand.

Sonya and Jermeen break down all the different ways this is done agency-wide. They also explain in detail why power within our agencies needs to be redistributed to lived experts so that people who need to be at the table can be there in a meaningful way rather than as tokens to rubber stamp policy decisions they were never a part of making.

I can’t stress enough the importance of my discussion with Sonya and Jermeen. What they share in their innovative article and on my podcast is what we need to make meaningful change across all of our agencies. Tune in, get inspired, and help make change happen.

Here’s more information on Sonya and Jermeen. See you at the Foster Parents Cafe!

Sonya Soni is currently a senior fellow placed at the Los Angeles County Department of Child and Family Services through Foster America, a non-profit organization founded by one of President Joe Biden’s domestic policy advisors, Sherry Lachman, which aims to build a more just child welfare system both nationally and locally. Sonya currently co-leads the Los Angeles County Youth Commission, the first-ever youth-led governing body with formal power in LA County that confronts inequities in the country’s largest local child welfare and juvenile justice systems.

Jermeen Sherman is a social impact consultant working to elevate community-led transformations across social services to improve life and generational outcomes of vulnerable communities. She combines the best of strategic and analytical thinking from the business world with an unrelenting commitment to social impact. She leverages cross-sector expertise in management consulting, business development, program design, and strategic communication to help organizations positively impact communities, implement strategic initiatives, and scale positive outcomes.

Beyond Human-Centered Design Additional Resources

Presentations/ documents:

• “Beyond Human-Centered Design: The Promise of Antiracist Community-Centered Approaches in Child Welfare Program and Policy Design” link here: https://www.cwla.org/child-welfare-journal/journal-archive)
• A toolkit of community organizing and community participatory methodologies and best practices that I have found most helpful while working in child welfare and local government
• Presentation on community participatory methods

Resources:

• “Design Justice: Community-led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need” by Sasha Constanza-Chock
• A list of resources and case studies that challenge HCD in child welfare and local government