On a Personal Note: "Best Practices" Must Not be Theoretical

Hello Friends,

This month I want to pick up on the points I made last month about the ways that 2N activates best practices in real life and pays serious attention when we know there is injustice and trauma introduced by the system. Here are some current examples.

Breaking down silos:

New partnership: Connect Our Kids. COK software radically increases placements of kids with kin and extended-kin. In this partnership, once children are (re)united with these families, 2N will follow-up to mobilize the new family’s existing community in support of this family, while also reaching out to other members to step up and foster. This way we will support kinship families and re-unifications along with other foster families.

Prioritizing Primary Families:

While seeking paperwork from social services to join a Second Nurture camping weekend, a 2N family learned that the biological father of “Jonah”, their two-year-old foster son, was legally eligible to parent his son. Despite this, Jonah had not ever lived with his father and instead had been moved through several foster families.

With the help of their 2N Family Support Specialist, the foster parents advocated for Jonah's father to be considered for placement. As a step towards this goal, they requested an increase in visits between Jonah and his dad and the transfer of Jonah's services to a more accessible agency in the father's neighborhood. This is still in process.

Strengthening Out of Home Care:

Foster families have challenges like any family, not just in relation to their child/ren. One of our families has an elderly grandparent in the home who has to be cared for 24/7. If outdoor spaces can't accommodate her mobility issues, the family cannot enjoy them and the child has less outdoor time than they want for her. Our Family Support Specialist makes sure that accessible playgrounds are available to our families who need them. And one of our cohort moms is working with the city to ensure more outdoor spaces are accessible to all.

“Best Practices” must not be theoretical—just words and ideas. Families and kids have to benefit in real life. Please, friends, when you read about Best Practices for fostering—ask where and how these are meaningfully implemented. They don’t matter on paper, only in life.

Rabbi Susan Silverman, 2N CEO

On a Personal Note: Living the Transformation

There is a lot of good thinking going on in the foster care worlds in Los Angeles and Columbus. In LA the Center for Strategic Partnerships is breaking open the way we define social services, to include a wider range of organizations and broader thinking. You can read about it here. In Columbus, recommendations for important change followed a governor’s advisory council and can be read here.

We are a small organization and we do work on the ground—not policy. But we benefit from the research and recommendations gathered from people who have personal experience in the system, those who work in it, academics and others who care deeply and offer their expertise.

2N does not rewrite policy and regulations. We e bring those best practices to the reality on the ground so that kids, families and society are served.

Many of the recommendations, we are happy to say, are built into our model.

Breaking down silos: Too often we all work in our own lanes, as if kids removed from their primary families are only impacted by the foster system.

2N works with partners across sectors because we know that the child is not in a vacuum. That is why we are partnering with Maryhaven’s addiction treatment center in Columbus, CASA, and Buckeye Ranch to foster kids whose parents are in residential treatment for addiction. That way we can best ensure on-going relationships between each parent and child. We can only do that if we work together.

Addressing Racism is the System: Brown and Black kids are removed from their primary families at an alarming rate.

2N is not made up of families whose primary objective is adoption. Our families’ primary objective is whatever is best for the child, even when letting go of that child really hurts. Our families take the risk of heartbreak because they know that is what kids suffer—and it is worth our own sadness to help soothe their souls. This means working closely with social workers and maintaining a relationship with the birth families to the best of our ability. Was the child removed for a reason that was circumstantial? This is why we have phenomenal partners like Change Reaction who address these circumstantial needs as early as possible to prevent disruption.

Strengthening Out of Home Care: When kids are in foster care, whether short-term or long-term, foster families need support—from each other, their communities and relevant experts.

2N arises from community. So more people feel supported enough to foster. This means emotional and practical support, like professional expertise. When a foster family needs, for example, speech therapy for a child, they don’t have to wait to get a spot from a county service or pay extraordinary fees for private sessions. They can get guidance from a certified speech therapist in their synagogue or church long-term or to at least bridge them until they get the public services they need.

2N is no nonsense. We want kids in the best possible families for them with the services and support they and their families need. And we will continue to live these best practices in our current communities as well as build our infrastructure so they can be lived in cities, counties and states nationwide.

Susan Silverman, 2N CEO

On a Personal Note: Holiness

In a past life I was a matchmaker. Now, I fulfill that impulse in my work life by bringing people and their organizations together. This summer’s month-long work trip was full of those synergies. In LA we co-hosted a Packing Event. Rob Scheer of Comfort Cases provided travel bags as well as items to fill them. The Book Foundation provided new books. Temple Israel of Hollywood donated a huge space. The She Ready Foundation provided financial support and volunteers. A 2N Cohort mom photographed the event. And about 75 people—from cohort families to people we had never met—packed the cases which were then brought to kids in the foster system who otherwise move from place to place with their things in trash bags. Like waste.

Which brings me to a more personal angle on an effort that brings so many different people together. I am a rabbi and I orient myself in a world of Jewish theology, customs, metaphors and history. Yet I have for years struggled with the word “holy”.

It is through my work bringing kids and families together in healthy and sustainable ways that I have come to a deep sense of what holiness is.

Holiness is the opposite of waste.

And every day I see people and organizations work to minimize waste—wasted childhoods, wasted opportunities to be loved and be a family, wasted potential and wasted hope.

And I am so blessed to be part of it.

Susan Silverman, CEO