Child welfare loses two heroes

There are not many true heroes in child welfare. Recently, we lost two of them.

Paul Vincent

Paul Vincent died on July 25. Paul led the child welfare division of the Alabama Department of Human Resources when it was the subject of a pioneering class-action lawsuit that demanded the system rebuild to emphasize keeping families together. (A member of NCCPR’s Board of Directors, Ira Burnim of the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, was co-counsel for the plaintiffs.) Paul welcomed the suit and worked hard to make it succeed.  And it did. For a while, Alabama was the unlikely leader in doing child welfare right – to the point that it made the front page of The New York Times. 

Paul also served on the “Marisol Panel,” an advisory group that grew out of a class-action lawsuit settlement in New York City. The group was strictly advisory. But because of who was on it, and because the head of New York City’s Administration for Children’s Services, Nicholas Scoppetta, surprised almost everyone by taking a lot of the panel’s advice, it did a lot to set in motion some of the changes for the better in  New York City. 

Then Paul founded the Child Welfare Policy and Practice Group, which issues outstanding reports on systems across the country, including Iowa, Indiana and Philadelphia. You can read more about Paul here. 

Karl Dennis 

Karl Dennis, the "father of Wraparound” -- or, as he preferred to call it, Unconditional Care -- died in June.  In a tribute to Dennis in Youth Today, David Osher writes: 

Karl also understood that each person and each context was unique and that settings, programs and even systems had to adapt to the youth and family rather than the opposite. Just as Karl never wrote off a young person, he never wrote off families even though most or perhaps all Kaleidoscope youth had experienced trauma, and agencies claimed the parents were hard to find and would not comply. He believed in family ties and understood that family included aunts, uncles, grandparents, even close friends, neighbors, and the whole tribe. Because Karl viewed families as valuable resources — and Kaleidoscope worked hard to find them — when they found them they treated them with respect and worked to earn trust, believing that wraparound should be family-driven. 

Karl understood the toxic impacts of language on people, worker-youth/family alliance, and organizational behavior. Karl insisted that his staff never applied the pejorative clinical language of “dysfunction” to families; rather, he saw systems that did not provide appropriate support to families and youth as dysfunctional. 

But it’s best to let Karl Dennis speak for himself, as he did in this presentation in 2009: