"Share Your Perspective" Paper on Race Equity in Child Welfare

Family Voices United launches regular "Share Your Perspective" questions on timely topics relating to child welfare. This new paper asks experts with lived experience across the country, "What changes can be made to reduce racial biases in child welfare? (e.g. child welfare workers, families, attorneys and judges, and others involved in the child welfare system)?"  

Lived Experience Experts identified the following priorities in response to the question:

1. Biases exist in child welfare, and we all must commit to understanding personal biases and working to unlearn them
2. We need representation, in both race and lived experience, at all levels of the child welfare system
3. Training and education must be mandatory and intentionally focused on historical context of racism in the child welfare system, mitigating implicit biases, and cultural humility
4. Culturally relevant placements and young people maintaining cultural ties must be prioritized
5. Accountability to reducing biases must be built into the processes throughout all aspects of the child welfare system
6. Supporting children, young people, and families must remain at the core of everything done in child welfare

Please click here to access the full paper and read quotes from young people with experience in foster care, birth parents, kinship and relative caregivers, and foster/ resource and adoptive parents.