Podcast: Equity in Child Welfare Evaluation

How can child welfare programs advance racial equity through evaluation?

This podcast series follows Senior Research Associate and Equity Director Grace Atukpawu-Tipton, Ph.D., M.S.W., as she talks with experts in racial and ethnic equity, disparity, and disproportionality in child welfare and other human service systems. Join them as they explore approaches and methods to apply an equity framework in the evaluation of child welfare programs and practices. All four episodes are available on SoundCloud or wherever you get your podcasts.

1. Cultural Humility and Community Partnership. Senior Research Associate Tess Abrahamson-Richards, M.P.H., a member of the Spokane Tribe in Washington State, draws on her extensive experience to share lessons learned in conducting evaluations involving Native communities. She discusses the importance of bringing cultural humility, partnering with communities throughout the entire evaluation process, and including American Indian/Alaska Native as a demographic category in data sets.
2. Implicit Bias and Stigma. Since 2005, Rita Cameron Wedding, Ph.D., professor of Women’s Studies and Ethnic Studies at Sacramento State University, has used her curriculum Implicit Bias: Impact on Decision-Making to train judges, public defenders, and practitioners in child welfare, juvenile justice, law enforcement, and education throughout the United States. She shares examples from her experience on topics including benefits and barriers to incorporating an equity perspective in evaluation, methods for identifying and addressing implicit bias, and strategies for avoiding perpetuating stigma in language used in child welfare practice and research contexts.
3. Family and Community Voice. Alan Dettlaff, Ph.D., is dean and inaugural Maconda Brown O’Connor Endowed Chair of the Graduate College of Social Work at the University of Houston. Through his extensive work in addressing the impacts of structural and institutional racism on children of color in child welfare, he shares his thoughts on engaging families that have experienced fear and trauma in child welfare research and evaluation, valuing and understanding qualitative data, and elevating the voices of families in the research process.
4. Diversity, Engagement, and Co-Creation. Jessica Pryce, Ph.D., assistant professor and director of the Florida Institute for Child Welfare at Florida State University, draws on her experience with child welfare research in highlighting family resiliency, focusing on equity to address gaps in service access and delivery, increasing diversity in research teams, and involving individuals and communities with lived experience in child welfare in the co-creation of research and evaluation.

This series was produced for the Children’s Bureau and is especially relevant for child welfare discretionary grantees in planning and implementing evaluations of their funded projects.