Full Circle Family Engagement

11/03/2025

When discussing ways to change or enhance child welfare practice, I am often asked where can we start?

From my own learning, I know that a vital place to begin is asking questions that will take a deep dive into how we interact with people, asking ourselves what language are we using, and are we recognizing the messages we are truly sending to and about the families we are to be in service of?

All too often, we do not realize how we are undermining and weakening families rather than supporting them to heal and strengthen themselves.

This is particularly noticeable in foster care campaigns. If you did a quick internet search for top foster care campaigns you would get tons of slogans and taglines such as:

“Let’s Raise the Bar: provide a safe & loving home”
“Open your heart, open your home”
“Every Child Deserves a Home”
“Fostering Hope, Changing Lives”
“Be the Change in a Child’s Life”
“Love Makes a Family”
“Transforming Lives, One Child at a Time”
“Foster Care: Where Love Begins”
“Every Child Deserves a Chance”
“Foster Love, Foster Hope”
“Creating Families, Building Futures”
“Foster Care: A Journey of Love”
“Together, We Can Make a Difference”
“Every Child Needs a Champion”
“Foster Care: Healing Hearts”
“Home is Where the Heart Is”
“Changing the World, One Child at a Time”
“Foster Care: Love in Action”
“Giving Children a Brighter Future”
“Every Child Deserves to Be Loved”
“Be a Hero: Foster a Child”
“Fostering Dreams, Building Hope”
“Foster Care: The Heart of the Community”
“Every Child Deserves a Family”
“Foster Care: Changing Lives Forever”
“It Pays to be a Good Parent”
“I Don’t Need your Sympathy, I Need You”
“Foster Dreams and Raise Hope”
“Foster Care, Foster Family, Foster Strength, Foster Healing, Foster Love”
“Let Love In: Foster Parents Needed”

These are all meant to evoke an emotional response in communities to gain interest in becoming paid by your local CAS/CPS to care for children and youth.

Building community starts with respect and integrity. Child welfare agencies need to stop perpetuating a narrative that says parents who are struggling and need real support lack what people better than them can readily give. It is more than time to be honest and open about agencies continuing to use foster care campaigns that undermine families and their abilities to heal, problem solve, and protect the children they love. Imagine all the healing, strength and the love in action that would happen if all the time, money and resources that go into these campaigns went directly to families and community building instead. Let families be their own heroes.

10/27/2025

Are you in a human service profession? In no particular order, if you take a moment to reflect on your career to date, ask yourself, how much time, effort, and attention has gone into your participation in things like:

- mandatory trainings
- weekly meetings
- lunch and learns
- webinars
- guest speakers
- collaborative committees
- innovation projects
- assessments
- audits
- court forms and affidavits
- consent for information
- identity data collection
- case consultations
- checklists
- sidebar chats
- labour relations
- funding cuts
- new pockets of funding
- grant writing
- charity drives
- reorganization
- rebranding
- community partnership
- social media campaigns
- mileage and time sheets
- vacation banks, sick time, seniority lists, and lieu time calculations

Then ask yourself how any or all of that has contributed to the healing, health and wellbeing of the people of whom you and your agency are in service of, what would your answer be? What would the people on the receiving end of said services be?

Having a lengthy career in Ontario child welfare myself, I’d venture a guess that many of you might say none of the above really matters if you do not have good relationships with the people you work for or the people you work with.

How will you show up differently?
Who will you be in your work?
What relationship are you really offering?

10/27/2025

10/03/2025

“…. where there is no us and them, there’s just us.” ♥️💫

Fr. Gregory Boyle, S.J., MDiv. '84, urged Boston College School of Social Work students to embrace ‘radical kinship’ in their work during a Q&A at the school; he was on campus in September to speak at First year Convocation. READ ➡️ https://on.bc.edu/FrBoyleSSW

09/30/2025

09/30/2025

Truth and Reconciliation is not a checklist, it is not an annual event, it is not simply wearing an orange t-shirt. It is listening, learning, it is acknowledging, accepting, it is action for human rights, for decolonization, for 94 Calls to Action, for remembering, and for restoration in all that we do. 🧡💫

“Today is a day of mourning, but also a day of promise. The promise that we will not turn away. That we will carry these truths in our bodies like medicine. That we will walk slowly, together, on the path that leads home. For the children. For the Ancestors. For all of us.”

On this day of Truth and Reconciliation, we pause.
We listen.
We remember.

Across this land, the dawn rises over rivers that once carried children away from their homes. Mist lifts from the lakes where grandmothers once sang lullabies now lost to silence. Cedars still hold the breath of prayers whispered in secret. Stones still hold the weight of small bodies never returned. The earth remembers. The wind remembers.

We stand in the presence of that memory, on land older than any boundary. We stand where moccasins wore paths to ceremony, where drums beat like heartbeats against the night. The loons still call across the water. The wolves still watch from the tree line. The sky still arcs wide enough to hold our grief.

Creator, Ancestors, Grandmothers and Grandfathers — we ask for courage. Courage to open our eyes to the truth that has always been here. Courage to let that truth soften our hearts instead of harden them. Courage to walk a different path than the one that brought us here.

On this day we remember the children who never came home. We remember the parents who wept without answers. We remember the families who have carried silence as their inheritance. We remember the Elders who kept the language alive in whispers, the ones who refused to forget.

We hold this silence not as an end but as a beginning. We commit ourselves to be the generation that chooses relationship over denial, that plants love in the places where pain has taken root. We commit to listening until our listening turns into action. We commit to making the land safe again for every child, every voice, every dream.

May the rivers teach us how to move forward.
May the trees teach us how to stand.
May the stones teach us how to endure.
May the fire teach us how to transform.

Today is a day of mourning, but also a day of promise. The promise that we will not turn away. That we will carry these truths in our bodies like medicine. That we will walk slowly, together, on the path that leads home.

For the children. For the Ancestors. For all of us.

09/16/2025

Child protection professionals cannot wait for the system itself to change. The system works as it is designed to. Compliance checklists give the illusion of safety and wellbeing.

Each professional must go beyond the standards if they want to help families through their most vulnerable moments. It could be near impossible to truly do this if we do not take the time to get to know families.

Ask better questions to connect strengths and abilities to lived experiences that will bring forward sustainable change through relational health. There is no problem too big that a family cannot solve, they are their own resource and professionals have a responsibility to nourish that.

09/02/2025

It is not uncommon to attend a child protection planning meeting where one or more of the professionals expresses that they “are feeling stuck.”

It is really important to use that moment to stop the “planning meeting” and take the opportunity to nurture a vital discussion on unpacking that stuck feeling.

Questions to be posed:
- what is it that you are most stuck about?
- what is needed to shift momentum?
- who is really stuck?
- is the family feeling stuck, and if so, for the same reasons as the professionals?
- how do we know? what has the family expressed… have they been asked?
- how many planning meetings has the family been invited to?
- if we are overwhelmed at the number of professionals in the planning meeting, could it not be reasonable that the family is too?
- are we putting language into action, and by whose definition?

We have a responsibility to ask ourselves better questions, and supportively challenge our teams to unpack what is truly fueling that stuck feeling. Otherwise, the status quo perpetuates and helping families build their own capacity and trusting them to sustain their own way forward remains lip service rather than genuine contribution to meaningful change.