My senior year internship has been at a field placement in preventive services. Everyone knows that the Association of Child Services (ACS) is this group of evil social workers who come in to happy homes and take children from their loving family situation. Well, now I can tell you what actually happens. What actually happens is a report is made if a child misses too much school, if there's a domestic violence incident - essentially if a child is reported as being unsafe in any way - then ACS does a 30 day investigation to determine whether there is a safety concern. After that investigation ACS either takes the child out of the home and puts the child temporarily into foster care until the home/family situation can be deemed safe (courts always get involved), or something else happens - that's not my job so I don't know too much about it. I do know that usually those temporary foster homes are kin or next of kin. There's a lot of knitty gritty detail there.
Let me tell you about my job instead. Preventive service comes in when ACS refers cases to the agency. Cases like that are usually to prevent the family from being separated, or to bring a family back together after having been separated. Essentially, the preventive services department at my agency is a referral based agency. Get a case, make assessments, send kids to tutoring, mentoring, after school programs, counseling, drug tests, etc. Send parents to parenting classes, support groups, therapy, anger management, rehab, and all that other stuff too. A lot of parents have children in foster care. A lot of those parents were in foster care as children. Studies have shown that parents who were in foster care are more likely to have children who end up in foster care. Sad but true. So I make referrals, counsel my clients, make visits at schools and at homes, meet with teachers, other case workers, collaborate with a million other agencies and services - then write it all down so that everything is documented.
Working in child welfare is certainly a difficult task. Most of the clients are referred, or mandated - very few cases are parents seeking advocacy. Some clients are willing to do what they need to do in order to close their case and create a positive environment for their family. Some clients will do everything they can do to give their case planner a hard time and get them out of their face - sometimes in the most difficult and complex way possible.
There are two things working in child welfare has taught me. 1) This job is hard work. Every day is an emotional roller coaster because everything you do is reliant on the cooperation of everyone else. Clients and collaborators can almost never be trusted to complete what is asked of them, and even if they are trusted, case planners still have to be on their butt to make sure things are getting done so that the case can close. We are supposed to have a 12 month turnover rate. The day is full of chasing people around, calling different numbers, and going to different locations because no one will return your email, fax, phone call, or mail. The people who do cooperate make you kind of want to hug them, or send them a thank you card. Hours can keep a person working as late as 9pm in and out of dangerous neighborhoods in Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Harlem - I haven't heard of many cases in Manhattan through our agency though. We're mostly Brooklyn based. I work in areas of the city that I probably would have never ventured to otherwise, so I'm grateful to the different version of New York that I may not have experienced otherwise. Most of the neighborhoods look the same. There's a million nail and hair salons, liquor and wine on every corner, lots of shelters and project buildings, playgrounds every few blocks, mostly buses and not as many subways, some kind of 'metro deli' every where you go, and in the more populated areas there's always a burger king, popeyes, or mcdonalds.
2) The second thing that working in child welfare has taught me is that you are never going to be rewarded for doing this hard work, at least not through praise or salary. ACS and preventive services are hard industries that have forgotten empathy, and done everything possible to ignore the fact that this is an emotionally difficult field to work in. There's not very much debriefing going on for workers who have cases everyday with crack addicts, prostitutes, pimps, angry clients, overly attached clients, clients who do nothing for themselves, clients who think you are there to do everything for them, etc. Sometimes you work with people who want to work with you but their children are still getting arrested for assault. Sometimes you work with people who scream at you, belittle, and disrespect you as best they can, kick you out of their apartments before you finish your job. Workers are sometimes put into dangerous situations, or scary situations. For example, the female worker has to monitor the daughter visiting her father at Riker's Island Prison. The father was locked up for rape, assault, or something equally as intimidating. These are just every day situations. If the client is non-compliant we have elevated risk conferences, sometimes have to call police... sometimes clients call police or threaten to sue us for doing our jobs. I think you get the picture. All that for $36,000 a year. Oof. Is it worth it? Well, there are moments when your supervisor says you've done good work and have a good turnover rate. There's times when your client isn't giving you a hard time. Sometimes clients will tell me they love me. Sometimes I get a thank you just for listening. When I go to the children's schools and take them out of class to meet with me, they are always appreciative. After my teenage clients start improving their grades, going to school regularly, and getting excited about their future, or my parent clients start taking their medicine regularly, and attending therapy - yeah. I'd say that those big changes are beautiful and can make it worth the rough hours and low wages. But the working through ambivalence towards change part can be rough.
I'm learning a lot from my agency, and a lot about child welfare and working with alllll kinds of different people. I've become really close with the girl that I intern with, and I'm friends with a few of my coworkers. My goal was to make something good in the environment because otherwise it is high stress, high tension, many deadlines - all the time.
Friday night happy hour is always something to look forward to.
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