CSSP is proud to present a series of essays proposing actionable new insights and ideas about how to dramatically improve the well-being of children, young people, families, and communities, with racial justice as both an underlying value and a “North Star” goal. In keeping with CSSP’s bias for action, these essays revolve around two key questions: “What actions will help to achieve more equitable outcomes for children, youth, and families too often left behind in our society?” and “How will these actions counteract or reverse the historical, economic, social, and systemic forces that cause unjust outcomes?”
The essays are dedicated to the memory of one of CSSP’s two founders, Harold Richman, who along with his friend Tom Joe, established CSSP in 1979. Harold was in turn a friend and mentor to many members of CSSP’s board and staff. Scholar, teacher, and policy advocate, Harold’s advice to us was consistent: “Be dissatisfied by what you see and commit yourself to doing something about it,” he advised colleagues and generations of students. But Harold was not a fan of ill-informed action. He believed in using the best and latest knowledge to improve social policy. The essays in this CSSP series make available innovative ideas from influential leaders to do just that.
CSSP and the authors whose work is being published here offer ideas in multiple forms, designed to stimulate response, elicit interaction, and prompt action. Seven essays invite feedback and response. Six interviews with the authors further personalize their thoughts. And, CSSP will encourage dialogue around these ideas and recommendations through a variety of on-line learning sessions. We hope that you will share with us your reactions as well as your ideas in this on-going dialogue.
To learn more about the essays or to provide feedback, please email us.
Additional Resources
Table of Contents
- Essay 1. Introduction—Passing the Baton: New Directions for Helping All Children and Youth Succeed
Frank Farrow, Mark Joseph, and Leila Fiester - Essay 2. Values, Voice, and an Equitable Vision of Validity
Jara Dean-Coffey - Essay 3. Winning on Equity
Michael McAfee - Essay 4. Building Power to Advance Health Equity and Racial Justice
Tony Iton - Essay 5. Mobilizing Youth Movements to Achieve Equitable Outcomes for Children, Families, and Communities at Scale
Austin Thompson - Essay 6. Balancing Adversity with HOPE: Reshaping Policies and Systems Around Positive Childhood Experiences
Bob Sege - Essay 7. Community Leadership in a Time of Crisis and Trauma
Sondra Samuels
Passing the Baton: New Directions for Helping All Children and Youth Succeed
Authored by:
- Frank Farrow, CSSP Senior Fellow & President Emeritus
- Mark Joseph, Professor, Case Western Reserve University
- Leila Fiester, Founder, InDepthInk LLC
Jump to:
- The inspiration for this series of essays
- A perspective for shaping the future
- How the essays will be organized
- The urgency of acting now
Our friend and mentor, Harold Richman—scholar, teacher, and policy advocate—believed in taking action to right society’s wrongs. “Be dissatisfied by what you see and commit yourself to doing something about it,” he advised students and colleagues. “Once you internalize that, get to work in whatever way you can.” But Harold was not a fan of ill-informed action. A lifelong student of society himself, he believed in using the best and latest knowledge to improve social policy. Without a fundamental understanding of what strategies, resources, supports, and opportunities can be brought to bear to make society more “generous and forthcoming” to those who need it most, Harold said, “you’re just playing around the edges.”
This series of essays honors Harold’s values and commitment by capturing powerful, actionable new insights and ideas about how to improve dramatically the well-being of our nation’s children, young people, and families. In keeping with Harold’s principles, this volume positions racial equity and justice as both a value and a “North Star” goal. In keeping with Harold’s priorities, the volume focuses on strategies at the intersections of communities, systems, and policies that shape the outcomes experienced by children, youth, and families. And in keeping with Harold’s bias for action, this volume revolves around two key questions about community strategies, systems, and policies: “What actions will help to achieve more equitable outcomes for marginalized children, youth, and families?” and “How will these actions counteract or reverse the forces that cause inequitable outcomes?”
Near the end of his life, Harold was asked to articulate his vision for U.S. social policy. His response was that children born in this country are entitled to adequate food, shelter, clothing, health care, education, and love so they are “equipped to make a place for themselves in the world—and that those rights are actually met by society.”
But by almost any measure, too many children growing up in
American communities do not enjoy those rights, and society has done far too little to fulfill them. The rights, well-being, and opportunities that Harold spoke of continue to be in jeopardy, especially for children and families who have been marginalized by poverty, lack of opportunity, and systemic racism.
The data on the challenges that marginalized families and communities face are well known but still appalling, especially as they are not randomly distributed. Negative outcomes are increasingly predictable, correlating closely with poverty, race/ethnicity, and place. Poorer children have dramatically worse outcomes than middle and upper income children, and the likelihood of negative outcomes increases almost linearly as income and wealth decrease. On every measure, children of color fare less well than White children. And children who grow up in neighborhoods afflicted with poverty, few jobs, scarce resources, and deteriorated housing are much more likely to have lifelong poor health, to drop out of or not complete school, to experience more unemployment and have fewer job prospects, and to start their own families without the economic resources to support the next generation. These outcomes occur not only for children and youth in cities but in many rural and tribal areas, too—places where economic investment has been low, jobs are scarce, and fewer resources are devoted to health and education. In particular:
- Too many children face challenges in their earliest years, with over 25 percent of American children born into poverty. Poverty rates are even higher for young children of color, with 44 percent of African American children and 42 percent of American Indian and Alaska Native children under age six living in poverty.1
- Too many children enter kindergarten without the preparation they need to succeed in school and with schools unprepared or under-resourced to meet their needs. Fewer than half (48 percent) of poor children are ready for school at age five, compared to 75 percent of children from families with moderate and high income.2
- School success is far from guaranteed for too many young people. Nineteen percent of high school students do not graduate on time, with starkly higher rates for African American, American Indian and Alaska Native youth (32 percent) and Hispanic and Latino young people (24 percent). One in seven young adults ages 16 to 24 is not attending school or working—totaling 5.6 million “disconnected” youth.3
- As the labor market changes and postsecondary education becomes even more important for future economic success, many young adults lack the skills, education, and experience they’ll need to succeed and adapt in today’s labor market. Fewer than half (48 percent) of young adults ages 18 to 24 were enrolled in or completed college in 2013,4 a missed opportunity that can have lifelong negative consequences. Adults with a bachelor’s degree earn more than double the weekly income of those without a high school diploma, while the unemployment rate for adults without a high school diploma is nearly three times the rate for adults with a bachelor’s degree (9 percent vs. 3.5 percent).5
The disparities in outcomes by race, income, and place have been decades and generations in the making. Their roots are complex and involve historical patterns of oppression and marginalization, disparate patterns of opportunity (or the lack of it), institutional racism, White supremacy, and the way that wealth is accumulated (or not) from generation to generation. The consequences of this structural concentration of disadvantage are intergenerational and society-wide: We are rapidly becoming a less equal and less upwardly mobile society, and if we do not confront these structural injustices boldly and comprehensively, more generations of children and young people will have their opportunities for a bright future curtailed. The urgency of opposing systemic oppression and advancing anti-racist systems and policies is increasing with time, not dissipating.
The present does not have to dictate our future, however. None of these patterns are inevitable, although they are by now deep-seated. As the essays in this volume attest, action can and must be taken to reverse the trends and forces just described. We know more today about what children, youth, and families need than we are currently using to counteract the institutionalized forces of discrimination, racism, nationalism, and oppression that contribute to racial and economic inequality. This volume seeks to accelerate change by presenting recommendations designed to confront and dismantle the systems, policies, and practices that fuel those trends and replace them with more just, inclusive, and effective ones.
The inspiration for this series of essays
Harold Richman, whose work and way of working inspired this volume, played an unusual and perhaps unique role in setting the direction of child and family programs, systems, and policy in the last decades of the 20th century and the early years of the 21st. His thoughts and approaches influenced a great many people and affected decisions in academia, philanthropy, and government over many years. His influence still can be felt in areas as diverse as neighborhood-based service delivery, where Harold was one of the first people to identify the importance of informal supports; community change and place-based work, where his leadership of the Aspen Roundtable on Community Change helped seed the literature of that field; and child welfare system reform, where, for example, his chairmanship of the advisory committee for the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation’s Children’s Program helped put in motion the movement that led to federal legislation on family preservation and family support.
Equally as influential was Harold’s legacy at the University of Chicago and as a creator of organizations. As professor and, for many years, dean of the university’s School of Social Services Administration, he taught thousands of students and mentored many hundreds among them. Many of his students have now become leaders in research, human services delivery, and public policy. Simultaneously, Harold started or helped start several organizations that continue to be active and influential today. He co- founded the Center for the Study of Social Policy in Washington, DC in the late 1970s, and CSSP remains active as a national policy and technical assistance organization 40 years later. He founded the Chapin Hall Center for Children in 1985, and it continues to be one of the nation’s premier research institutions focused on children and families. Harold was instrumental in setting up children’s policy centers in South Africa, Ireland, Israel, and Jordan in the 1980s and 1990s; many of those institutions, too, carry on important research and policy advocacy in their respective nations.
Harold’s creation of environments in which people could learn and take action was the work he most enjoyed, but his motivation was deeper than personal satisfaction. His devotion to nurturing students and fledgling organizations grew from a conviction that a constant pipeline of committed, knowledgeable leaders and more numerous knowledge- and innovation-based organizations were essential to make progress in improving child and family well-being. He knew that forward motion—whether at the community, systems, or policy level—requires people and organizations to sustain it.
A perspective for shaping the future
Applying the recommendations in this series of essays will require a different way of thinking and acting than we have used in the past. Each essay sets forth the author’s best sense of how to do that in various domains. Across the essays, several common themes emerge, in addition to the overarching theme of racial justice. Together, the themes provide perspective for viewing both the problems and the solutions. Each theme is fundamental to improving child well-being, yet the answer—and the challenge—lies in advancing all of them simultaneously and in a coherent fashion in order to realize their full, cumulative power.
The first theme is the importance of grounding solutions in an understanding of the experiences of children and young people and their families. This point would be obvious if it weren’t so often ignored. A startling gap often exists between the practice, program, and policy recommendations made on behalf of families and the realities of life for children, youth, and families who have been marginalized and denied opportunity. This reflects the tendency of researchers, policy makers, practitioners, and elected officials to talk about the people whose lives are most affected by public systems or community initiatives rather than supporting them to speak for themselves and making it possible for them to help set agendas for action. By contrast, the authors in this volume ground their recommendations in action, research, observation, and experience that is more authentically aligned with the realities of people’s lives.
A second, closely related theme is the importance of relationships,
primary supports, social networks, and connections of all types in people’s lives and as essential ingredients in any strategy to improve child and family outcomes. It has become a truism that the key to successful interventions that help children, youth, and families is “relationships, relationships, relationships,” but some truisms also are true. Previously considered “soft” elements of systems change, community change, and even policy change, these connections have been identified by scientific inquiry and by the fields of neurobiology and epigenetics as significant at a depth we may not have imagined. Relationships of all sorts—from the earliest “serve and return” between parents and children to the complex ties that bind people together in large organizations—are the building blocks of successful human development, often propel social change, and can make the difference between success and failure of any innovation. Moreover, increasing the forms of support and assistance that create, nurture, and restore those relationships often are the most productive public- or private-sector investments.
A third theme is that multi-sectoral, multi-generational strategies are required to address the complex circumstances faced by vulnerable children, youth, and families. The issues described in these essays occur in both the private and public spheres; in fact, the authors maintain that only by combining private- and public-sector solutions—by leveraging market forces as well as the equitable and inclusionary influence of government—can the most urgent problems be solved and better outcomes for children and families achieved. The essays underscore a shift from programmatic, small-scale interventions to a systemic frame for change. And, as noted earlier, the essays focus on strategies that involve the intersection of the communities, systems, and policies that affect children’s and families’ lives.
A fourth theme is the importance of place and community—including communities that are not bound by place—as primary contexts for structural inequity and effective social change. More often than not, place and community are the environments in which many other themes (including lived experience; supports, networks, and connections; multifaceted strategies; equity and inclusion; and leadership) are manifested. A burgeoning body of evidence indicates the negative impacts of high-poverty environments on the life chances of children and their families. Tactically, a “place-conscious” focus allows for capitalizing on the synergy and targeted impact facilitated through a focus on a defined place while also paying attention to the role of systems and regional dynamics beyond that place.
A fifth theme recognizes that a focus on place and community—important as these are—is in itself not enough: increased power on the part of adults and young people living in urban and rural areas challenged by high poverty and limited opportunity is necessary in order to achieve change. This power must take hold across multiple dimensions: power of voice when decisions are made, electoral power to have representation and shape policy, power to shape public narratives and social and cultural expectations, and power to advocate for the systems and policies and opportunities that can make a positive difference for their children, their communities, and themselves.
A sixth unifying framework in these essays focuses on the desired
end of all of this work: a life course for children and young people that is built around healthy development, access to opportunity, achievement of pivotal milestones, and strong family and community ties. This theme bundles together many concepts that are gathering force as people innovate in order to achieve better results at greater scale. In some fields, this direction is referred to as a strong results or outcomes orientation, one that focuses efforts on a clear statement of the condition of child or family well-being to be achieved. In other domains, this concept is referred to as a focus on “life course.” We suggest that these are part and parcel of the same goal: framing all interventions and strategies by starting with the desired end (a whole, healthy, and successful life) in mind and mapping backward to make sure the necessary aligned contributions are made. This theme also embraces a broader definition of evidence in understanding “what works.”
Finally, many of the change strategies discussed in this volume envision a change process that pays much more attention than in the past to the roles and characteristics of the people, organizations, and institutions that lead and sustain change, and to ensuring that the people who tackle the tough job of changing systems or transforming communities have the necessary skills and support. Here the alignment between the themes of this volume and the values and work of Harold Richman comes full circle: Developing new leaders and effective institutions for the next generation was one of Harold’s longest-lasting legacies.
How the essays will be organized
Each essay in this series addresses an important topic related to improving child and family well-being by tracings the origins of a challenge, envisioning a different future, and charting a course to get there. The recommendations are practical, feasible, and actionable. Their message is that dramatic improvements will require fundamental and long-term changes to many aspects of American society, but the bridges from here to there are manageable and capable of producing results within the next decade.
The authors come at these themes from many directions. Jara Dean-Coffey offers a call to action to develop and use a more equitable approach to knowledge development and the use of evidence, with transformed attention to voice and a more inclusive approach to validity. Michael McAfee challenges individuals and organizations to engage in the personal growth and organizational changes that are necessary for a racial justice and anti-racist lens to pervade policy and systems that support children, youth, and families. Robert Sege portrays and recommends the use of breakthroughs in developmental science, brain science, epigenetics, and neurobiology, and their potential to transform human services policy and practice. Austin Belali writes about the importance of movement building as an essential vehicle for change. Sondra Samuels describes the challenges and opportunities in developing leadership for complex community change at the individual, collaborative, and organizational levels. Tony Iton suggests future directions for uniting “people power” with policy and systems change to accomplish needed transformation in health outcomes and the broad social determinants of health.
The urgency of acting now
The essay authors have one more thing in common: a sense of urgency. For every year that passes without dramatic improvements in promoting healthy development for infants and toddlers and preventing early trauma, we compromise the lifelong health of hundreds of thousands of young children and youth. With every five years that passes without major improvement in academic outcomes for poor children and children of color, we have several million young people who will not be able to earn the wages to start and maintain thriving families of their own. And for every decade that goes by without major gains in these and many other areas, we lose too many members of another generation of young people.
Harold Richman certainly felt this urgency acutely. As a long-time friend and former student of his once recalled, Harold often greeted people with two questions: “How are you?” And, “What are you doing to change the world?” The ideas advanced in this book are only a partial response to that vital second question. But if they inspire and inform the creative efforts of the many other people who are driving change, we all may be able to heed Harold’s admonition to stop “playing around the edges.” In that sense, this volume represents a passing of the baton. This is what we know. Now it’s time for the next generation of change agents in the field, using this knowledge, to take social welfare policy and practice to the next level.
To learn more about the essays or to provide feedback, please email us.
Sources
1 Center for the Study of Social Policy. (March 2014). “Results-based Public Policy Strategies for Reducing Child Poverty.” Retrieved online.
2 Brookings Institute. (March 2012). “Starting School at a Disadvantage: The School Readiness of Poor Children.” Retrieved online.
3 Opportunity Nation, “Who are the 5.6 million disconnected youth, and how did they end up so off-course?” Retrieved online.
4 KIDS COUNT Data Center. “Young Adults Ages 18 to 24 Who are Enrolled in or Have Completed College.” Retrieved online.
5 Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Employment Projections 2015.” Retrieved online.
Values, Voice, and an Equitable Vision of Validity
Authored by:
Jara Dean-Coffey
Director, Equitable Evaluation Initiative
Read a Q & A with author Jara Dean-Coffey.
Jump to:
So here we are, beginning the third decade of the 21st century. The United States is increasingly diverse demographically, reflecting a great variety of experiences, perspectives, and insights. Data continue to have a powerful role in our understanding of ourselves, each other, and our collective, albeit divided, American society. 2020’s racial justice awakening, stemming from a deeper understanding of the ways in which structural racism contributes to inequity, and from the disproportionate toll that COVID-19 has taken in different racial communities, has made it more challenging, going forward, to ignore some truths about this country that have always been so.
This dynamic and complex reality cannot be reduced to the simplified expressions of data often depicted in dashboards and charts. There is growing acknowledgment that “voice” brings life to data that, often, are quantitative. This voice tends to be that of the people most impacted by specific conditions or outcomes. Their experiences and perceptions are increasingly considered when designing, implementing, or evaluating the strategies and programs that contribute to healthy, thriving, and sustainable communities. Still, although story and narrative are increasingly seen as meaningful and important, they are rarely considered to be “data” or “evidence.” Why?
It’s about validity—whether the data are considered sound, cogent, and factually acceptable. Sociopolitical decisions, policies, systems, and structures have long been shaped by methods that inherently give greater value and validity to certain types of data and analysis than to others.1 The dominant (e.g., White and Western) concept of validity remains grounded in a preference for that which is empirical and objective and lends itself to quantitative representation.2 Diversity and lived experience often are merely used to “color” the analysis. A construct of validity that reflects equity would more fully express the many dimensions of individual identity and the many elements—organizations, systems, and networks—that define the uniqueness of communities.
This essay considers what validity represents, who defines it, and how those definitions implicitly or explicitly reinforce hidden values and intentions. I then suggest a frame for validity (informed by and building on the work of others) that can deepen our understanding of complex environments, create more accurate narratives about what is working for whom (and how), and move us closer to a world that affirms human dignity and puts equity and liberation within grasp.
Concepts of Validity
It is important to understand how we got here so we can determine how to get to somewhere new. Several dominant research and evaluation paradigms have informed how we tend to conceptualize validity. They include:
- Positivism, which views data as “something that exists, are [already] there, and are observable… there is no relationship between the self and knowledge,”3 and post-positivism, which acknowledges that “divisions between objectivity and subjectivity, or public and private knowledge, or scientific and emotional knowledge, are socially constructed”;4
- Social constructionism,5 which states that reality is socially constructed and is interested in how these constructs come to be;
- Pluralism and pragmatism6—the former being the view that multiple truths and versions of rightness exist, and the latter a belief that there is “a” right—a singularity; and
- Critical realism,7 which asserts that there is a world independent of human beings that has deep structures and that the structures can be represented by scientific theories, which are central to this paradigm.
Each of these paradigms tackle one or more of three core questions posed by Guba and Lincoln:8 1) what the form and nature of reality is and, therefore, what can be known about it; 2) what the nature of the relationship is between the knower (or would-be knower) and what can be known; and 3) how the inquirer (would-be knower) can go about finding out whatever he or she believes can be known. What is missing from all of these paradigms, however, is the axiological question that asks:
[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=” link=” color=” class=” size=”]What kind of information and knowledge, if any, is fundamentally and inherently valuable and important; what (whose) assumptions does the information reflect; and what (whose) intention does the information advance?[/perfectpullquote]
That unasked question matters because who we are matters, as does where we stand in relation to place and power. Those attributes affect what we see, what we believe, and how we make sense of (i.e., validate) things. They also shape the questions we ask (and don’t ask)
