Our Child Welfare Development Services (CWDS) program Director, Dawn Schoonhoven Scott, convenes the Southern Child Welfare Directors regularly throughout the year to provide a space for our region’s leaders to share information, resources, barriers, and strategies to enhance our work. The purpose of this group is to align and coordinate our efforts as a region and to identify opportunities for collaboration, partnership, and advocacy.

During our May meeting we were joined by Dr. Anita Barbee from the Kent School of Social Work and Family Science at the University of Louisville and the Children’s Bureau Quality Improvement Center for Workforce Development. Dr. Barbee presented on strategies other jurisdictions have used to enhance retention and engage our region’s leaders in planning new recruitment and retention strategies to build upon what we already have in place in Southern California. Ideas were explored such as:

• How to create new positions at a variety of levels to break up the work that is currently done by social workers (for example, creating more administrative support positions and dividing the task assignments differently across employees)
• Developing new recruitment pipelines such as high school level or community colleges to engage future employees earlier in the process and provide realistic job previews and engage them in the field

Some counties shared exciting strategies they are currently using to support and retain staff such as:

• Conducting stay interviews and then developing stay plans in which they map out what concrete steps are needed in order to help a social worker stay with the agency
• Training supervisors in new leadership skills to better support staff in processing their experiences and learning in the field
• Hiring additional staff psychologists or other positions designed to support social workers in managing vicarious trauma

As some of our counties continue to experience challenges with staff, the Academy for Professional Excellence is creating spaces for our leaders to learn from one another and other jurisdictions and engage in concrete planning to meet the needs of this current workforce.

Visit the CWDS webpage to learn more about the program.

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