LatinaLista — With 50 different child welfare organizations in the country, not one of the 50 is reported to be working well, according to Molly McGrath Tierney, director for the Baltimore City Department of Social Services.
It is a crisis that McGrath Tierney has tried to address for the past several years in her efforts to reform how services are delivered to foster care children.
Speaking at a TEDx event, McGrath Tierney, spoke of the dysfunction of the foster care “industry” and how instead of helping children has resulted in these children having among the most dire of futures.
McGrath Tierney explains how foster care dismantles families and, in the process, destroys the sense of belonging imperative to a child’s well-being. In her view, foster care is being implemented in an inefficient and damaging way that relies more on expert viewpoints rather than users of the system to evaluate the system’s effectiveness.
Before a spellbound audience, McGrath Tierney delivers a presentation that outlines not only what’s wrong with the foster care system but how it could possibly be fixed to the point that foster care becomes a rare occurrence in our society.
(Editor’s Note: In a disappointing and ironic ending to this post, Molly McGrath Tierney resigned from her position on February 28, 2014 to join a New York-based management consulting firm, as a senior partner. There is now one less person fighting to change a system that is entrenched in profit-making and treating children as commodities)
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