How could behavioral design improve frontline child welfare practice?

This brief will focus on opportunities to design for the context of scarcity affecting staff as a pathway toward transforming the child welfare system and the ways families experience the system. [...] That increased intervention leads to trauma, family separation, and worse outcomes in the long-run — the opposite of the aims of a child welfare intervention.6 These persistent challenges in trying to do what’s “right” in a resource-constrained environment are driven by the effects of scarcity. [...] For example, the address the report came from was in a middle class neighborhood, or the worker has a “gut feeling” about the family because the family’s surname is familiar from a previous contact with the system and the worker figures that the “apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.” Without even consciously recognizing it, these implicit signals may become the deciding factor for whether a famil. [...] Left unmitigated, bias leads to disproportionate outcomes for non-white families and people living with low incomes.9 While the evidence is alarming, the call to action SAFE CHILDREN STRONG FAMILIES SUPPORTIVE COMMUNITIES SAFE CHILDREN STRONG FAMILIES SUPPORTIVE COMMUNITIES SAFE CHILDREN STRONG FAMILIES SUPPORTIVE COMMUNITIES SAcFaEse CyH.oILrgD R |E N 3 STRONG FAMILIES SUPPORTIVE COMMUNITIES SAFE. [...] FoErg CHILDREN STRONG FAMILIES SUPPORTIVE COMMUNITIES SAFE CHILDREN STRONG FAMILIES SUPPORTIVE COMMUNITIES SAFE CHILDREN STRONG FAMILIES SUPPORTIVE COMMUNITIES SAFE CHILDREN STRONG FAMILIES SAFE CHILDREN STRONG FAMILIES SUPPORTIVE COMMUNITIES SAFE CHILDREN STRONG FAMILIES SUPPORTIVE COMMUNITIES .