Company: Bloom Works

Client: Washington State Department of Children, Youth and Families (DCYF)

Country: USA

This service co-design project set out to create a “kin-first” approach at a government agency tasked with the safety of children in a US state of over 7 million people. Historically, child welfare agencies have placed children in foster homes with parents selected and trained by the state. The kin-first approach takes a different approach by placing children, when necessary, in homes with relatives or non-relative adults with whom they have pre-existing relationships. This ensures they maintain contact with familiar faces and their own community members.

The kin-first approach aimed to counteract historically harmful impacts on historically marginalized communities, where children are more likely to be reported to agencies and separated from their families. The challenge here was substantial because the size of the agency and the scope of shifts needed to have an impact were significant. Also, communities the agency serves needed to overcome well-earned mistrust of government.

This project used a co-design process, which is a co-creation practice where stakeholders join the design team as lived experts. We broke up our project into four consecutive six-week sprints (or phases), each focused on deep engagements with a different key stakeholder group and guided by research questions specific to the group. We met with government employees working at the child welfare agency, external service providers focused on meeting other social needs of caregivers, government contractors responsible for recruiting and training non-kin foster families, and the kin caregivers themselves.

We also ran interactive co-design workshops with participants across three stakeholder groups in our project. Workshops included both a report-back on the findings from our ongoing research conversations, and activities directed at developing solutions to barriers. This way workshop participants played an active role in the generation of recommendations eventually delivered to the state agency.

Our desired outcomes were 1) to raise the rate of placement with kin to around 80%, from a current rate of approximately 53% and 2) to compensate kin caregivers at the same level of reimbursement as non-kin caregivers. We achieved this second goal three months after we delivered our final report and playbook of recommendations.

The impact of our project is vast. Since child welfare agencies in the US have historically been responsible for systematic discrimination that separated families, especially marginalized Black and Native American families. Taking a new approach – a kin-first approach that will keep these families together – is therefore not only good service design and government service delivery, but is a matter of anti-racist repair.