Using Design to Transform Child Welfare

Katie Miller, the Chief Innovation Officer from Alia takes us through their journey of applying design thinking to redesign the child welfare system.

Alia planned a 3-day event for 100 people from 30+ states. Their "How Might We" Challenge: How Might We design a child welfare system that actually works for kids and families!

Our very own Anna Love had the opportunity to help with the design of the session as well as lead a team through the event.

Transcript

My name is Katie Miller, and I'm the Chief Innovation Officer at Alia. We're a nonprofit organization that 

works with public child welfare agencies to help them do things differently with kids and families.

So what we think is that the child welfare system is due for a redesign.

Not just ratcheting things up to making incremental changes, but what we are really trying to do is redesign it in a way that incentivizes good work, healing work with kids and families and not the opposite.

Right now, there's some-- the culture and how the money flows and who has the control and what decisions they make, are really geared towards making the system work, and not making kids and families better.

We think that should be the opposite.

So one year ago we were design babies, and we were just being introduced to the concept of design, of the empathy experience, and then the iterating and implementing in this constant like loop-- feedback loop of learning.

And we thought that that would be an excellent approach to our redesign concept. So we planned a three and a half day event here in Minneapolis, and we invited a hundred amazing people from 33 different states, and we had design facilitators that divided them up into ten groups of ten different kinds of people. 

So we had ten different sort of perspectives on each of the ten teams. And our "How Might We" was "How might we redesign a child welfare system that actually works for kids and families?"

That was a real pivot point for us that, like, changed our sort of plan for the year.

It's like okay, maybe we don't test, maybe we just do. I don't want to try to do it a different way, I want to do it a different way.

It took us a couple of months to get our heads around what the actual redesign was. And so we tried to code all the evaluations, and we did some follow-up listening sessions with the participants, and then in our office one day we were, like, sitting and looking out of our stuff and we went, "oh my gosh, what these people are describing is really strong families and communities," like the system that every kid is already born into is the perfect one, which is their family.

So one of the things that I think that was extremely powerful at the event was that user experience that we had parents who had been investigated by the child welfare system and lost, and maybe had their children returned.

And we had youth who have-- were in foster care. And so they were a very integral part of our design event. 

There was a lot of tension, it was very powerful. There was a lot of personal reactions, especially, as you can imagine, to the empathy experience, that frankly we didn't expect, and we didn't plan for well enough.

But, which also gave us the very solid commitment to always including them in this process. And then the bias toward action. Like we're not-- we call ourselves a "do tank" instead of a "think tank" you know.

A lot of the principles really seem to fit with what we're doing, and so it's just kind of latched on to them and like keep coming back to it.

People are doing awesome work with kids and families.