Addressing Poverty to Keep Families Together with Sarah Winograd Artwork

Seen Out Loud

Seen Out Loud is a show about disrupting the child welfare system by the simple act of seeing families in their full humanity. Seeing people for who they truly are, and learning from their stories, offers new perspectives and compelling insights that can lead to radical transformation of America’s foster care system. Listen with us to families as they share deeply personal stories about their experiences with the child welfare system. Hear them express how the moments they were finally seen and valued shaped the trajectories of their lives. In this podcast, we accompany these stories with conversations about the work happening on the front lines of the family well-being movement—a collective effort aimed at meeting the needs of families to prevent systems intervention and the removal of children from parents. Hear leaders of the movement describe how they are actively building a future where families are engaged in systems work and have what they need to stay together and thrive.

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Seen Out Loud

Addressing Poverty to Keep Families Together with Sarah Winograd

July 27, 2022 • Institute for Family • Season 2 • Episode 8

Sarah Winograd’s journey as a “professional volunteer” led to the realization that poverty was a driving factor in the child removals in the families she was working with. See how Sarah mobilized her community to address family poverty to help families stay together. Through the Together for Families program, Sarah lives out her vision of supporting families by helping them meet basic needs.
Show Notes
00:00:30 | Matt opens this episode reflecting on the child welfare system’s association between poverty and neglect

00:01:10 | Meet Sarah Winograd: Program Manager for Together for Families, Advocates for Children, and an adoptive mom.

00:05:05 | Back in the U.S. as an adult, Sarah dedicated herself to volunteering where she would begin spending a lot of her time working with youth formerly in foster care in New York and later in Georgia.

00:06:45 | Sarah talks about the first case she worked on as a CASA volunteer in Georgia.

00:10:37 | Who was representing and supporting the mom in Sarah’s case?

00:11:28 | Sarah explains the “ah-ha” moment she experienced while talking to one of the children in the family. This helped her fill in gaps that were missing from the family’s case file.

00:15:20 | Matt and Sarah discuss a shift in thinking around the reason Sarah became a CASA volunteer—from helping kids to helping the whole family.

00:17:38 | Sarah explains some of the support she provided to the family while staying within the boundaries of her role as a CASA volunteer.

00:20:37 | Sarah shares how she received the reputation for the "resource queen” by helping families not on her case load meet their basic needs and stay in-tact.

00:22:59 | Sarah shares her findings on poverty as a driver of child welfare involvements, as well as how her colleagues felt about the realities of the families they served.

00:25:10 | Sarah talks about the conversation with her CASA supervisor.

00:30:54 | Matt reflects on the punitive structure of the child welfare system and Sarah’s approach to seeing families for their strengths and with empathy, rather than defining them by their circumstances.

00:32:14 | What’s next for Sarah after CASA?

00:41:14 | Sarah’s vision of what’s next for the Together for Families program.

00:44:40 | Advice for people seeing the same issues in their community who want to address the needs of families.

00:45:53 | Final thoughts from Matt Anderson.

Resources
Together for Families | Advocates for Children

Georgia ranks 38th in the Nation for Child and Family Well-Being | Georgia Family Connection Partnership

One promise became a lifelong mission for this Atlanta family advocate | CBS46

Cobb County, GA Child Welfare Stats | Fostering Court Improvement

A Key Connection: Economic Stability and Family Well-being | Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago

Child Welfare: Purposes, Federal Programs, and Funding | Congressional Research Service Reports

Child Welfare Financing SFY 2018: A survey of federal, state, and local expenditures | Child Trends