Public Child Welfare

Public Child Welfare: A Casebook for Learning and Teaching provides social work students and practicing social workers with 20 real-world cases gathered from four California county child welfare agencies. Readers are exposed to the stories of social workers and families involved in child welfare services. The rich and varied content captures the daily complexities, challenges, and successes that social workers experience in the field.Framed within the context of relevant national and state policy and practices, the cases address a variety of child welfare issues including neglect and abuse, substance abuse, domestic violence, criminal justice involvement, mental health, reunification and adoption, and more. Case-based learning relates to family dynamics, initial risks and harms, finding the right home for the child, court proceedings, and the trajectory of these complex cases over time.Public Child Welfare challenges social work students and practitioners to critically examine documented, real-world cases to inform and strengthen their own practices. The casebook is an ideal resource for social work courses, child welfare seminars, and agency-based training programs.

Extensive research documents that classroom education alone is insufficient to support transfer of core social work knowledge and skills in the real world. Case-based learning is one vehicle to support the transfer of learning to real-life situations. This casebook provides 20 case studies based on real children and families as a context for bridging the gap between theory and social work practice. Each chapter also introduces a list of classroom discussion questions about these agency-based, real-life case records, to encourage critical thinking about each of these child and family situations. This casebook would be a valuable companion to other child welfare policy, program, and/or practice related texts." —Diane DePanfilis, Ph.D., M.S.W., Professo, Silberman School of Social Work at Hunter College, City University of New York"I love, love, love this public child welfare casebook. It perfectly meets my need for a class that I am teaching in January. I have been looking for case studies to assign to students and so many of the ones I have found are not comprehensive enough. I think this book would be a great complement to our text." —Michele D. Hanna, PhD., MSW, Associate Professo, Graduate School of Social Work, University of Denver

Sarah Carnochan is the research director of the Mack Center on Nonprofit and Public Sector Management in the Human Services.Michael J. Austin is a professor of nonprofit management at the University of California, Berkeley, and the director of the Mack Center on Nonprofit and Pubic Sector Management in the Human Services.Lisa Botzler is a child welfare consultant with Shared Vision Consultants with many years of experience helping families and developing working relationships with community partners.Lisa Molinar is the president of Shared Vision Consultants, Inc., a human services consulting agency that specializes in child welfare organizations.Joanne Brown is a consultant with Shared Vision Consultants and a faculty member at the Center for Human Services at the University of California, Davis.Karen Gunderson is a consultant with Shared Vision Consultants. She has more than 30 years of experience in child welfare, including eight years of direct service and 22 in policy and program development.