A collaborative approach to supporting Black families in the child welfare system

Black children are overrepresented in Ontario child welfare investigations. Compared to white families, Black families are more likely to be investigated and children are more likely to be placed in out-of-home care. The Children’s Aid Society itself recognizes that this is something that it needs to improve, but with big institutions and big systems like this, change often takes longer than families can afford to wait.

We sat down with Dr. Joseph Smith, Chair of Anchored Minds Foundation, to talk about how the Black Agency Network uses a collaborative, culturally responsive approach to quickly get help to Black families and children who are involved with child welfare. 

Bonnie Mah, Maytree: You saw a problem and you wanted to do something now. What role did you want to play? 

Dr. Joseph Smith, Anchored Minds: With the Black Agency Network (BAN), we wanted to play a role that large institutions typically can’t play. It is difficult for large institutions to have the time, bandwidth, and resources to show the type of empathy that’s required to support families that are systemically marginalized. Big institutions struggle to be nimble and responsive when an immediate need comes up.  

With BAN, we put together highly vetted B3 (Black-led, Black-serving and Black-focused) charities or non-profits into a network of support for Black families who are involved with Children’s Aid Society of Toronto (CAST). Within the network, these agencies can share notes and receive special resources to allocate people power as well as programming power to support families in unique ways, be it legal support, educational support, parenting support, or mental health. 

BAN can then be a conduit for CAST workers who don’t have the time to do all the research to vet organizations. We figure out which organizations have the time and capacity to engage with families. We do that legwork. So, it takes pressure off the CAST worker’s back from trying to learn the community and learn the dynamics and learn what services are most relevant and available right now. And then it allows for community agencies to have the time to respond to the needs of these families. 

Bonnie: What benefits does this bring to Black families?

Joseph: What we’re talking about is culturally relevant and responsive services. At least 50 per cent of their leadership are Black-identifying folk, have lived experience within the community, and they predominantly serve Black-identifying individuals.  

The culturally relevant part is important. For example, food insecurity: within the diaspora, the types of food that Black families would like to give their children might be different from the types of food that other ethno-cultural groups would like to give to their children. You might think, “Well, if a family is dealing with food insecurity, anything should do.”  

Yes. But no. 

We’re talking about human rights here and we’re also talking about agency. These families have the right – even in moments of strain, stress, and marginalization – to have a choice, to really be thoughtful about what they want to give to their children, what they want to feed themselves, and what they want to expose their kids to.   

If they can’t do that because of an economic deficit, then why not link them to a culturally relevant, culturally responsive organization that can provide those choices? 

Bonnie: We’re talking about human rights: cultural rights, economic rights, social rights. How does poverty tie into this? 

Joseph: Strong tie. When I was a kid, my mother emigrated here from Jamaica with a master’s degree in education. She had taught in Jamaica for 11 years. When she tried to access the teaching profession, she was denied entry. She was told that professionally, she’s qualified; academically, she’s not. So, she had to go back to school to get a four-year undergrad degree after coming to this country with a master’s degree from Jamaica. Now, she had separated from my father because they fell on economic hard times, and that created fighting between the two.  

She was alone with me in a foreign land. I’m three years old. And she’s being told by the province that she has to go back to school. She had left my father. She had nowhere to stay. We were homeless for two years, living in shelters. Because her qualifications weren’t recognized, she had to go back to school, take out OSAP loans, stay in shelters with me, and I had to be taken care of by other individuals at times as well.  

After getting her undergraduate in Canada, my mother spent 11 years unemployed. In the mid-90s, the Ontario government froze the hiring of teachers. She couldn’t work in her profession. She had to volunteer to get back in. That’s about 14 years of not having the income you need to support your family. Luckily, she got an apartment in a dilapidated building in a low-income part of Toronto. But that environment meant I was exposed to violence and a lack of other resources. 

If the wrong people had been around us at the wrong time, I might not have been with my mother because they might’ve seen our circumstances as neglect. Children’s Aid would’ve been involved. Luckily, that did not happen to me. But there are a lot of families that have a similar story, who haven’t been able to get back on their feet.  

Bonnie: A study of Ontario child welfare services found that when Children’s Aid decides to remove a Black child from the family home, there seems to be more of a reluctance to place them with kin, compared to how they place white children. Why are kin and community important? 

Joseph: When a Black child is able to stay with kin, there is a renewed confidence and faith within the community about the community’s capacity to take care of itself. That level of self-sufficiency and agency is important for that young child to see and bear witness to. 

What we’ve seen in the research is that a lack of proximity to cultural roots and ethno-cultural centres can result in a longstanding emotional disconnect that can be deleterious to the child’s health – not just mental health and well-being, but also their physical health. 

When Black children are taken away from Black families and then placed in the homes of white identifying families, or another ethno-cultural group, it sends a signal that we think other people can take care of a Black child better than the child’s own community. 

Bonnie: So there’s a benefit to the child themselves, and there’s also a benefit to the community as a whole – it’s in the story that other people tell about you, and the story that you tell about yourself.  

Joseph: These are connections we need to take seriously. We want to maintain the relationship between children and kin and cultural kin as strongly and as sustainably as possible into the future. That’s a big component of what BAN is trying to do – assembling a cohort of people in the community who have the capacity to foster Black children, and supporting them. 

Bonnie: Part of what BAN does is coordination. How do you ensure that the network has enough capacity to support the families who are coming to you? 

Joseph: Right now, an individual can be referred to BAN by a CAST worker. Or, a Black family on their own can take a look at our website and they can reach out to our navigator, who is a social worker. That social worker finds out what the family’s needs are and then coordinates the services. We have eight organizations that are part of the BAN network right now. The goal is that within a few months we’re going to be onboarding five to eight more. We want to ensure that we have a range of options in the GTA that families can choose from. 

Bonnie: As a young program, how do you have the capacity to have enough social workers?

Joseph: To work around some of the funding challenges, we have a resident social worker who coordinates a number of social work students that are interning with us. We have about five interns from different universities at any given moment. Essentially, the social worker will get the intake information and document it, and then the social work students engage with the family in a more personal manner, to get insight into what that family needs. The families get regular communication from the interns, and the interns get hours that count towards their degree.

Bonnie: Have you started to see BAN’s impact on children and families?

Joseph: There was a family that connected to our navigator. We found out that this child had been referred to Children’s Aid. They got a worker, and about three weeks later, they went missing. They were one of the Black youth that were officially “missing” in 2024. Our navigator was able to stay in contact with that young person while they were missing.  

The individual didn’t want to give us direct coordinates as to where they were and what was happening, but at the time, they were living in a group home and they were unhappy in that space. So they got away for a bit. Where they went, how that happened, we don’t know. But our navigator had formed a relationship with the young person and was able to keep tabs. When the individual wanted to return, we were able to provide immediate wraparound supports to help them ease their way back into their regular life.  

That’s just one example where we acted as an intermediary – between CAST, the education system, the family – to help problem solve life with that individual. They weren’t happy in their home life and they didn’t like their group home and they ran away. If it wasn’t for one of our interns constantly reaching out and connecting, who knows where that person would be? Who knows if they would’ve felt like there was a caring adult to support them?

Bonnie: It’s striking. In a short period of time, the navigator and that young person built a relationship with an incredible amount of trust. 

Joseph: Everyone at BAN is from the community, has lived experience in the community, and has lived experience with child welfare services and educational institutions as well. So, they are sensitive to some of the nuances in the lives of teenagers, and it’s quite key to the success we’ve had in such a short time.

Bonnie: What’s one thing that you would tell people who want to do this work, or who are doing it and are stuck in the weeds, to help them keep going?

Joseph: There’s that old adage about “many hands make light work.” BAN is truly reflective of collaboration. We’re expecting agencies to band together to figure out and coordinate what resources and what pace would be best to support a family. We are working with universities, we’re working with non-profits, we’re working with charities, we’re working with mainstream institutions, we’re working with provincial reps.

The institutions don’t all communicate with each other – there has to be someone in the middle to put all the pieces together. BAN figures out how to assemble the right menu of options that can support families through their hardship.

BAN itself began with collaboration. The partnership between Anchored Minds Foundation and Delta Family Resource Centre, and our individual and collective work with CAST, make BAN possible in the first place. These connections are blossoming into a model to fill service gaps for Black families.

I think that collaboration is the way forward for people who are trying to lead in this area. It has to be collaborative and it has to be inter-institutional. It has to be many institutions coming together to solve a problem.

Maytree supports the work of Anchored Minds and the Black Agency Network through a grant.