Hi! Today we are re-broadcasting an episode from 3rd Stage, 23rd, about Ontario's Child Welfare System. Since we ran that episode, the Ontario government has announced initiatives towards overhauling children's aid to focus more on prevention and keeping families together and to address the overrepresentation of black and indigenous youth in the child welfare system. So we decided to run this episode again. If you're interested in more details, see our show notes from this episode for links on the story. From the Toronto Star, I'm Sabayet Azaz and this manners. I want you to imagine that you are a child protection worker and you have to respond to a report of child abuse. You walk into a home unannounced, unexpected and un-invited. You find a single mother living in low-income housing with her three children. There is a single mattress in the middle of the room and the kids are lying on it asleep. Apart of your job is to walk through the entire home so you start with the kitchen. There may be very little food, dirty dishes piled up in the sink. Now generally at this point, two things can happen. The children are deemed unsafe and removed from their home and placed in the system or the children remain with their family and the child welfare system provides help and support. I asked you to imagine yourself in that home to ask yourself what crossed your mind? What race or ethnicity did you think that family was? The numbers show that if those children were white, it is more likely that those children would stay with their families. According to Toronto Children's Aid Society, Black Toronto's only 9% of the city's population, while Black Children represent the highest percentage of children in their care. The CES says it recognizes that poverty is part of the issue but it is also more than that, like systemic racism, that the CES admits is a problem. So how do we fix this? In today's episode, I talked to Mahesh Rajapas, the chief operating officer of Toronto Children's Aid Society, who says it's time for CES to stop trying to bring children into the system and focus on supporting the family instead. Thank you so much, Mahesh, for joining me on the podcast today. Thank you. So I want to talk about the data first. The recent data that your organization has shared says that over 40% of children in care are from Black families. Now I've been looking at a star investigation from around six years ago and the numbers don't really seem to have shifted as much. There's still this proportionate number considering that only about 9% of Toronto's total population under 18 is Black. Why do you think this hasn't changed much? Well, I think one of the real challenges for us is dealing with this whole notion of systemic racism and it's something that we have to pay attention to within our own system but our system as a large child welfare system in our organization intersects with schools and with police and with justice and with the courts. It's a reflection of our organization but it's also a reflection of everyone else. So in order for us to change, we need our partners to change along with us. And I want to talk a little bit more about that. You've already mentioned systemic racism across institutions and society as well and there's a deep link to poverty and the systemic racism that we talk about and childcare isn't there. Could you talk about that? Sure. So one of the real challenges our organization faces is that we have the responsibility of keeping kids safe and we take that responsibility very seriously but poverty creates risk and poverty creates risk for obvious reasons because it leads to homelessness, it leads to stress and it leads to just challenges with parenting. So when parents are experiencing poverty, their kids are placed at risk and now we want to find more helpful ways to manage poverty rather than investigate families and remove children from their homes. And that is really what we're trying to do is to find better solutions to the real poverty. And that's what I want to come to because you've often talked about the need to stop trying to bring a child into the child welfare system and focus on supporting the family instead. So how do you see the groundwork being laid for that? I think we start by clearly stating that we are an organization of the children's eighths side of Toronto that firmly and 100% believe that kids do best at home. We really want to make that our platform for our service principles and our service objectives that children do best when they are at home and in their communities and that we have a long history of demonstrating that children who grow up in care do very poorly. They have education outcomes, poor employment outcomes. They're isolated, they're separated from their families and they experience numerous mental health problems, etc. So the foundation for it is for us to say we want to design our services around keeping kids at home and then we sort of expand from there. But that's how we started by saying that we fundamentally believe that kids belong at home and we wanted to design the service framework around that principle. And I want to talk about some more details around that as well, including your campaign journey to zero. But when you're talking about kids doing best at home and supporting families, what do you mean by that? Where does the CS come in on that and what are the ways you can do that? Our children's eighths side, as many children's eighths side are designed in a way that if you are worried about the safety of a child, you call a children's eighths side. And that children's eighths side then completes an investigation into the concerns raised. And then worst case scenarios, as we just mentioned, Sabah is that the risk is exceptionally high. Children are removed. And so we really want to start to find different solutions to maintaining kids at home and creating safety at home. And many of our programs are now designed to ensure that even though risk exists, that risk can be managed and mitigated through different approaches rather than removal. We have implemented quite an elaborate framework around managing the safety of children while allowing them to stay home. And that's where the CS Toronto's journey to zero campaign comes in as well. I think it started almost eight months ago. Can you tell me more about that and what was its goal and eight months later, what have you learned from it? Yeah, so our journey to zero is a partnership that we have with the Children's eighth Foundation of Canada, who are fundraising on. And they have done a fabulous job in finding donor support to fund this program. We actually started the fundraising around two years ago. And then it took us a little bit of time to secure all the donors and raise the funds to launch the program. But their Children's eighth Foundation of Canada was able to raise almost $7 million. And so we've started what we'd like to call simply a prevention department. We will be launching three interventions that focus solely on the idea of prevention. And so like I say, Children's eighth society, as an our Children's eighth society of Toronto is built on this notion of protection that you're worried about the safety of a child you call Children's eighth society. And we launch an investigation to protect Children. But really what we believe is that if we invest in families and if we build family capacity and if we build family networks, it makes family stronger and makes children safer and makes communities stronger. So we really want to focus on prevention. That's what our journey to zero is all about and the zero. What it represents is that not that no Children will be in care, but that no Children will grow up in care. And we understand that we live in a world of crisis and we live in a world where crisis happen in families and Children may need to be placed in alternative placements temporarily. But we should then work as quickly as we can to mitigate risk and get kids back home. So the zero represents our commitment to not raising children. So the journey to zero program was running parallel to the actual investigations work as well. Do you think there are any concerns that it might lose its effectiveness because of that there's a certain trust factor needed to initiate a program like this. Is there any way that it might be considered more of a token move of the actual focus with the government funding and the work is still on the conventional way of doing things. The investigations work. Yeah, that's a great question. I think that what we've done is we've actually partnered with other organizations to provide the prevention work. So your question around trust is a really good one in that the Children's 8th Society of Toronto has a long reputation in our city of being an organization that certain populations, marginalized populations, whether it has to do with race or whether it has to do with poverty are very mistrusting of us because of their historical experience of their intersection with their organization. So we have a lot of work to do to rebuild that trust. So what we've done is we have partnered with other helping organizations that are experts in the area prevention. And so we have a professional from another organization doing that work parallel to our own organization. So it gives the family a very different feel that this is though the Children's 8th is supporting it. I have a professional from a helping organization that has a different reputation actually doing the work. So that's part of the answer your question. The other thing that you mentioned was the, you know, are we?
We worry that it's token. Again, that's a great question, but the reality is that we get about 100 to 120 calls a day about children who are at risk. And so that work isn't going to go away. Those calls will keep coming and it's schools that are calling us, police that are calling us, etc. So we want to have a parallel process where we're still dealing with risk, but we're also still dealing with building down the capacity at the same time. So it is absolutely not token. And it's really interesting that you've brought up the parallel dimension of this, you know, working with other organizations to implement this because in terms of what you're trying to implement, there could be challenges. In terms of a certain sort of psychological contradiction, for example, a welfare worker trying to support the family is perceptually also seen as someone who could potentially take away their child. So how do you address that trust issue? Should this organization be the one doing this in the first place? So I just want you to elaborate more on this system if you're working parallel with other organizations. Will they be supplementary? Will they be from the community? How would that work? So I think what we have to do is have a very long-term approach to this. And so the children's aid society of Toronto has existed for 100 years. And if we have a reputation, we've created that reputation. And so now we have an opportunity to create a different reputation, but you can't create a different reputation if you just do the same thing. So we understand that we have a responsibility to have the client experience be very different. And if we continually have the client experience be very different where people feel like they have been helped, if people feel like they have been listened to, if people feel like they have been supported, then I think we will change our reputation as an organization and the community and the people that need us the most will see us as somebody that does more than investigate them and remove their children. Our goal as an organization at the end of the day simply is to fundamentally change the client experience so that when you call a children's aid society or when you call the Toronto Children's Aid Society, you are listened to, you are partnered with, you are seen as the expert in the life of your own family and your own children. And we are helping you protect your own children versus protecting your children from you. And really something that I want to really, really stress is that our service framework is focused on the notion that we should be helping families protect their own children and not protecting children from their families. And this reputations take a long time to build and reputations take a long time to change. We are not pretending that we are going to gain the trust of our community in months and that we understand that we have a long road ahead of us in doing that work but we are very committed to it. We will be right back. I also know that there were hopes that the success of the journey to zero campaign and what you are trying to implement now could persuade the government to allow its funding to be used for prevention as you say instead of investigations. Has there been any headway on that? Yeah, so we have a governance table. So that governance table meets about four times a year and our ministry partners are a part of that governance table and that table is looking at the data. This looking at the outcomes is looking at the process of all families that have gone through our journey to zero program and the outcomes of those families. And so they have absolutely been at the table with us. They are interested in this. There is a modernization process happening in child welfare and everybody has a desire to improve the lives of children and families of the children who don't have to be separated. So the ministry has been a partner and they are a partner and governance table which is really nice to see that they are very interested in the outcomes. And at the end of the day, this is a demonstration project. So we've been given a certain amount of money from children's aid foundation of Canada and their donors. It is very heavily research and evidence informed. So we have to prove that the families that go through this program experience different outcomes and there is a heavy research component to the program to demonstrate there is a better way to do things. And I want to talk to your point about reputation and credibility and you made a great point about how trust and repetition in a community takes years to build a rebuild. And we know that in 2017 the Ontario Human Rights Commission released a fact sheet talking about racial discrimination practices being observed in child welfare and obviously talking about these numbers that you're talking about, the disproportionality of black indigenous and racialized children in the system and certain concerns on biases within. And now we're seeing a reigniting of the Black Lives Matter movement. There's been a sort of reckoning over systemic racism overall. Now being officially acknowledged, what does that reckoning look like and mean for CS? I think it means that we need to pay even more attention to what we're doing and how we're doing it. And we have to hold ourselves accountable to a higher standard. So like I say, you can't expect things to change if you continue to do the same old thing over and over again. And so really what we're trying to do and I can give you a long list of the things that we've done and just very quickly to give you a sense of things. We have created an equity department that has anti-black racism leads in every single area of our organization that review cases before children come into care. We have completed implicit bias training for all of our staff. We've completed anti-black races that make cultural safety training for all of our staff. We have a community consultation table of members of the Black community that service the Black community that help inform our work and help guide us to make sure that we're aware of our blind spots and we're doing the right work. And we're continually developing new partnerships with the Black community. And we're paying more attention to who we're hiring into leadership positions. And I don't have the numbers exactly, but I think three of the last four directors that we hire and we're racialized people of color. And so we're doing a number of different things in a number of different areas to move the needle in this way and we will continue to work in that way. So I think really what it tells us is that we must pay attention to the issue of anti-black racism. And the only way things are going to change is if we in fact change our system and understand how those systems are contributing to poor outcomes for Black families and change those systems. And that's really what we're trying to do. And there's also been links to the demographics, for instance, of the case workers themselves about the need for representation from various marginalized communities, from the Black community, indigenous communities. And it was being connected that a lack of such representation could lead to certain inherent biases when making certain assessments. Do you see any change in that composition now? What has been your experience like? Well, so it's a two-pronged and we have changed in terms of the makeup of our staff. We certainly have more racialized staff that are employed at Toronto C.A.S. over the last three to five years and we have more racialized staff that are in leadership positions. But interestingly, the data hasn't moved. So I think that's something that we need to look harder at and understand. The data is a complicated issue and I don't in any way want to make excuses for it. But we are counting differently who we include in the population of Black and mixed race. And we are paying more attention to make sure that our missing data is not missing anymore. So previously about 15 to 18% of the cases that we had, there was racial data missing. And we've gotten that down to two or three percent. So our numbers keep changing, which makes the foundational number difficult as a kickoff point to start with. And so regardless of all of that, we have made some improvements and we know we've made some improvements. Some of our numbers are going in the right direction. We know that, but they're not moving at the pace that we want to move at. And what about the tools through which assessments are done? A lot of research has argued that the risk assessment tools in Ontario might be biased and perpetuate racism because they are not accounting for structural inequalities such as the racial discrimination that we're talking about in poverty, for instance. And this can contribute to racial profiling. Are you running your assessment tools through an anti racist lens? Yes, absolutely. So we have implemented what we call an equity and science of safety framework. And so our anti black racism leads and our equity director are going to a very long process of ensuring that the work that we do is equity informed. And so that is where the implicit bias training has come in. That's where the cultural safety training has come in. But Sam, I just want to be honest with you, very difficult needle to change and a very difficult needle to move. You know, we have eight or 900 staff. We have staff that have worked with us for 20, 30 years and they're all amazing individuals and they're dedicated, but they have work to do and we all have work to do. Understanding our biases, understanding how implicit bias impacts our decision making and our thinking is difficult work. And we are committed to that work, but we shouldn't pretend that it's easy. And we shouldn't pretend that if you attend a training, you're going to all of a sudden not have issues of bias informed.
your decision-making. So the tools are only as good as the people that apply. And we understand that. And so our responsibility is to create a workforce of people who are committed to work of equity and who are committed to going on personal journeys of understanding their own issues of implicit bias and racism so that we have an equity and form organization. I want to talk to you a little bit about your experience as well. Who started off as a child's protection worker at the CES initially is that correct? Oh my goodness. I did. That was a long time ago. I did. I started. I don't even know the year but you're probably in the early 90s as a social worker. Part of that work is also that of potentially removing a child from the family. So tell me about your experience. What do you remember the most strongly from that work and has that informed the way you see the CES approach currently? So I had the privilege of speaking at something called a 514 talks and it's where five people speak for 14 minutes and I told the story of remembering the very first time that I apprehended a child. And it was for me it's a very powerful memory because it's something that stays with you. You're removing a child from their home even though it happened you know like 25, 30 years ago the memory is still there. It's a very powerful thing to have to walk into someone's home and walk away with their child and explain why it's traumatic for the child of traumatic for the family and it's not something that is easy to forget. So I do remember that and that absolutely informs the way I think, the way I work and my commitment to the field and to the organization. It reminds you of the importance of this work. We are responsible for the safety and the well-being of children and we have to do everything that we can to ensure the children are safe. The irony of it all is that when you remove a child you are dealing with only short-term safety. So you've dealt with the immediate risk but you've created a whole host of long-term risk and so we want to recognize that long-term risk and we want to find different solutions to it and that's really again what we're trying to do in terms of ensuring that kids stay at home to avoid that long-term risk that we create when we separate kids from their homes. And just on that long-term risk part my last question to you was about that what are the impacts or the consequences that you've seen over the years for children particularly racialized children that grew up in care? Well there's so much there, but I think the key thing is we really do value identity. When you are a child from a different community whether that's the Black community, the Indigenous community, the South Asian community, but you are not matched in a home that is a cultural match. It impacts your identity and that's a huge problem in terms of our responsibility of ensuring that children are able to maintain their culture and their rights. So that's one problem in terms of culture matching homes for children so they remain in homes that are representative of who they are. But then the other thing is that you know research tells us that high school graduation rates of children who grew up in care is about 30% less than the regular population, that the employment outcomes quite poor for kids who grew up in care, that they have very serious mental health problems or addiction problems. They experience homelessness. We know that kids in care also are targets of human traffickers, etc, etc, etc. So there's a very long list of very serious problems that children who grew up in care experience. And I think in our hearts we all know that the notion of children's aid society, the Toronto Children's Aid Society, raising children is just not something that is going to lead to a good place. I do understand that have been children that have grown up in care and that have been very successful and those children are incredibly strong and incredibly resilient and they should be commended for their success being able to be successful in growth and care but the vast majority of children who grow up in care don't do well. And we really want to pay attention to that long-term risk and more importantly we just want to invest in families. I've never met a parent that doesn't want to be successful. I've never met a parent that doesn't want to be a good parent so our responsibility is to help parents get there, not remove children from their families. Mahesh, thank you so much for being on the podcast today. Wow, thank you so much. It was a pleasure speaking with you. Thank you so much. That was Mahesh Rajabhan who started at the Toronto Children's Aid Society as a child protection worker and is now the chief operating officer. That's it for today. Thanks so much for listening. This matter is hosted and produced by me Sabai Tizaz, Adrian Chang and Raju Muhtar. Produced and mixed by Sean Pattonum and our director of programming is JP Fozza. Our show theme music is by so-called and our episode music is by Mike DeAngeloz. We want to hear what stories matter to you. Please send us comments, questions or ideas to
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