From the Ground, Up is a statewide effort to develop durable, multidisciplinary partner teams to analyze and make changes to the California child welfare system. Solutions to improve California’s child welfare will not come from a small group of insiders or from outside consultants. They are already here, embedded in our communities, cultures, and collective wisdom. We will create a space for them to emerge and put them into practice.
“Everyone in a complex system has a slightly different interpretation. The more interpretations we gather, the easier it becomes to gain a sense of the whole.”
- Margaret J. Wheatley
From the Ground, Up uses a three-team approach.
This team is made up of 5-15 system-impacted parents, former foster youth, caseworkers, attorneys, judges, service providers, agency leadership, and other child welfare professionals. The Core Team will handle day-to-day project management and steer the course of the work.
The Core Team
Most of the magic happens in the Survey and Dig Teams.
We’ll divide the state into five Regions. Each Region will have a Survey Team of 35-50 members. Like the Core Team, the Survey Teams will be diverse in terms of identities, experience, and ideas. Survey Teams will scan the system’s landscape, looking closely at statewide and local data. They’ll use lived experience and the narratives of people working in and impacted by the system to make sense of that data. These narratives will add layers of texture, warmth, and nuance to the meanings these communities generate from that data.
Survey Teams meet four times a year. The first meeting (online) focuses on team formation. The second, in-person meeting will conduct a complexity analysis of the region’s child welfare system. The third meeting (online) will deepen that analysis. At the fourth meeting (online), we’ll collect the strategies that emerged from those analyses and issue them back to the state in the form of imperatives: things that must be done in order to improve the California child welfare system.
Regional Survey Teams
Each Region will also have a small number of Dig Teams to utilize. Dig Teams are composed of 5-15 specialists from the Survey Teams. Survey Teams will ask Dig Teams to study specific, cross-cutting issues identified at the Survey Team level. Dig Teams will use complexity mapping and report their findings to the Survey Teams. Survey Teams will use the complexity maps to inform their sensemaking sessions.
Dig Teams are deployed twice throughout the project. Once, following the Survey Team’s initial scan of the system, and again after the Survey Teams’ second layer analysis.
The Dig Teams’ work is in-depth and detailed, and it all happens online. For the first deployment, Dig Teams will devote a total of thirty-six hours of analysis to the Survey Teams’ issues. At the second deployment, Dig Teams will devote forty-eight hours of analysis. They’ll leave no stone unturned.
Dig Teams
The solutions that emerge from this work are not mere recommendations. They are imperatives: things that must be done in order to improve the child welfare system, as expressed by the people working in it and impacted by it. They are re-envisioning the system, From the Ground, Up.