Board of Commissioners - Regular Meeting

Are you ready?

Welcome to Ramsey County Board Workshop. Today's workshop is titled the Minnesota African American Family Preservation and Child Welfare Disproportionality Act from Legislation to Practice. Courtesy reminder that this board workshop is recorded and it is live streamed on Zoom webinar. There will be no votes taken during this workshop. Let's start with introduction of commissioners and presenters around the table and then the rest of the room. Kelly Miller, Ramsey County Commissioner, District 7.

Gary Smith-Murtry, Commissioner, District 3.

Mai Changshan, Commissioner, District 6. Mary Jo McGuire, Commissioner, District 2. Sarge Evans, St. Commissioner, District 1.

Marina Moran, Commissioner, District 4. Rafael Otenga, District 5. Lynn Becker, County Manager.

Social Services Director, Sophia Thompson.

Children and Family Services Deputy Director, Bobbie Jo Potter.

Nikki Newman, Manager, Child Protection. So, who is it?

Florence Faraday, Manager of the Chief Quarantine. Eve Fubran, Madam, Governor of Relation.

Leo Moreno, Ramsey County Chief of Staff Office.

I want to be sad. Manager and not.

We're just going around the room that you want to go next.

That's really really important part of government relations specials.

You know, and social services that the director for aging and disability services.

And it's exciting that less aging and disability services.

Markers program availability with the evaluation unit. . . . . . . . .

Now it's a pleasure to talk about the range of those measure. Very good. We will director of government relations. Well, when can you manage your social services? Gets it correct. We're going to evaluate here with an evaluation team.

Larry Truman, Administrative Services Director.

How great. So good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for being here. Today's workshop gives us an opportunity to take a closer look at Ramsey's County's implementation of the Minnesota African American Family Preservation and Child Welfare Disproportionality Act, where we are, what we are learning, and where we need to continue to focus our efforts. This work is about more than implementing legislation. It calls on us to examine how children and families are supported, how the disparities that continue to exist are addressed, and how partnerships with the community can create meaningful and lasting change. I'm especially pleased that we have elders with us today to share their perspective and the work that they're doing with our community and with the Ramsey County staff. Their voice is an important part of this conversation and how this work continues to shape. With that, I'll turn it over to our social services director, Sophia Thompson, to walk us through the work and what we're learning and where we go from here. I also want to just note to commissioners, let's hold off on questions until the very end, just so we can make sure we get through everything. If it's something really, really pressing, raise your hand maybe twice. Think about it the first time you put it up. Then if you can hold it, put it back down. Close up another time, then I'll know.

Director Thompson. Thank you, Chair Miller, for that introduction. Commissioners, County Medical Director, community, thanks for allowing us to be with you today to give this presentation on the Minnesota African American Family Preservation and Child Welfare Disproportionality Act. Throughout this afternoon's discussion, you will often hear us refer to the Act as MAFPA, CWDA, or the Act. It is a way to diminish the name, and we recognize the length of the name. And so there may be times we say it in full, and there may be times that we say the Act or MAFPA, CWDA. More importantly, we're going to talk about what implementation actually looks like for families our workforce, and our community. The story that we'll tell you is one of both progress and one of continued work. We've learned a great deal since implementation began, and we've also learned that meaningful transformation requires more than changing just policy. It requires changes in practice, relationships, infrastructure, and how we begin alongside families and communities. Before we get into the work itself, I want to take a moment to recognize the people and partnerships that brought us here. NAPA CWDA represents years of collaboration amongst legislators, community leaders, advocates, and families who share a vision for improving outcomes, specifically for African American children and their families. I want to Send a special thank you to Senator Bobby Joe Champion, Representative Esther Abaje, and their legislative colleagues for championing this important work. We also have to give homage to our own Commissioner Rena Moran for your longstanding leadership that has been years in the making to see this come to fruition. And thank you to this board for your continued support and our ability to be one of the Faison counties to implement this new law. I'd also like to thank our executive leadership, our county partners, the Department of Children, Youth and Family, our partner in this Hennepin County who was a Faison, one of the second Faison County, our MACSA delegation, and again, our community partners. This work has truly been built through collaboration. And finally, I want to recognize our Children and Family Services leadership team and staff. They are the ones who have turned this legislative intent into daily practice. The progress you're going to see today reflects their dedication and the strengths of these partnerships. So I want to thank everyone who's contributed thus far in the journey. And with that, I'll turn it over to Bobby Jones.

Good morning, commissioners, county manager. We're gonna start with why this work matters and flow through some of the disparities or the reasoning why the legislation was passed. And then we'll move from legislation to practice and talk about what the work looks like and what we've been doing. And then we'll talk about what change looks like because that's what the biggest ask on this law is doing is asking us to change how we engage with community and others who provide the similar service to the families that we're working with. And then finally, we'll head into what's next and how do we sustain the work moving forward. So to understand the work underway, we must first remain grounded in why this law exists or why the act is necessary. Math is an important shift in law and practice. But the disparities it is designed to address, they still exist within our system despite all of the efforts. African-American children and families, they continue to experience disproportionate involvement and unequal outcomes in the child welfare system. All of this at the same time, families are navigating increasingly complex and interconnected needs. The situations and circumstances that families are experiencing are becoming more and more complex. And so as we work through the rest of the day, you'll see all of the efforts that we're providing to bring those disparities down in a meaningful and intentional way. So what the data continues to tell us is that the disproportionality continues to persist. The data that we're sharing today is specific to Ramsey County, and it's not including any of the state data, so we're just focusing on our work. African American and American Indian children continue to experience higher rates of removal and involvement with the child welfare system. And what we've seen over the past year from 2024 to 2025 is an increase in those removals. This is important context because the Act is responding to a longstanding system where disproportionality already existed. And so this isn't something that we're temporarily dealing with. This is something that's longstanding and it's going to take multifaceted approach to address. And ultimately our goal is to change the outcomes and have stronger family preservation. And sometimes that means changing the experience that families have with us. Despite the disparities continuing forward, we are confident in our efforts in a partnership with the community members to ensure that those disparities will be brought down over time. Again, we've, As a system created solutions within the system and this last happiness to create those solutions with Community so that's what we're doing.

So from legislation to practice the data tells us why change is necessary, the complexity families are experiencing tells us why the change has to reach across the entire entire child welfare system. Mathbook creates a different set of expectations for how we work with African American children and families. The focus shifts towards early support, persistent engagement, family voice, cultural connection, and great accountability. So how that looks and the purpose is reducing, as you can see, reducing disproportionality, strengthening family preservation, expanding active efforts, and increasing community partnerships. It establishes expectations throughout the life of the case, but these are just the central changes. It requires earlier and more persistent efforts to prevent unnecessary separation. Families must have more meaningful role in safety planning, including through the family group decision-making process. Father's relatives and kin must be identified and engaged early. not only when a placement is needed, but when a child protection matter exists. Family relationships, culture, and community must be treated as sources of safety and support. The Act also creates greater accountability through case reviews, documentation, and continued examination of disparities and decision-making. The most significant change is the active effort standard. The clearest way to understand it is to compare it to what it looks like in practice. And so so in looking at this historically, the efforts have been considered reasonable. And so the act maps for it to be active. And so I'll show you in a few moments, what active looks like versus reasonable. The family voice is it requires the families to be included and can make decisions together regarding child safety and case planning. It requires fathers to be notified early on, non-custodial parents and relatives about child protection involvement. They also must be considered placement options whenever possible. We want to preserve relationships and provide culturally specific and responsive support to families. And the accountability comes with our case review process, which I'll also talk about. and auditing to look at how the practice is playing out in real life. And then it also asks that we look at alternatives to permanency other than termination of parental rights, which feels more permanent than our alternative of a transfer of custody to a relative or other caregiver. So the reasonable efforts versus active efforts, this is just some examples here. Under traditional reasonable efforts approach, an agency might provide a referral and document that a service was offered, but active efforts requires us to help identify the right service, understand the barriers, support family and accessing it, following up and adjust when the plan is not working. So the question shifts from, did we help to, what did we do to help families succeed in their safety? The distinction is important because families often face transportation, childcare, housing, scheduling, trust, and system navigated navigation barriers that a referral alone cannot solve. So to demonstrate what this means in practice, actually I'll skip that part. So this is just an example of the differences and how we might help in an active effort scenario. I'm going to pause right there, and I'm just going to jump in real quick.

We're going to go back because we did slip a slide, so we're going to go back, but on that active effort, what's important to know is that we have received, our staff have received a lot of training on what it means, and we're basing it off of the Indian Child Welfare Act standards, so we're taking a lot of the information we learned from ICWA, and we're modeling it over with what does that active? So we know that our ICWA staff have been doing active efforts for a very long time and we have our own ICWA unit. And so leveraging that and some other expertise on what does that look like? And what we're learning is that a lot of our staff are saying, this is actually, some of this we do, it's part of our practice and we have to do better job of documenting and really talking about what that is. For some, it is a new practice of here's a referral, here you go. or really I'm going to sit with you and I'm going to call, or we're going to do this together. I'm going to pick you up and take you. And some of that leads to capacity. So I just wanted to go a little deeper into that active efforts piece. Nikki had picked back up, but we skipped a slide. So we're going to just go back just a little bit to talk about, go back one more. So when we were talking about from legislation to practice, we skipped a little bit regarding our workforce and caseload. We want you to dig into that a little bit. So I'll let Bobbi jump back in real quick and talk about workforce and caseload capacity.

Thanks for that. When it comes to the landscape that we're working within, it's important to know what contributes to some of the disparities and our workforce is a critical component to that. When we think about how they can reduce the disparities when we're fully staffed and we have everybody trained and functioning, what we've experienced over the last year is a little bit different. Huge thank you for the positions that you've granted us at the end of last year. We've got about five positions that you granted that are still vacant. So some of our hiring processes, we've had to, it's not that they haven't worked, it's that we had to go through them multiple rounds to be able to fill all the positions. So there's that piece of things. The needs for the children and families that we're serving, I mentioned it briefly, but they're becoming more and more complex. And so when we think about the community services that are available to support families, their reach is a little bit less further than it historically has been. And so Our workers are doing a really good job at bringing the disparities down at that front door. And so we're really serving the families who are at the highest level of crisis and needing some sort of intervention. And so that means that the work is a lot more challenging. Also, the needs for families are also increasing and growing as well. And so we need to have staff available to be able to serve families. face-to-face, right? Often when we hear about active efforts or when people are training about it, we talk about you've got to get out of the office. And so a lot of our work is in the office behind the desk. And so we're navigating that with our staff and working on training. Other things is we've seen a number of transitions within the division as well. So there have been people who have left the agency, but we've also had transitions from people who are child protection workers moving into other positions or the general advancement that happens within a division. So When it comes to staffing and transitions, we continue to have a need in that area as far as stabilization goals, and we've got some efforts underway to help with that. So it is something that isn't new to us. We've been having transitions since I've been with Ramsey County, and we'll continue to have them likely.

I'll get ready two times.

Actually, if you want to go back, I didn't mention the Right here, the phase-in process, when we phased in with Hennepin County, January started us out at 30% phase-in, which is three out of every 10 cases to where we are. And it increased every 10% every quarter until where we are today, which is 80% as of July. We'll be at 90% as of October. And then come January 1st, we'll be at 100%, which the whole state will be participating in.

I know, right, but we deal with that.

No, it's a good time to pause. Let's pause, and if there's any questions, we can ask them now.

Oh, okay. So... Brina first, and then Mary Jo. We see the removal increase from 24 to 25. Can you talk about that increase of why kids are being, families are, kids are being removed? Are we talking about kids are being removed from the house, or... What are we saying here?

Yeah, when we dive into that data a little bit more, what we're experiencing is that some of the out-of-home placement removals occur because we've initiated them. Are there things that we've been working with the family and we've identified that there isn't a safety plan or there isn't anything that can be done to avoid it? In a number of instances, though, those decisions are made before we're even involved. And so those would be the instances... Sorry, I saw... police officers are the ones who sign the police votes and make that final decision. And so they have to be part of that conversation. And so if a police officer responds to a call and they think that there's a removal that needs to occur, they make that decision right there in the moment. And so sometimes the at-home placement decisions aren't within our hands. Is that new?

No.

So it's always been done that way.

And so why are we seeing a greater number of that happening with police officers removing kids? Because that was the gist of the bill is to not do that type of removal.

I think it has a lot to do with the complex needs of the children and families that we're serving. What we're seeing in some instances is that youth who have children diagnosed disabilities or behavioral struggles, our youth who are police are responding and making those decisions and they need higher levels of care. So sometimes the needs of our community require that level of intervention. And then when we get involved, obviously we try to reunify the family and get them home as soon as possible, but we are trying to partner with law enforcement to help get ahead of some of that as we're seeing.

I'm going to jump in and quickly just before you, when Is that, do you see people, because I kind of, my thought process went to, well, is this a way for families to get the help that they need to get a bed, to get, you know, the correct mental health that they need because there's also a gap in that system as well and long, you know, the longer waiting periods or longer, you know, wait lists. So is that an option? And to piggyback off that, Is it also to like a training issue that as they continue to hire new police or, you know, just a training issue that maybe somehow there could be collaboration on that?

Yes, there's definitely room for collaboration and training and through our partnerships with Raise the Age and our interactions with law enforcement, we're going to be having those conversations and helping with the process. I do think though that in the instance about getting access to beds and services is I think that that avenue is being explored and is sometimes the way that families do get access to the services that they need because the system isn't able to respond. Regina? Yeah, I do think too that the families that aren't able to get the supports from our community service providers, if they aren't able to get services right away, their crisis and their needs continue to rise. And so when families get to our, you know, when we get the information about them, they're at the ultimate crisis level where historically we've had other services and community providers that would typically meet those needs, but there's wait lists, they're experiencing funding cuts and various different things. So it's a combination of a lot of different things.

So it was my thought that when the police show up, even if it's the police that is making a decision to replace for other family members, is that happening or is that what's happening?

Yes, so the officers do know that they should be trying to find a non-custodial parent, a parent, a relative, a kin, or somebody to leave a child with. And that is something that we're continuing to reiterate in our conversations with law enforcement.

I'll jump in, Commissioner Moran. Increasing placements is multilayered. As Bobby was saying, there are those that are within our control, and then there are those pieces that are not within our control. Some of the other things that I think we've seen as we are, and again, when I think about legislation and how long it takes to really get to what we hope to see, it takes some years, right? So having two counties phase this in, really we've been told, well, this is the practice time. This is the trial period. This is our opportunity to get it right. So on January, 2027, we're ready to go. And so we really leaned into training our staff, and supporting them with understanding their expectations before we started moving down the train. Now, how that connects to the placements is when you have staff that are new or newer, we will see an increase in placement sometimes. That's a natural thing that occurs. We have supervisors, managers who we've created some systems that help to prevent unnecessary removal. And so that the removals we're seeing are truly instances where children need to be removed. That said, we still see short-term removals, two days, three days, five days, right? Those are the ones that we hope we can start to decreased because one would suggest that if I'm out of the home for two days, I didn't need to be out of the home. Right. So it is that partnership and working with our law enforcement partners so that they also understand they have a really good relationship with our screening team where they can call and ask. So, yes, there's things that we expect them to do in terms of asking, can you go to a relative's home and whatnot? and with some of the capacity pieces. One of the things Bobby didn't get the chance to lean into yet is the acuity of the young people also plays a factor. And we are seeing cases that have more mental health, whether it's the parent or the young person. We are seeing more cases of substance abuse, whether it's the adult or the young person. And so all of those, despite these efforts with this particular law, we are hyper-focused on only removing when necessary. And despite that, you're right, we have seen this slight uptick that we are really focusing in on. And the way that we're focusing in on that is if a child has not been removed or if they've been removed within the first few hours or the first 24 to 48 hours, we're having collaborative meetings a multidisciplinary meeting is an example of one meeting that we would have. Um, also what's the other, thank you. A mapping meeting that takes place where there's a number of people who come to the table early to say, how can we get this young person back into their home? And so, um, we also are kind of taking a look at what, what rules are short term and which ones are longer term.

So what I hear is that, um, Children have been removed at higher numbers because police are not well-informed. They're just removing because they believe they should remove. But when they are removed, they are placed with family members. And when that doesn't happen, they go into foster care with strangers, right? But we're seeing an uptick in mental health and substance use disorder, even among the parents and or the child or maybe both.

Yes.

And that's causing an increase of removals from the home.

I think we should add too that with the complexities of what we just said, there is several, or I would say more than several, a much higher rate of parents not wanting to parent children. And so we have had an extreme amount of parents who are saying, I can't, I won't, in hopes of getting the services that have the gaps that are missing. And so we have had a serious amount of that in that age group too, like 12 to 14, that tween age where they're growing, they're bigger, they're more, I don't want to say dangerous, but parents are feeling fearful of having children in their home who are not, where the mental health is not stable.

Mary Jo? Just a quick question. Thank you for that great information. Some of my questions were that way. You just mentioned that there are positions that aren't filled yet. Is it just we just have a long process or we're just not finding the right fit? I mean, we know that this is really important to find people that really are able to do this work, just combination. It's a hard job.

I don't know how else to say it. It's very difficult when you're honest about what we need and what the work is i think um what used to be a very difficult job to get is now we're hiring people that are really don't have a lot of work experience in the field in general um and so we're having that turnover and um just having people realize once they get into the positions the intensity of the work yeah okay okay Thank you.

I appreciate that. That makes sense. Thanks.

Is that up twice or is that one?

That's tight. Commissioner McGuire opens up something that I'll bring it up now, which is, the caregivers, people in the caregiving fields, people in social work, in mental health and some other kinds of things. We have a demographic shift of the baby boomer generation. We had early retirements happen during COVID. We had a number of programs that would have been providing supervision over the last five years to new people coming in that were stilted because of COVID disrupted. There's a whole lot of things that created this shortage and also burned out a lot of people really fast. So one of the concerns that I have was the idea of just recognizing the workforce challenge that we have and that we should rise to. I'm just recognizing this challenge, the idea of reasonable efforts versus active efforts in the idea that you're having more energy and effort in the front end. You have more longer periods of ongoing engagement with families. This also creates less, you know, thankfully, less transactional, but also then that means more relational relationships between the workers that are invested in the individuals over long periods of time. So I just think about the idea of how we recruit, how we retain, how we support individuals who are doing this work so that they can show up for our families and meaningfully help them through these times is I mean, there's psychological costs, there's emotional costs, and all these different kinds of things. So I just wanted to ask, when we look at the entirety of your workforce or the caseload, what I couldn't see in the data was what percentage of our total caseload goes from reasonable efforts to active efforts with the implementation of this rule? And how does that shift that sense of who is doing the intense work? who gets to maybe shift in and out of that as they need to recoup after maybe a bad incident with the family or a bad outcome? You know, like, how are you? I mean, just thinking of the whole ecosystem of your team, this is a big shift.

So, Commissioner Jefferson, I'm going to try to take that in a few pieces. I want to start with some of the efforts we've been doing to recruit and retain, which was Not the direct question, but you leaned into it a little bit, and then we can go into the caseloads. So prior to math with CWDA, we recognized a true need shifting in the workforce, as you mentioned. And so we now have a dedicated training team and a dedicated onboarding team that has its own leadership. and its own curriculum, which is actually new. We didn't have that before. So a new worker would come in and they partner with an old legacy worker and they go through their training at the state, which is a few sessions long for a few days. And then they get the majority of their training from their colleagues. We now have a system that there is a six week long training curriculum That was helped to be, that we developed in partnership with Casey Family Programs. And we are now running our second cohort. We're about to run our second cohort team through that. It's not that we didn't have training before. It's that it wasn't very specific. We recognized this need and had to bring that on for our staff. We also have an onboarding team. And so under the onboarding, and this is still being actualized. So it's not imperfection. But the team members come in and they're in an onboarding unit before they actually go and do the work on their own with their teams. So those are two things that we've done to recognize that when we get people in, they're saying, we want to be trained well. You can't just give us 10 or 15 cases to start out with. We need time. And so that has also been us listening to staff who maybe came on and then it didn't work so well. Or maybe they were an intern and they came and then decided to leave. So I wanted to lean into that. When you talk about the percentage of caseload with this, I also want to reiterate that we're training everybody. So everybody within Children and Family Services will be expected to know how to provide child protection responses inclusive of the MAPA law. And so the percentage of cases and then Bobby will get here after the questions, has to do with the cases that are eligible for the phase-in currently, right? So when we say it started at 30% and right now we're at 70%, by the end of the year, we will be at 100, that's still a very small percentage. It's going to be different for every worker, but eventually we could expect when we are in full implementation of all of the disproportionately represented groups, we can expect that this criteria of MAFPA eligible cases would be 90% of anyone's given caseload. Because it doesn't just include, right now we have been, as we're phasing it in, it has focused on the data we can capture, which is race. And that will expand in the next few months to other disproportionately represented groups and DCYF is giving us that guidance on when we start looping in those other disproportionately represented groups. So right now it's really going to vary based on the worker, based on the rotation of the cases that are coming in, but eventually any worker at any given time could expect that they would have to apply this to any upwards of 90% of their cases.

I appreciate, I know what time, but I really do appreciate, I don't think I quite had grasped how transformational this will be for that department, that it's not, that it's not a, you know, a special subsect of experienced workers, or then, I appreciate that. Thank you. And I, you know, thank you for that. Yeah.

County Manager Becker, and then we will move on.

Yeah, I know we're trying to give time here, but I just really want to reset the conversation a little bit in that, you know, all the mechanics of the program we're talking about, I think are important points of clarity that, you know, some commissioners have been closer or further away from this act. I do want to say as Ramsey County, though, for us to be impactful on the systems change side, we're really trying to think about the families differently. Like I, you know, I'm a little bit just struggling with my own feelings of just thinking that there are no families that don't want their children. Let's just like ground ourselves in that. Like getting the parents to do more toward restoring parents' sense of their agency and capability and authority is really where we actually in Ramsey County want to center the work. And I think in sitting with some of the families, I think, you know, I had taken notes when we were with our community with our elders, but I think it's just this realization that, you know, it's, it's, we have to put parents back in those decision-making roles and distinguish like the support from substitution, make help in capacity building. I don't know. I just feel like we, I don't want to fall into the same rut that every other county is in implementing this act and forget that we need to put the family as the driver of the success of the their their success and so I just I think it's important that we keep that in front of mind so I just so I just think that's really really important because the system no matter how great the act could be if we're just kind of doing a system it's still going to have the same result and we have to kind of flip the whole thing on its head and the only way we do that and I know you'll hear more but I just kind of still struggling a little bit of like how we kind of get our collective um organizational mindset outside of like systems thinking and put the family there at the center. So, okay. Thank you for letting me say that.

Yeah, no, I'm really glad that you said that because one of the things, I mean, like in, in some of the other cases where I've talked about how well, if, if there's a tipping point, a certain population cannot, we just universally do the right thing for everybody was kind of the, the, where I was kind of going with that and also recognizing that it is a big shift in, in approach and, and just honoring that, you know, making sure that we're reasonably resourcing and supporting as we're asking for that kind of a shift. Thank you for centering it that way because that's, yeah, I think different people on this panel have different experiences of even being close to, utilizing these services at different times of their lives. And I so appreciate the work that's gone into giving every family that sense of agency and the supports that they need.

Thank you. I think we opened up talking about changes in practices and changes in infrastructure. There's another one that I didn't pick up, but definitely the practice in the infrastructure. You know, we have a new policy that just continued to do things as we're always done. This is really starting with the police there, right? It shifts them, right? Well, they are now becoming the decision-makers, you know, but they need to be well-trained too over the process.

And one thing I forgot to mention in a backslide, which is still moving us forward here, is that our... We've changed our practices internally in terms of, even though there's a 72 hour hold a police fold that they've maybe held a kid outside of the home. We have 72 hours to make decisions about whether that child goes home or not. And we do an internal process. That's Sophia mentioned. It's a mapping and it includes County attorneys. It includes the managers. It includes workers too. staff a case based on what an intake worker and assessment worker has done to determine what we can do to try to get that child home versus keep that child out of home. So we have a process in place that helps us check our biases as well as make decisions where it's not one or two people alone. It's an agency decision versus an old practice that it might be between a worker and a supervisor, whether a child who stays out of home. It's a much bigger process for us now so that we can return children sooner rather than later. And it kind of moves into our slide here about the numbers that we have. And although we've served We've served 718 families, 1,700 children. Of that, 96% of these MAFPA children have remained safely at home. So when it comes to our MAFPA cases and the assessments that we're doing and the processes we've done internally, we've been able to keep kids at home. More often than not, even though the numbers are potentially showing a progressive increase. up swing. So these numbers reflect meaningful early progress in Ramsey County's commitment to the goal of math with CWDA. The implementation is not simply the application of a new set of statutory requirements. It's a practice shift, one that asks us to engage families earlier, elevate family voice, include fathers and relatives, strengthen active efforts, and pursue the least disruptive path to child safety. The shift is occurring alongside a rapid phase-in within a child welfare system already experiencing substantial workforce and service capacity pressures. We share this context not to question the importance of the law or the urgency of the work. It's that we're learning how to reinforce that this is a necessary act. looking ahead, our focus is not simply reaching full implementation. It's building the shared infrastructure and support needed to implement the law meaningfully, consistently, and sustainably for families. So as we've implemented The act we've also part of the law asks us to do case reviews. And at this time, the case reviews are on the agency. So kind of Ramsey had both created our own review tools, um, definitions and workflows based off of the, the, uh, The details of the law and we train staff reviewers to review, um, the cases. So far, we've reviewed 550 cases. 375 of those cases were in 2025, and 175 are through June of this year, just from January to June. And what we've learned, just as it kind of was mentioned earlier, is that we still need to do better on earlier support and family group decision-making referrals in the early stages. I think You know, workers will say a lot of their faces, you know, they come in, it's one meeting, two meetings, they haven't found a real child safety issue. So they're opening and closing cases without necessarily including those active, those, those efforts of engaging the family so that maybe we can avoid recidivism of return cases. So we are learning that we have to engage families still, um, more than we have been. reach out to non-custodial parents, reach out to fathers and see what their role is to help support keeping kids in the community and at home. And then better documentation. Our workers are doing a lot of work that they don't give themselves credit for sometimes because they're so busy and the workload is so much. So how do we consistently show active efforts? How do we document it so that it's really there and clear to do everything we can to prove to not have children placed outside of home. So in these reviews, we've created a remediation plan that includes ongoing training, intensive supervision and practice improvement as we continue to progress towards getting better at providing these active efforts.

Anything I'm missing?

One thing. Yeah. Can I pause for one second? Commissioner Jeon? Going back to the case review and then also just what you shared earlier about that many of the cases, they're decided from local law enforcement too. Are you deciphering, are you splitting that data out to make that determination about that these are decisions from social services and or law enforcement? are you splitting that data apart? Commissioner, I'm not sure about that. Can we get back to you on that one?

I would need to take a look with our, I was going to call them our review team, but our evaluation reporting team to just make sure if we have that at that level in the system, we're able to see like who made the initial, but there's a little bit more nuance to be able to to tell that piece of it. So I'd like to get back to you on that.

Okay. And then the other question that I had around was like local law enforcement. It sounds like there needs to be some additional relationship building or like connecting with the local law enforcement too. It's just, it's coming to our ECC then. Like if police are being dispatched, Are we capturing that on our end when like alternative response initiatives?

Very good question, Commissioner John. So this is going to get a little nuanced, so I'll try to try to balance the two. Yeah. I must say that our police partners, our law enforcement partners have been great. We continue building that relationship with them as an iterative process of continuing to, whether it's go to their their roll calls, or just meeting with the leads. We have a really good, the team that does the investigations is called the sex crime unit. We have a very strong relationship there. So I wanna level set that and just say, I think we have a really strong relationship with all of our law enforcement partners. And when they are on the scene and they are making a real time decision, they may or may not be able to think I'm gonna call into the screening line and see how they can help me or depending on what time of day it is. And so part of our practice, I'll just share a little bit about a change that took place. There was a time where we had an after hours team. Through the years, that changed, right? For various reasons, that wasn't the most efficient way to have a full team operating overnight into the evenings. It wasn't the fiscally responsible thing to do. And so we had to shift away from that model. We do use our appropriate response initiative in this past four or five months maybe to help answer those screening calls on the nights and weekends. Getting a social worker to respond when the police is there that might take 30 minutes or an hour, we haven't mastered that with our staffing levels just yet. So yes, oftentimes the police are in the position of either calling our screening team and consulting with them or making a decision that is in their purview to say, I'll let child protection deal with it later. I'm just gonna get this kid to a holding space until a placement can be found or until child protection can do their work. And so the reality is that it's changed and we have to kind of meet the moment and that might mean like now we need to think about meeting the moment differently. I don't know, hope that answers some of your questions or most of your questions.

I mean, I guess I would just be curious in just certain general conversation about like what that means, like what meeting the moment in that time means or what it would look like.

So Commissioner Jean, I'll just, so our current practice might mean we might need to shift. Maybe we need to, if we didn't have, we had staff at night responding that didn't work then, Maybe we go, we try it again. Maybe we have different staff that are available. We've been talking about how do we get more intermittent staff, right? We typically are staffed with full-time employees and we don't have as many intermittent or part-time staff to meet those needs nights and weekends. And so I think that's some of the, what I'm thinking about in terms of how we might meet the moment differently rather than, you know, we tried the putting full-time staff nights and weekends, that was too far. Maybe we try something in the middle. And so I think those are discussions that we continue to have with executive leadership about how we meet the moment in that way. That's just one example.

Okay. And then last one is just how does local law enforcement work then with you all? Is it just when they're holding someone or- And then they have to make a decision about whether, you know, the child is at risk or in danger. Yeah. What does that process work? And to me, it also seems like, you know, I don't want to, I want to make sure that, you know, the experience that families have here is equitable, right? That no matter who it is, for whichever local law enforcement it is, that they're treating with the same type of standard that they would treat any other family. So that's why I'm like, it seems like they almost have a lot of discretion too.

Yeah, so that's what I'm trying to parse out here. Yes. Commissioner Song, this has been something that has come up just with the state of Minnesota as a whole and how we've leveraged and used law enforcement when it comes to assessing that initial safety or the need for children to be removed. Law enforcement is placed in a really strong position to be able to make that critical assessment in the moment by putting someone on a hold. But in addition to those placements, we also work with our law enforcement partners to do investigations. They work really closely with our intake team to partner if there is a situation that escalates and we have to do investigations. So those are the two primary ways I think that we work with our law enforcement partners. But I'll pause there and see if either of these ladies have anything to add.

I don't think I have anything more to add other than I think we do our intake and investigation workers have really good relationships with our police department. I think they reach out. on a regular basis to workers to ask and consult about things. I also do believe our police officers are looking to their families before they're looking to us for placement options in situations where maybe a parent can't parent at that moment. And so a lot of the cross-referencing, we cross-reference with the police and the police cross-reference with us and I think we've improved significantly in our relationship with our police partners.

Thank you.

So the legislative updates. The 2026 legislation further defines how this proportionality represented communities will be identified and directs greater attention to families' economic, cultural, and disability-related needs. I believe the state is going to pause on some of those parts of the act that focuses on low-income poverty and it's going to focus on the race and ethnicity as the primary way to gain active efforts. It reinforces the expectation that when safe and appropriate agencies work with families to develop safety plans that incorporate family and community supports and adjust the needs as change and adjust as needs change. So legislation also expands the state's role in systemic case reviews and updates future county reporting and remediation requirements. Ramsey County's existing 2.5 million phase in award is now available through December 31st of this year. This provides additional time to use the funding but does not add new dollars. A new statewide county allocation was also established for child protection staffing and services. Funding may support active efforts, prevention and out-of-home placement, reunification and permanency. Importantly, the allocation may sustain staff and services initially supported through temporary funding. Actual county awards will depend on the state appropriations and the statutory formula.

You can just go back real quick. So we know that just on that legislative update under the funding, so $15 million was appropriated for all counties. Our allocation, I think, was about $1 million for this upcoming 2027.

I guess, what would you say the anticipated costs of implementing this versus what's appropriate? What's the gap we're going to have to fill there?

Thanks for your question, Commissioner Devensy. It's a question we get often, and the... the numbers have really fluctuated quite a bit. And I'll just be honest. We've seen, we, we have done estimates that looked as low as 4 million and estimates that looked as high as 17 million. And the reality is it depends on what we really want to do. Right. So if we're talking about, we just want to staff up and we want to be able to make sure we have enough staff to meet the demand. So their caseloads are low. That would be one number. If we're saying, well, active efforts, because a judge can order an active effort to be, I want you to pay someone's rent for three months or six months. That's going to look really different. So it's been really hard when folks ask, what does that look like? Because there really is a continuum. I think it's something that we need to continue to build. year after year to be able to really support families with where their needs are in the moment. It's also going to depend on what families have access to in their community. So if they don't have insurance for whatever reason, and they need therapeutic interventions, well, we may have to pay for those. So it really, if you were to ask me like just one number, I would say we would want to start out with probably about $4 million. And that could also include those community contracts, those culturally specific services. But right now, we're working with what we have. And we have been able to do some. We haven't seen that in its full potential because we haven't yet been able to add in those culturally specific providers to see the great work they can do.

I was going to follow up for that. I guess the reason why I'm asking is because there are, we're bumping up against the ecosystem that just isn't out there for family members who may not ever interact with our Child Protective Services or who may escalate and call the police because they feel it's the only way that they're going to get access to the very limited services that are there. And I guess the question I have is like, how can we, within our position of convening, with partnering, with building capacity within the greater ecosystem, create a sense of urgency around, you know, I think of there was a lot of day treatment programs that closed during COVID. How do we get those reopened again? I mean, how do we encourage partners to revigorate their respite programs so that, you know, if an officer comes and says, we can't stay here, I can't get ahold of anybody, but I know that there's a respite program that we will feel will be a softer disruption than, what is currently available. I'm just thinking of, and that's for another, I mean, I don't have to list it all off now, but the part of this is when we think about what's county responsible services, sometimes it's being able to figure out, well, it's not on the county to have created all of the possible things in community that families need to get through. But we are being asked now with these active efforts to connect families. So along with our work, what else can we be doing to make sure the community can meet this call to action? Because it's not all us. Thank you for that.

Commissioner Jevenson, I think I heard you say you do or do not want a full answer to that right now. Or that's an opportunity for further discussion.

I just think that that's a further discussion. I think that there are certain times when we think about our legislative asks or other kind of community asks, and that sometimes it's all about the dollar amount. And I think that sometimes there are greater community asks, which is there are a number of things that are coming online that may be bigger than the county can do, but how can we... gather our partners to see what other things are going to be in communities.

And I think that's the next step, too, with our community partners that we are partnering with, too.

And to be continued, I'm sure. Yes. Right now. Moving along. All right. Great questions.

Yes, it is good.

That is a good segue into what change looks like, just because, like you mentioned, the law is asking us to change how we approach the work and how we look at things. And yes, I think we do need to revisit previous service providers, but I think it's challenging us to take things even a step further by asking community what they think and working with community on developing some responses. And so I think here in Ramsey County, we've done a pretty good job of doing that, I think, for children and family services, for sure. Since I've been here, we've brought community in to help inform our work. And so some of the MAPA CWDA work that we're doing now is currently influenced by some of the previous work that my predecessors have done. In thinking about our transforming systems together, we've carried forward some of the screening work that we've done with that group and we're continuing to work with community members to pull that work forward. We also continue partnerships with partnerships for performance. We have our young lived experience folks who come to the table and help us identify where we can grow in serving that population. We also have expanded our executive level partnerships across the county as far as who we work with and who comes to the table and has conversations. So we have an advisory committee. that was pulled together that our elders and some other community members were a part of and continue to be a part of. Other ways that we're working with community as a result of MAFPA and bringing voices to the table is our citizen review panel. We're tapping into them and using them in new and different ways. We've worked with partnerships to get more access to family members from community service providers earlier on. And so thinking about our partnerships with the Nokomis Circle Liaison, the Minnesota One Stop with the parent mentors who go out earlier now and are going to be serving families prior to court. So we've really been doing a lot of work with those community members who are interested in wanting to come to the table and help us figure this out. And that's why we have Elder Ford and Elder Atum here with us today as they've been part of our MAFPA CWDA advisory committee and as a result of that work you know we had a number of meetings and the feedback that we got was like kind of we're sick of talking and we'd like to start doing and I'm like cool I like that too so we've since broken off and had a few different conversations so with elders we've talked about community engagement and with our partnership for permanence We're exploring case reviews and having the young folks come and help us in that way. But today we're going to focus on some of the work that we've done with Elder Ford and Elder O'Toon. So I'll pass it over to you.

This is a lot. Let me start with kind of describing my personal experience since being invited on the advisory committee. And I'm sharing this personal story because I believe it's reflective of something that Deputy Manager Ling, I'm sorry, Manager Ling spoke about. How do we truly think and transform the system so that community and families are the driver, the designers, the co-creators, less by default, we end up operating the same system. So when I was invited to join this advisory committee, my first thought was, I have expertise in education and family engagement and literacy and making cultural connections, child protection, child welfare, what could I possibly contribute? After speaking with Elder Mary Kay Boyd, who cannot be with us today, but sends her best wishes, and Elder Atum, I began reminding myself of my family's experience in the child welfare system. I thought about the many, many children who have been placed in our home. My parents have always been foster parents. And so as I began reflecting on the children and families that I've served in education settings and the conversations I had to have with staff, bringing children to it back in the day, St. Joe's Home for Children, which was a major intake facility in Hennepin County, I thought, wait a minute. How easy it is for us to overlook, devalue, and forget that we as community members already have the cultural authority and we are the experts in our experience. And so I share that personal reflection because this work around the system being driven by the hopes, the aspirations, the authority and the expertise of community requires community to look at itself and to remember that we know some things about what needs to be put in place to support and protect families. And we know some things, a whole lot of things about system and structure failures in helping us do for ourselves. And so That's my personal reflection, and it's a part of the work that we have been engaged in with our community. I'll start.

So I want to say, first of all, that I've been at this table many times, and I want to acknowledge that Just in case you wonder, I'm 83. And I really don't have time to be in places and spaces where I cannot contribute. So I feel very strongly that Elder Mary Kate and I, who we're both 83. Wow. We really want you to know that we are not here to ask you for something. We are here because we have something to go back on offer and to really perfect in terms of how we give what we have that has worked. How many children we've raised, how many children we have fostered, how many times we have fought with many, many different kinds of government and officials and how we are here. We're here because we sat on this advisory committee for 18 months. 18 months. So we want especially for Commissioner Moran to know that we were there because we thought that the work you had done and the work that you and others have done with this file needed us to really hear what does it mean to give advice? What does it mean to be on a quote unquote advisory committee? And so when we first started to come, one of the very first questions for us was, what do you mean advisory? Does that mean that we tell you some of the things that you answer some of the questions you have, and then at the same time recognize that you can use it or not use it? So if you can use it or not use it, then you could call me on the phone and I could give you things. I wouldn't have to sit at meetings. I would not have to travel and try our best to be with many, many parents. So we're not giving you our advice, individual. We're giving you what community members have really actually emboldened us to be able to carry because they too have been around us for, in some cases, 25, 40 years, some of the people. who we now have to work with have been around us for that long. So I said, what is advice? Does that mean we have some way to inform the governance structure that is in place or not? And the answer was, no, you are here as advisors. So they were able to tell us the truth. It is advice. And we were able then to see, okay, we'll just come to meetings. One of the things that was profound for us at those meetings is that County Manager Ling was always there. So were the attorneys. And we began to think that the quote unquote experts in the room, people who consider themselves experts, really were trying hard to understand what what was it that could be done to make this become a law that was implementable and practicable by the people around the table who were actually the governance group. This is the governance body. So how could they become to the best of their ability as what we felt as competent as we are that we're doing what needs to be done and doing the things that work. So I just want to say, we really want to make a contribution. And if we're not making a contribution, we will not come back and give you advice based on something that we think is gonna work, but we'll give you an advice on something that we've done before that did work and the chances are will work again.

I'll never forget the phone call. between Elder Tungalu and myself, where we had to really make a decision about what will we do that only we can do beyond advising. And so back in June, we decided we're just going to go into action and do what we know how to do, which is pull our people together. And so we convened 35 families, community members, young and old folks in our community who have experienced the child welfare system. And again, know some things. And so at that June session, a community conversation, we made sure that we all were introduced to and are familiar with this new law. We introduced active efforts versus reasonable efforts. The whole requirements around case reviews, which happen after a case is closed. And we asked the question, how can we draw on our community experience and expertise? And where in that whole roadmap from report is made to a child, that whole pipeline, where does community want to be and need to be not just involved, but significant drivers. And the community, the consensus was not in the case reviews, but at the very beginning at that screening process. And so Elder Atum, myself and Elder Mary Kay took what our community said and staff, county staff did an incredible job of making sure that Sister Sophia was there and others were there because having those decision makers present in the space with community, not talking at, but with community, a part of community was significant the notes we took the reflections we took and we said okay what is community authorizing us to formulate and so we took what community said and said here is an example of how community needs to be and will be involved on the front end and so that was the inception of a pilot project that we called the Black Tape. And I'll pause there.

I would just add before that, that one of the major words that you've heard us use now even more than once is authority. And we were able to, it was really powerful that we were able to show people in the 35 people who were with us that we had Leaders within this, from the top down, I continue to repeat this over and over again. I think at some point, County Manager Lane, I think I said several times, this is a person who has authority. She can make a decision. Then we said, and we want you to know the kind of hierarchy. We have commissioner. We have county manager. We have deputy county manager. We have director. And we want you to know that you are hearing this. You have just one more level to go to be at the top. And that's at this where the commissioners are. So we want people to see that you are serious about this time looking at where is authority? Where does authority lie? And if authority has to do with knowledge, then community has to have authority at somewhere near the top because they are the ones, we are the ones who know some of the language that's used in the description to you today. That's language that we then went with the people in the room to say the words that are being used, for example, maltreatment, active effort, safety. How do we What comes up for you as a definition of those words? So we have people to go through this kind of definition process. And we now are presenting to you using terms that they use for the same term that you have seen now in the law. So we want to have, you have maltreatment according to the law. We want you to have maltreatment according to what is cultural understanding and knowledge of what is maltreatment. not just linguistic or vocabulary, but cultural interpretations. And so that was a process that gave us the opportunity to present to you today something they have now given definitive authority to, or we wouldn't be here presenting this to you.

Something that was powerful throughout this community process is the fact that we don't have to start from scratch when it comes to describing and defining and scoping maltreatment from community and cultural perspective. And so we took the time to reground ourselves at each of these sessions with standards for a healthy African community that are not new, It's this process of reminding ourselves of what we have. My mother's always saying, everything we need is already in the house. So these 21 standards for a healthy African community provided a grounding for these community conversations and a grounding for the work of defining. Something else that was an important distinction that came up at the last session is these culturally rooted guidelines that can be used in the initial screening process to determine whether a case is screened in or screened out can run parallel with what is legally required per the Minnesota mental treatment guidelines. So it's not replacing, but it's on equal authority. And then what does it look like? What does the community say about the sort of training and education for county staff and a team of community folks who together can engage in that screening process and have the whole pilot process overseen and guided by the wisdom of community elders. And so that's the vision for what we're calling the Black Table. One final reflection after the last community conversation. I had some conversations with some of my team and my organization and some young folks who had heard about this Black Table conversation. And I was reminded If you look at the screen there, there's an image of Table Mountain in Cape Town, South Africa. I was blessed to recently spend quite a bit of time on top of that mountain and every morning waking up in my hotel room looking and being greeted by that mountain. Table Mountain came into existence because the gods rose Table Mountain from the sea to protect the land and the people and to be a constant reminder that the people need to remember, look back and remember in order to move forward and protect what has been created. And so when I think about and reflect on what the spirit of the Black Table and these community conversations, it's about What is community's responsibility for protecting and developing our children? And what is the county's role in following the lead and guidance provided by community so that we can protect all of our children together?

We just want to say, and then go through the phases, that this is an original project table of sorts. So what we've been doing with our study of ourselves and within ourselves is the unlearning that we now have to involve ourselves in. There's a significant amount of relearning that we have to do. As you heard today, some of the language about parents no longer wanting to parent or the police having a higher level of Those, yes. And having almost authority. They have an authority that no one else basically have. So those are the kinds of practices that have become what everyone expects to be the truth of what's going on. So what we've been really looking at is what is the unlearning process that has to happen within this group of professionals? no matter particular disciplines, and what is the unlearning that has to happen within and among those of us who are parents, African-American people, parents, whether we are talking about mothers and fathers and the biological, or those parents in the community and cultural point of view that are really like proximity parenting. Parenting because you live next door and have for centuries because you may call and be seen as a mother or a father or something, but it's not biological. So those are the, we have to now relearn and have those things become the practice. As you will see now, as we talk about the work in action, that's where we're trying to head. Are we out of time? I thought that we were getting close.

Three more minutes. Okay. I'm good.

So we're talking about, we just want you to see the phases of change evolve. And you heard that before. And the evolution of the back table, community defined space, bringing cultural knowledge. We just want to underline cultural knowledge, not just cultural involvement and not just kind of anti, you know, unified. And so we're talking about knowledge. And this is knowledge that we want to bring to stand side by side with the knowledge that is coming forward. to implement the law, define the law. Well, there will be laws, similar laws from cultural laws that we will bring us then side by side. So we each can see where is the intersection, where the intersectionality going to be able to happen with that law that's not based in culture. And this law that is based in culture and have to coexist in order for this to happen. give us something different at this table and to report to the state when you have another report that goes in. We realize that six months are a short period of time. And then reflections of the community. We're talking about perspectives on authority, accountability, disproportionality, as far as we see disproportionality, like how many of us, not as compared to Europeans and other people, but disproportionality in terms of How many of our children and our own people is there a disproportionality that we have to see in terms of how many of us are in child protection reported by our own people, by our own neighbors, by our own teachers? There's a level of disproportionality there that we will study ourselves and share what those particular indicators are for us. Thank you.

Well, thank you very much. I want to just jump in here. We're getting to time. I'm going to, my knee is going to come up. I just want to say the experience of having this opportunity to work with the elders is invaluable. When you get a new law that really was grounded and focused on this cultural piece and it expanded, right? But we know where the spirit of the law came from. That may not translate for every county come January 2027. But we know, based on your leadership and your blessing, that we will continue to make sure that how we implement is grounded with the spirit of those cultural specificities.

May I just say one more thing, please? There is a specific practice that we're taking back to the community and to the advisors So there is a specific project. We didn't talk about the specificities of it today because of time, but we are going to start at the front end and be able to become a part of the screening process so we can inform in a different way some of the things that's going to happen. And so we'll bring that back to you once we have been able to implement it. Thank you.

Thank you so much. Can I just say, while you're switching up, thank you, thank you, thank you so much I'm so grateful that we're a phase in county first because we can benefit so much from you. And hopefully the other counties will take something of what we've learned and their implementation. But I know we all are so grateful for your work. Thank you so much. Thank you.

All right. So as we get run through, we're going to just kind of speed through our last few slides so that we can make sure if there's additional questions, we can get to them.

So first of all, I want to thank chair, commissioner, and county manager for the time and the opportunity. And I do want to thank everybody in this room, the whole community, for your commitment to the Residence Agency Conference. I also want to thank the elders for sharing their perspective. I think what we heard today is an important example of communication, partnership, and how to better serve the community. Partnership is not an implementation. Partnership is working together to make sure what works well, what needs to be changed, and look at how we can improve the system and partner together. So as we look ahead, the question becomes how we sustain this approach in turn and what we learned and turn that into practice. The elders are one important source of community knowledge and part of the larger feedback. We are also listening to families, our workforce, and what we hear is that we need to focus on early family engagement, father engagement, community relative engagement, and also document active effort. And I cannot stress to you how important it is to document active effort. cultural connection and strong support for our staff. The information show us what we need to do and what our staff need to support them to do the job. We need to be honest about what implementation feels like for the workforce. It includes challenges. It includes the uncertainty in the support they need. Staff has demonstrated a strong commitment to child safety, family relationship, and also support in the goal of MAPA CWD8. I think it is important to identify and have a clear expectation, concrete examples and opportunities to learn from colleagues, coaching, capacity, and culturally responsive resources. We need resources for the population we serve. and for our community. Feedback matters because they are the worker that's turning laws and policies into real life experiences with family. And I like to believe that lasting change requires listening to and supporting the people who carry the work. If we want major changes in practice to last, it requires ongoing organizational support. Our response include strengthening communication, training, developing tools, guidance, expanded family group decision-making, community-based support, and better ways to provide feedback and use the information to improve how we work with families. The goal is to make expectation of MEFPA-CWDA more concrete, practical, and realistic for staff so that they can do their day-to-day work. Some takeaways are increased complex needs, math by CDA transform practice by family engagement and partnership. Ramsey County will continue to adapt and strengthen the systems. As we look ahead, our priorities are clear. We want to continue implementation while strengthening our workforce so that they are able to carry out the work. We need to strengthen the way we work together. Partnership is important and it is important in our communities. We need to improve how we measure outcome if we really want to make a difference. We need to continue to expand voluntary and preventive services early on so families have the options before situation arises. There are implementation and physical considerations we need to monitor. Active effort requires a higher level of arrangement and follow through with families, which increases the workforce and services costs. Recent court order are asking us to do more and show more evidence about active effort. For example, the court have asked us to pay for rent, daycare, birthday parties for kids, and supervisor visit three, four times a week. We continue to navigate how the expectations intersect with Math Plus EWDA and existing court process. There are concerns with expected court challenges when Math Plus EWDA fully implemented. Our focus is to identify impact early on versus later, ensuring that we have the capacity and resources to meet the requirement to maintain safety and permanency. This is long-term transformation. What we build and what we put in place will now determine whether the change can continue and become part of the everyday practice. So I will close with what we need from the board as we continue this work. First, we need to sustain the workforce capacity infrastructure to make this work. We've talked through this presentation about the level of engagement that the Act requires active effort, takes time, relationship, coordination, and follow through. Focusing on workforce capacity, training, support, data, accountability is important as we move forward towards the FOIA implementation. Second, we need to continue championing volunteer preventive services and culturally responsive services. If our goal is family preservation and prevention services to prevent removal, we must make sure families can access support and services early on before crisis comes up. Continue to strengthen the resources and partnerships so families receive support early on. We need to continue partnership with families, elders, and communities. You have heard directly from the elders about the work that they're doing and the perspective they bring to the table. We want to move forward a model where community voice is part of how we design what we design implement and evaluate the work. The board support for the approach is very important. Part of our work we cannot accomplish at the county level alone. Policy funding system issues affect our ability to support families and fully implement that. The board has an important role in using their voice to advocate for resources and policy change. Importantly, advocate for case review shift to DCYF. And statistically, we look at the size, the sample size versus 100% of the cases. Today, our ask is not simply to support the implementation, but to support transformation. How we engage family, how we partner with community, how we support our worker, how we improve outcomes for children and family matters to us.

With that, thank you. Any questions? Very quick, because I know we're ending. OK. So I leave with change in practice, changing infrastructure and changing the level of power and who has it to get to something different. And to get to something different, you know, we look at law, we're also looking at cultural law. They go hand in hand, right? But we also, the elders clearly defined and said there's a process of whether we are, whether families are screened in or screened out. But at the same time, I'm hearing the police ought to power to make that decision. That's a problem. Right? And so I don't know if the elders did. Is this what you decided where we need to go next? Or was that a county decision about what we need to go next? Was that a decision made together? Or was that a decision? Was that a collective decision about the next step? Did you see this?

It's a collective effort. I would say share.

It's a shared effort about where we go next. Because I'm... It seems to me that until we make a shift that values the community do point as much as we do the county and other practices, we're going to fall short and I'm not really seeing it in my opinion. And so it's an opportunity for Ramsey County because we're all pallets and what we write in that report to the legislature, needs to encompass some of that. Where we are seeing community elders in the process, lived experience process as a main point of how we transform the system. That got to be a part of it. Otherwise, we're living within a structure that's still the structure. That has not changed much. We're asking for more money, we're asking for more people, we're asking for but I don't see the transformation of community that we're asking for. And so that's a huge part of the transformation. That's a huge part of looking at not just the practices that we continue to have. We're not transforming it. We're just replicating it and asking for more in order to do the change. And if we don't get that, what I hear is that, well, These are the issues and the problems, and it's why we can't do it. And I just say, I have to believe that we haven't captured the essence of community yet and what they bring to the table.

I kind of want to hear you, Commissioner Moran, but I think it's a bigger systematic issue than more than what Ramsey County can solve alone. I think if we look back at the history and the systematic and just how communities are treated and how communities are held down. It's, we can't solve this issue alone. Yeah. I just, I also really believe that the work that you guys are doing is you're doing it to, to get up to law so we can be in compliance with law. But I also think like the state organizations, community, and, most importantly, the people affected by this have a play a part in this as well, right? At some part or some point in this community members, parents have to step up and say, Hey, I don't want this. I want different for future generations. I want different and have to have ownership in this too, because we can create all the policy we want. We can create all these programs we want, but if, if we don't have them at the table with us to do this, then

really yeah then really what is it for i guess can i just very briefly um chair miller and commissioner moran um i hope that through this presentation and through how we're bringing the community elders the law didn't ask for that yeah right the law implies some things and then it gave us some really strict instructions so yes our focus for the past 18 months ish has been on the law and those really strict instructions where we get to infer a little bit is based on our values and the values that this board has set forward. And with engaging our community partners, we will continue to evolve that process. But that's not something we had to do. But I do believe that is something you all expect of us. And so we are doing.

I would agree with that.

Commissioner Jean.

Just a very last question around the data, around the families too. may you follow up with us about just like by zip code about the families? I mean, that's super important because we are just a part of an ecosystem too. And as you know, our cities are grasping with like their budgets and they're making decisions on where to cut parks and parks and rec centers, libraries, like those are just really important for us as policymakers to know and to be able to advocate for our communities.

Absolutely. Commissioner Jean, can you just, Clarify the code where our families are. One more piece of that. Families for all of, so do we really try to narrow this into the MAFPA law? Are you asking for that based on MAFPA participants or are you asking for all of the child protection reports? Okay. I just wanted to clarify.

And I just have one follow-up question and we can, you could send this to us. I keep hearing about early prevention, early prevention or early is key. But what does that look like exactly when families have no touch point or they've never had a touch point with social services until there's a crisis happening, until the police are at their door, until they're at their end, right? Like, so what does that, where do families go to for that early prevention, that early help, right? Because again, you hear, I know in our community, you think, oh, child protection, they're just going to remove my kid immediately. I mean, you always have that negative impact from, you know, histories, right? From decades of of the negativeness of social services and removing families and removing kids. So sometimes people don't even want to ask for help until it's almost too late and it's to that point. So I guess just clarifying on, because it's mentioned numerous points in this PowerPoint and even some of the key takeaways is early prevention, early help, where and how do we help that? It's almost like you have to rechange your messaging and community engagement. and reintroduce ourselves that, hey, child services is not the same it was 30 years ago. It's not the same it was 10 years ago, right? Like we're taking different approaches, different models so we can help families stay together. I think that would be great.

Chair Miller, we will definitely follow up in our response, in our written response with some of that additional information. Okay. One last question.

Commissioner Jemison. This is for future, just for clarification on my part. I heard the request for a case review shift to DCYF, and I just wanted to, whose recommendation, why, and what does this mean for community avoids? I don't know the technicalities of what part of the process this is, so it's just above my understanding of where this is. That's perfect.

I can take a moment real quick, Commissioner Jevenson. Currently, the way the law is written, we are expected to review 100 percent of all eligible MAPA cases. A case review in traditional child protection practice takes place at the end of the case. Where we found some challenges with that 100% is that if a case comes in, as Mania was explaining, or maybe someone who was explaining, and the family meets with them and they decide it's closed, we still have to do the same level of work or the expectation is still the same. And that can tweak the outcomes of the report when a large percent of them are maybe closed within a very short amount of time. But we're still expected to do the same things. And so currently, the agency is responsible for 100% of reviewing every single case. And so our legislative, Maxa, and others, they are proposing that case reviews one shift from the county responsibility to be more in line with other review processes that the state actually do the reviews and that we move to a statistically significant sampling. So for example, in our equal reviews, it's one case for our current, and that one case has a lot of weight. In other children and family services reviews, maybe it's 2%, 3% of your cases that they select. but right now this is at 100%. So that alone, it might tell us something, but is it telling us what we want to know? I would say what we've learned so far, it's not telling us all the things we want to know. So if we could get that administrative burden, one relieved, but also for anyone who's doing it to a number that really is maybe more meaningful statistically.

Okay, so that part I get, but it also feels like more systems like status quo of who's doing what and who's paying for it and all of that. And I guess what I'm hearing from our elders is, you know, since we're doing some participation that's above and beyond because the how you do it is really important. Is there any part of the process that would be determined internally that would give you some feedback culturally about along to alongside i don't mean in the high level 100 but i mean even in these discussions that you're having and maybe that's already part of the work that you're doing but i'm hearing what commissioner moran is saying is like there's the the what we have to abide by in courts and all of that and i get that and i would get that a lot because we're the ones who have the risk assessment for that right but also the spirit of how do we balance authority of cultural expectations with the system stuff i mean i guess is there any part of that if it does go to the takes the administrative burden off of us that can include some community voice and how, and to continue to inform that work.

So we're planning to use our next legislative report to include that. And our elders have been guiding us on that and have been really clear with us that they want their work that they're doing to be included. And so we're getting started on that second report early.

Okay. I am going to wrap us up. If we have any further questions from the board, let's please send them to Director Thompson. and Deputy Director Bobby Joe, and we can get follow-up on it. I have this whole page I'm going to say, but I'm just going to cut to the chase and say thank you again to everyone who has been part of this work and to our staff for putting this into practice today. I'm sorry I kept you over. Adjourned.

Thank you.