The symposium, titled “Leading for Change: How to Create Sustainable Impact in Children and Family Services,” brought together agency leaders, government officials, service providers, and more to learn about how partnerships can improve care and how the system can work to confront challenges.

Anne Williams-Isom, FCLC ’86, New York City deputy mayor for health and human services, helped organize the symposium to provide a place for professionals to learn with and from each other. While Williams-Isom was unable to attend, she said that the idea for the forum came from the legacy of James Dumpson, the late activist and leading social crusader who served as the city’s first black welfare commissioner and as GSS dean from 1967 to 1974.

“So much of Dr. Dumpson’s work was about the intersection of policy, practice, and research—he wanted to ensure that NYC children, families, individuals, and communities were supported with dignity,” said Williams-Isom, who served in leadership positions in the city’s child welfare system for many years before going on to lead the Harlem Children’s Zone, an education and anti-poverty nonprofit.

John Mattingly, a former head of New York City Administration for Children’s Services (ACS), encouraged those in attendance to value the importance of public service.

“Public service creates public value,” he told those in attendance. “The work that we highlight tonight is one example of public service going back into the mid 1990s. And still going on here in New York City as we speak.”

A Look Back

Mattingly, who served as the welcome speaker, set the stage for the first panel, which featured a look back at the history of ACS. The panel included Linda Gibbs, who served as deputy mayor for health and human services for New York City; Gerard McCaffery, the former president and CEO of MercyFirst, a nonprofit human and social service agency; Sister Paulette LoMonaco, formerly of Good Shepherd Services; and Fred Wulcyzn, the director of the Center for State Child Welfare Data, Chapin Hall, at the University of Chicago.

Shirley Gatenio Gabel, the Mary Ann Quaranta Endowed Chair at GSS, who served as the moderator, highlighted the strides that many of the panelists had made during their time working with or for the city.

“There’s one statistic that keeps on coming to mind—in 1996, when ACS was founded, there were 50,000 children in care, and today, there’s 6,800,” she said. “So I think we can all agree that’s 6,800 too many children in care, but what an accomplishment. And a lot of that accomplishment is due to the hard work of people on this panel and people in this room, and many others working together to create a new system for children.”

The Importance of Data

Wulcyzn said he’s seen how data and story collection from those in the system can help to make improvements. He has about 4.5 million records of children in foster care since the late 1970s, when they first started tracking children’s experiences—at the time on index cards, compared to today’s more modern, efficient system.

“In the last 45 years or so, we have completely changed [the system], and our ability to know something that was happening to children is extraordinary,” he said. “And at the time with Linda and Nick [Scoppetta, the first head of ACS] and all the people who worked at ACS at that time, it was the first time we really had a chance to demonstrate what could be done to take those stories seriously and use them to make a better system.”

Addressing Current Issues

While panelists acknowledged that progress had been made in serving children and families, the second panel of the evening highlighted some of the challenges that still need to be addressed. The panel featured Jess Dannhauser, the current ACS commissioner; Julia Jean-Francois, the co-executive director at the Center for Family Life; Benita Miller, the executive director of Powerful Families, Powerful Communities; Raysa Rodriquez, chief program and policy officer at Federation of Protestant Welfare Agencies; and Willie Tolliver, professor at the Silberman School of Social Work at Hunter College.

Jennifer Jones Austin, LAW ’93, the CEO of the Federation of Protestant Welfare Agencies, an anti-poverty, policy, and advocacy organization, served as the moderator. She said that as she listened to the speakers from the first panel, she kept thinking of the word sankofa, which is an African word from a tribe in Ghana.

“The literal translation of the word sankofa is ‘it is not taboo to fetch what is at risk of being left behind,’” she said. “What it means is taking from the past what is good and bringing it into the present to make progress in the future.”

Jones Austin said that she saw this as the goal of the evening—to look back on the history of ACS and to engage in “constructively critical analysis” of child welfare.

Miller said one of the things the agencies should keep in mind as they continue this work is the need to keep the community and the voices of children at the center of it..

“For me, it was very, very important to bring in folks who were impacted by the system to the conversations that were happening around their lives,” she said.

Inequities and Underlying Causes

Jones Austin emphasized that the system is set up to “treat the symptom.”

“To solve the problem, we have to get at the underlying cause that created the problem in the first place,” she said, citing examples of structural inequities such as poverty, mass incarceration, economic deprivation, social and emotional well-being, and a lack of clinical resources in communities. “We’re not going to solve these problems by just pouring more money into systems that are in place, at best, to treat the system.”

Dannhauser also highlighted the disparities that he and his team are working to address.

“There’s disproportionality throughout the entire system—the most disparate point is at the point of the call,” he said. “It’s 6.6 times more likely that a Black family be called [into ACS]than a white family in New York City. That means, according to one study, that we are investigating almost half of Black families in New York City—44%. And that’s something we’re working really hard on to fix.”

One way is through providing families with resources upfront, he said.

“We have a lot of work to do around how we engage families. We are very open in this administration that it may not be right for ACS to be building all of the solutions, but that there should be other areas that are created, and we have a long way to go.”

Williams-Isom said the goal of the forum was to focus on “how to create sustained reforms over many years in children and family services.”

“The panelists demonstrated the power of diverse teams to bring about systemic change and large-scale reform,” she said in an email following the event. “This needs to happen throughout the entire human services system so that we can reimagine what is possible so that people can truly thrive. I am so proud that Fordham GSS is at the center of this very important work.”

Mayor-elect Eric Adams announced Williams-Isom’s appointment during a press conference on Monday, Dec. 20, where he introduced four other women who will serve as deputy mayor in his administration.

“You are just seeing the coming together of an amazing team,” Adams said. “This is going to be my core leadership, and they are going to ensure that we move our city in the right direction.”

In her role as deputy mayor, Williams-Isom, a 1986 graduate of Fordham College at Lincoln Center, will oversee the city’s health and social services agencies, including the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation, the Department of Social Services, and the Administration for Children’s Services. She’ll work to address the needs of seniors, children, victims of domestic and gender-based violence, and people struggling with hunger and homelessness. One of her main areas of work will be to continue to guide the city’s COVID-19 response and address some of the issues exacerbated by it, including a growing need for mental health services.

“We’ve all been hit hard by this pandemic, and we are all feeling it. But I know that this administration will help us get through. We will heal, and we will heal together,” Williams-Isom said after the announcement.

Williams-Isom will be sworn in on Jan. 1, along with Adams and the rest of his administration.

She was raised in Queens by a single mom, a Trinidadian immigrant and a nurse who always stressed the value of a good education. After completing her bachelor’s degree in psychology and political science at Fordham College at Lincoln Center in 1986, Williams-Isom went on to earn a J.D. from Columbia Law School. She also received an honorary doctorate from Fordham in 2018.

Lifting Up Those in Poverty

Williams-Isom is no stranger to working with people in need, particularly children and families in poverty. Prior to returning to Fordham as the Dumpson Chair, Williams-Isom spent more than 10 years at Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ), a nonprofit anti-poverty organization, first as its chief operating officer and then as its CEO. The organization was praised by former President Barack Obama as a “model anti-poverty program for the nation.”

More than 25,000 children and parents in Central Harlem participate in the organization’s “cradle to college pipeline” programs that aim to break the cycle of generational poverty through workshops for new parents, academic help in HCZ-run charter schools, and college prep services.

“It’s not just me running a school well or an after-school program well. I’ve got to run 24 different programs really, really well. Mediocrity can’t be,” Williams-Isom told Fordham Magazine in 2014 after her appointment as CEO. “It comes down to this sense of urgency: How many generations are we going to let fail?”

Williams-Isom continued those efforts in her most recent role as the James R. Dumpson Chair at Fordham, where she worked with faculty and students to develop research, programs, and policy analyses that improve services to at-risk children and families.

The position was named after James Dumpson, a former dean of Fordham’s Graduate School of Social Service who, like Williams-Isom, worked on bettering the lives of children. He was a social worker, professor, and administrator who began his career as a children’s caseworker and rose to become New York City’s first Black welfare commissioner in 1959.

“For me to be able to come back [to Fordham]  and really think about service and what it means to serve the most vulnerable is an honor. Put that together with Professor Dumpson’s vision—and as an African American woman—I think he would be super proud to see me in this position,” she said.

When she took the role in 2020, Williams-Isom said that for years she had been working to help provide a “holistic approach to our children and families,” and that she appreciated Fordham’s commitment to cura personalis, or care for the whole person.

“I think attending to somebody’s spirit is very important, especially with the trauma that we have seen, based on the policies under which disenfranchised folks have had to live in this country,” she said.

Working for the City

When Williams-Isom is sworn in on New Year’s Day, it won’t mark her first experience in New York City government. She spent 13 years, from 1996 to 2009, in the city’s Administration for Children’s Services, first as the director of the Office of Community Planning and Development, then as special counsel to the commissioner and as associate commissioner for external affairs, and finally as the deputy commissioner for community and government affairs. Before working for the city, Williams-Isom worked for five years as a lawyer after graduating from Columbia Law School.

In 2016, she was appointed by New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio to his Children’s Cabinet Advisory Board.

Earlier this month, in her role as the Dumpson Chair, Williams-Isom convened a group of more than 175 parents, community activists, lawyers, academics, nonprofit leaders, and government employees for the first of four meetings to discuss ways to reform the child welfare system, which has been disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. The discussion, titled “Narrowing the Front Door to NYC’s Child Welfare System,” will resume in January.

At the initial meeting, Williams-Isom said she has spent years thinking about ways to fix the child welfare system, dating back to her first stint with the city in the 1990s, and she noted that it disproportionally affects families of limited means and those who are Black and Latinx.

“There are people who say you have to blow up the whole system, because it’s terrible and based on racist principles, and we can’t fix it,” she said. “Then there are people who are reformers like me. I call myself ‘abolition curious.’ I’m kind of beginning to see it’s not as easy to change systems and take out the years and years of racism in them.”

In her new role, Williams-Isom will be tasked not only with reforming the child welfare system but also overseeing critical health and social service agencies dealing with inequities that have been exacerbated during the pandemic. After she was inaugurated as the Dumpson Chair, she said now is the time to take a look at these services anew.

“We have agency and we have choices,” she said, adding that the necessary changes will take what journalist Isabel Wilkerson has called “radical empathy.”

“Radical empathy is not about you and what you think about a situation that you have never been in and probably never will be in,” she said. “It is a kindred connection from a place of deep knowing that opens your spirit to the pain of another as they perceive it.”

The event, titled “A Conversation About the Well-Being of America’s Children,” included the presentation of distinguished chair medals by Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham.

“Thank you for dedicating your lives to the protection and the cultivation of hope in the hearts of children, especially children who have been forced by circumstance to live at the margins of society,” he said.

In a short talk following her induction, Gatenio Gabel thanked the Quaranta family for funding the chair honoring Mary Ann Quaranta, D.S.W., who died in 2009. Quaranta, a graduate of the GSS class of 1950, would go on to serve as dean of the school from 1975 to 2000, taking it from a small local school to one that ranked eleventh in the nation. She also established the school’s doctoral program. Like Dumpson, she was named a Social Work Pioneer by the National Association of Social Workers.

Gatenio Gabel has served as a consultant to UNICEF, UNESCO, and U.N. member countries on child poverty, advocacy, and protection. She’s twice been awarded Fulbright Scholarships to study child and family policies.

Her talk detailed how racial inequities have become embedded into the American child welfare system. She said that in the early part of the 20th century, social work pioneers identified potential harm that could come to children and pushed for laws on child labor, welfare, schooling, and a juvenile justice system—all of which ignored class and race disparities.

“Many scholars have questioned whether the reformers were acting in the best interest of children, or whether the intent was to extend governmental control over children of the poor,” she said.

She noted that the 1980s was the last time white children were in the majority; by 2040, she said, they will comprise 43% of the child population. Black children are three times more likely to live in deep poverty than white children, and Hispanic children are 2.5 times more likely to live in low-income households. Yet child welfare, health care, and educational systems continue to harken back to the turn of the last century when race was not a consideration.

“Our cries for justice for children today rest on our ability to build new anti-racist systems in social services, education, law, health, and law enforcement.  Only when new systems are implemented will we be able to bring justice to all children in this country,” she said.

Following her induction, Williams-Isom noted that her chair’s namesake, James Dumpson, Ph.D., was an educator before he became New York City’s first Black welfare commissioner, and, later, dean of GSS, a position he held from 1967 to 1974.

“Social work and education are brother-sister professions,” said Williams Isom, who served as CEO of the anti-poverty organization Harlem Children’s Zone from 2014 to 2020. There, she oversaw all programs in the cradle-through-college pipeline to improve services and outcomes for 25,000 children and parents in Central Harlem. She agrees with Gatenio Gabel that the child welfare system needs a complete overhaul.

“There are 12 million children living in poverty today, making them the poorest age group in America,” she said, emphasizing that overall 32% of Black children and 23% of Hispanic children live in poverty. “And 320,000 children have been pushed into or near poverty due to the pandemic’s economic downturn.”

“I think that Dr. Dumpson would have been calling for us to reimagine literally everything that has been done before because it has not been working for so many children in our nation,” she said. “Many of the systems that serve Black and brown children are imbedded with systemic racism and so they can never achieve the outcomes that we seek.”

She said that while the pandemic may have shocked some about the inequities it exposed, people in affected communities weren’t surprised. Yet, she said that much could be possible in the post-pandemic world.

“We have agency and we have choices,” she said.

She said that the necessary changes will take what journalist Isabel Wilkerson calls “radical empathy.”

“Radical empathy is not about you and what you think about a situation that you have never been in and probably never will be in,” she said. “It is a kindred connection from a place of deep knowing that opens your spirit to the pain of another as they perceive it,” she said.

Taking on that perspective will allow policymakers, social work practitioners, and public and nonprofit leaders, as well as faculty at universities, to understand that child welfare systems need drastic change—even at the institutions they serve.

“We must finally admit that these systems were not designed with abundance in mind, they were not designed for people that we love and respect,” she said. “They’re designed as if resources were scarce and we just have to tolerate black and brown bodies.”

In a Sept. 12 talk, Charles E. Carter, Ph.D., deputy director and chief strategy officer of the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University, said the science behind early childhood development and the core capabilities that caretakers need to excel in life, parenting, and work must be reflected in policy and practice to create new theories of change.

The talk, “The Science of Child Development: Implications for Policy and Practice,” was part of the James R. Dumpson Memorial Lecture on Family Well-Being, co-sponsored by the Graduate School of Social Service (GSS), Fordham School of Law, and the Citizens’ Committee for Children of New York.

The event celebrated the legacy of late activist and leading social crusader James R. Dumpson, New York City’s first black commissioner. Dumpson served as GSS dean from1967 to 1974. After he died in 2012 at the age of 103, the University endowed the James R. Dumpson Chair in Child Welfare Studies to honor his lifelong commitment to helping the poor.

Like Dumpson, Carter, who spent more than 20 years working with low-income children and families, is dedicated to transforming the lives of vulnerable children.

Carter began his address at the Lincoln Center campus by recounting memories of his single mother. As a child, he marveled at her “superpowers,” which included working two jobs to support her young children and maintaining order in their household.

“What I call superpowers, scientists call core life skills,” said Carter, noting that successful caretakers are capable of planning ahead, focusing, exercising self-control, seeing things from different perspectives, and being flexible.

“These are the skills that you need in everyday life, whether it is school, work, marriage, family, or relationships.”

Scientific research shows that our brains continue to develop from birth through adulthood, Carter said.  Since it also shows that the stress of poverty and unresponsive child-parent relationships can disrupt childhood development, he believes critical interventions can help adults who are struggling with executive functioning skills, such as controlling impulsive behavior and adjusting to unexpected life demands.

“If you’re able to reduce external sources of stress, you’re able to possibly free up mental space for adults to be able to access those five core skills, and in turn be more responsive to their children,” said Carter.

He proposed reducing external excesses of stress, strengthening core life skills, and supporting responsive relationships as key principles for policy and practices. These principles are particularly important considering that current policies don’t typically take into account how a caretaker’s psychological, neurobiological, and self-regulation systems are impacted by their adversities.

What’s more, paperwork for assistance can be overwhelming and a lack of incentives for parents who work can cause further strains for families struggling to make ends meet, he said.

Because of these potential stressors, Carter encouraged practitioners to be clear, explicit, and strategic about how they work with families in order to make a meaningful impact in their lives.

“If we can be bold, we can recognize all of the superpowers of the people that we work with, and help build the skills of the systems that support the families that we most care about,” said Carter.

Next week, GSS will host a memorial lecture to honor Dumpson, who died Nov. 5, 2012 at the age of 103.

The featured speaker will be Bryan Samuels, executive director of Chapin Hall Center for Children in Chicago and former commissioner of the Administration for Children, Youth, and Families. Samuels’s lecture will center on child welfare, a topic about which Dumpson was passionate.

The memorial lecture is part of an ongoing series associated with the James R. Dumpson Chair in Child Welfare Research, a position created in 1980 to honor Dumpson and utilize the University’s education and research resources to improve the quality of life for vulnerable children.

The chair, which is currently held by Brenda G. McGowan, D.S.W., evokes Dumpson’s commitment to children by focusing its teaching, research, and advocacy on New York City children most in danger of losing their rights or not enjoying an adequate quality of life.

A reception will follow the lecture. RSVP by emailing Priscilla Dyer, or call (212) 636-6623.

Dumpson began at Fordham in 1957 as a visiting associate professor in the Graduate Institute of Mission Studies. After leaving to serve as deputy commissioner in the Department of Welfare, he returned to Fordham in 1967 to take the helm at GSS, becoming the first African-American dean of a non-black school of social work.

To read more about Dumpson and see a timeline of his career highlights, click here.

Read Dumpson’s obituary in The New York Times here.

“We must choose to change our paradigm,” said William C. Bell, president and CEO of Casey Family Programs and former New York City Commissioner of the Administration for Children’s Services. “Even today as we have embarked upon the 21st century, we still have a system that far too frequently sees lengthy separations between children and their parents . . . as being the desired intervention.

“We must be willing to see children in the context of a family, to see families in the context of their community,” he said, “We cannot adequately intervene to resolve human suffering through silo-based intervention.”

Bell was the keynote speaker at the GSS’ James R. Dumpson Colloquium, recognizing Brenda McGowan, D.S.W., the school’s newest Dumpson Chair in in Child Welfare Studies, and celebrating the upcoming 100th birthday of the chair’s namesake.

James R. Dumpson, Ph.D., who served as GSS dean from 1967 to 1974 and is renown for his pioneering work in child welfare, was on hand for the event. He will turn 100 on April 5.

“This appointment is a real honor for me,” McGowan told the audience of 150 faculty and social workers. “When I first moved to the city 40 years ago, his was one of the first names I heard as an important person in child welfare. I wasn’t sure I’d ever meet him . . . but I got lucky.”

William Bell, M.S.W.

Bell is head one of the largest foundations working nationally to improve public policy and practices in the country’s foster care system, which serves some 500,000 children. If the nation doesn’t change its current efforts in child welfare, he said, by the year 2020 approximately 7 million more children will have gone through the foster care system.

Also speaking were Gladys Carrion, Esq., (CBA ’73), commissioner of New York State’s Office of Children and Family Services; Gerald Mallon, D.S.W., (GSS ‘80) director of the National Resource Center for Family-Centered Practice and Permanency Planning; and Carol Wilson Spigner, D.S.W., Kenneth L.M. Pray Professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Social Policy and Practice.

Spigner said that the welfare of children is intricately tied to the issues of “gender, economics and race” in the nation, since almost all foster children come from groups that are systematically disadvantaged. Going back to the 19th century “era of the settlements,” she said, would set the right model by working not just for children but for more job opportunity, better healthcare and greater community-based decision making.

Finally, Bell urged the social work community to learn how to broker power to help enable legislation on behalf of the poor and underrepresented.

“Let’s not deceive ourselves. Gender, race and economics influence the [legislative]decision-making in this country,” he said. “And power concedes nothing without a struggle.

“Are we ready to struggle?” he asked.