Community Possibilities
Community Possibilities
The Invisible Safety Net: Understanding Kinship Care with Amanda Klein-Cox
Amanda Klein-Cox joins me to talk about KinCarolina, a comprehensive support program for caregivers raising children with disabilities or special health care needs. The program combines peer support, training, financial assistance, and community-building to improve caregiver wellbeing and ultimately benefit the children in their care.
• Kinship care occurs when relatives or close family friends raise children whose parents cannot care for them
• For every child in formal foster care nationally, approximately 19 are in informal kinship care arrangements
• In South Carolina, this ratio is even more dramatic—1:300
• Most kinship caregivers receive little to no support despite saving states millions in foster care costs
• Kinship caregivers face unique challenges including financial strain, legal barriers, and supporting children with trauma
• Early results show caregivers feeling less isolated and better equipped to support their families
Amanda's Bio:
Amanda Klein-Cox, Ed.D., is a Senior Research Associate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, School of Social Work (SSW). Dr. Klein-Cox serves as the Project Implementation Manager for the KinCarolina program, which provides comprehensive support to kinship caregivers raising children with disabilities or special health care needs in the Midlands region of South Carolina. In addition to overseeing implementation, she organizes and convenes the project’s Advisory Council and multi-state team of researchers and collaborators. She has also led developing and implementing a national survey of kinship caregivers with the same team. As a researcher, Dr. Klein-Cox is interested in bridging the fields of education and social work around child and family well-being, particularly in the area of kinship care. Since becoming a mom, she is also interested in the intersection of maternal mental health and well-being with child welfare and family well-being outcomes.
Dr. Klein-Cox owns Engage with Data and currently serves as the Lead Evaluator on the HRSA-funded Behavioral Health Workforce Education and Training program at Ohio State University.
Dr. Klein-Cox began her career as a middle school teacher. She earned a Doctorate of K-12 Education Leadership and Policy from Vanderbilt University.
Contact Info for Amanda and KinCarolina:
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Hi everybody.
Speaker 2:Welcome back to Community Possibilities. If you've been hanging around the show a bit, you might have noticed that occasionally, maybe more than occasionally, I have a guest who talks about children and families in our foster care systems. Our foster care systems and you know, in this country we say we care about families, but yet we have somewhere around 400,000 kids in our foster care systems. South Carolina is no different the numbers. There are somewhere around 3,400 kids in foster care, but that does not include kids that are being taken care of by their grandmother, their grandfather, an aunt or a sibling, or even a close or not so close relative May not even be a relative at all. It's called kinship care. So today, amanda's going to be coming on and she's going to be talking about a program in Carolina, south Carolina, specifically called Kin Carolina, and the program provides peer support, peer support groups, trainings and financial support while they are involved in the program. So she's going to tell you how they developed the program, using a needs assessment and really kind of diving in with people who have, as we say, lived experience. Her passion for this project is infectious. I encourage you to go on over to Ken Carolina's website. I'm also going to make sure we get this podcast out a little bit earlier maybe than we had planned, because at the end of the month, ken Carolina has some trainings that you can take advantage of if you are interested. All right enough with that, with the preliminaries.
Speaker 2:I hope you enjoy the show, as always. Please like and share the episode. Thanks so much, everybody. Hi, everybody, welcome to Community Possibilities. I know I say this all the time, but, yeah, I'm super happy to have my friend Amanda Klein-Cox on the show today. Hey, amanda, hi, I'm happy to be here. So, yeah, so Amanda and I have already been chatting for like 12 minutes for what we usually try to keep to an hour podcast, but I had not hit record because we haven't talked to each other in a while. It's been a while since we connected.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So I was trying to remember the American Evaluation Association conference that we met at, I want to say it was Chicago, it was Minneapolis.
Speaker 3:Minneapolis. Oh, you remember that? Oh, I remember because I was in a spot with my consulting business and I went there because I saw how much independent consulting content there was and I found this amazing community of people who actually kept in touch after a conference. It was so memorable to me. So, yeah, I think it was like right before the pandemic.
Speaker 2:Yeah, okay, oh my gosh, minneapolis, they all run together after a while. I do remember that we chatted at the dinner the independent consulting group dinner and you were getting started, and then we ended up in the same mastermind for a while, and then your life took a little bit of a shift and there might have been a baby A baby who's not a baby anymore? Yes, and you all can't see it because we don't post on YouTube, but there's, like you know, some Van Gogh artwork behind.
Speaker 3:Like you know, some Van Gogh artwork behind it, some abstract handprints and things, yeah.
Speaker 2:So you and I know each other, but my audience may not know you. So I want to give you an opportunity to introduce yourself, and I always tell people don't tell me your business bio, don't read a Shurbita. Tell us how you came to be who you are.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I love that, that framing of it. Well, I grew up in New Jersey and then went to college in Baltimore. I went to Johns Hopkins and stayed in Baltimore for a really long time. I got really passionate about policy, particularly in education and inequities in education, and realized that if I was at the time time thinking this way, if I was going to do some policy work, then I needed to understand what was happening on the ground. And so I actually became a teacher. I got my master's in public policy, bachelor's and master's there, and then became a teacher in Baltimore City Public Schools. I taught middle school social studies for a couple of years. That was an experience, for sure, and I realized that, although I liked the instructional parts of it, being in the classroom was really not the right role for me. And then I worked in and around schools for probably about 10 years.
Speaker 3:I ended up really becoming interested in the family and community aspects of school and education, particularly around the time the Harlem Children's Zone was starting up and looking at those macro-level factors that impact kids and how they develop and how their families operate and what circumstances they're born into and all of that. And so I started working in schools in the family and community space and started seeing, given my policy background, I had taken a bunch of statistics courses and things like that and started seeing that there was a great need for data in this space. There's a ton of data around reading levels and things like that. At the time I was in elementary school, so that was a big thing, but I was working on attendance and I was working on engaging our families and I started, of course, like I love Excel and so I started tracking all this stuff and making these complex spreadsheets. And a lot of other people started noticing these spreadsheets and I was doing trainings and it just made me realize that a lot of people working in schools don't have they may have not taken lots of statistics classes or had just those skills around tracking data. And then in the meantime I started my doctorate, which was like an executive style program, so I was traveling a lot to Vanderbilt and didn't have as much time and so, like a long story short, ended up starting my own consulting business in this space, trying to help people in the family and community space track their data and actually understand what they're doing and make data driven decisions. And so my company I've changed the name since but is now called Engage with Data, and actually this fall will be 10 years since I founded it.
Speaker 3:Since I have the company has become a smaller part of my work. Partially, just like luck, happenstance, I ended up getting married, moving to Ohio where my husband is in school, and it was really hard to maintain a business without a local network, and so I took on a part-time job at Ohio State University with an amazing like once-in-a-lifetime kind of supervisor, ramona Demby Brinson, and I have been fortunate enough to continue to work with her even as she's changed institutions to UNC Chapel Hill. So now I actually work remotely for her and then also still maintain a little bit of work at Ohio State. But most of my work now is research and evaluation in the university setting. But I mean, I've always kind of been social work adjacent I'm in schools of social work but not a social worker so I still get to work on family well-being and look at these kind of macro level factors that are influencing families, and it definitely does feel like kind of an evolution of where I started, even though I'm not directly in education now.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I love that. Social studies was always my favorite subject. Fun fact yeah, would I have liked you as a teacher.
Speaker 3:Depends on the day. I think sometimes I was in survival mode. I was 22, working in Baltimore City schools in a middle school that wasn't well run and I think, on the days that I could really be creative and engage my kids academically, those were great days. There were other days that were not so great for any of us.
Speaker 3:so, um, you know things right, yeah, exactly, and now you know, as a mom I see everything so differently, like thinking about how we engage kids, how we engage the parents, um, and then I've learned a lot about trauma since, like why didn't I know this as a teacher? There's just so much that I I wish I knew then. But it's still very formative experience and I keep in touch with a couple of my students.
Speaker 2:So you know, I feel like I say that pretty much every day. Why didn't I ever know this thing, right? You know, fill in the blank, like trauma, informed approaches, all that kind of thing. You know, you know, we've known each other for a couple of years now and I'm even now rehearing your story. I'm like, oh my gosh, I knew we had things in common. But just that community approach, that idea that schools sit within communities, right, that families sit within communities. So what can we do to support those kids, those families, those schools?
Speaker 3:And there's so many community level, mostly driven by policies of the past and present community level factors that are impacting kids and families, really negatively impacting their lives and ability to improve their lives, and they're walking into schools like that, and so it just made me realize that even the best schools can't fix some of those things, and that's how I think my view, and like professional view, has broadened, because not and this is of course not like degrading any teachers or curriculum specialists or anything I just think that problems are so much bigger.
Speaker 2:Right, yeah, right. I don't know if you know this, but one of our biggest projects right now is with the communities and schools of Georgia.
Speaker 3:I do remember you worked with them.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, and we have a full service community schools grant and it's just like that, right, like it's schools within, you know, communities and the business and the partners and all those things really wrapped around these kids and families to give them what they need. And we are starting to show such positive outcomes when we can do that.
Speaker 3:That's exciting because I actually was a community school coordinator. That was my title, so the Baltimore Community Schools Network was kind of where all of my like data tracking and stuff started to spread because there were a lot of us in different schools doing the same work. So I love that yeah, uh.
Speaker 2:So uh, teacher, mom, wife, university independent consulting, excel, data nerd, all the things. But one thing, um, you and I have in common is really a heart for families that are involved in the child welfare system, and you were really kind of interested in bridging that. You know from one side to another that education, that social work, the child and the family, and how to really kind of create that sense of well-being, especially around kinship care. And for those folks who don't know what kinship care is or even what child welfare is, maybe we can just start with a little bit of an explanation. We try to be a jargon-free zone here.
Speaker 3:Yeah, no, and you know it's funny. I did not know the term kinship care when I was in schools, even though I was working with kinship caregivers. This is like my hill to die on. Why are we not using these same consistent terms across fields? The social work field has so much literature and knowledge and practice around kinship care, but educators don't know about that for the most part. So, yes, it is jargon-free, but I think a lot of caregivers don't even know the term. So kinship care is when a parent is unable to raise their child for a variety of reasons. It could be mental health or substance use, it could be incarceration, it could be poverty or homelessness, military service or even their death, and so a relative or close family friend steps in and raises that child. Close family friend steps in and raises that child. Okay, so it sounds simple, but it is very challenging for those families for a lot of reasons, and it's also very, very common.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know what? My mom helped raise a couple of her grandchildren. Now, it wasn't like in official capacity right where she was. You know my nieces and nephews were not necessarily placed by a child and family services situation, but she certainly had a lot of financial and emotional and just practical responsibility.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and actually most families are not through the child welfare system. Most families are not through the child welfare system. You know a lot of families. It's just kind of an informal agreement, like okay, this is happening. Okay, like, yeah, mom, you'll take the kids or sister or whoever. It is predominantly grandparents raising their grandchildren. I think that's the most commonly heard, I guess, configuration. But you know sisters, cousins, even sometimes, like they call it, fictive kin, so just someone, a neighbor or a teacher. There are lots of different arrangements and it looks different for everyone.
Speaker 2:So kinship care can be any of those not necessarily a grandparent, but it could be an aunt or an uncle or even, as you said, maybe a neighbor or a godparent or something like that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely, and they all have different challenges based on their roles. You know I've heard of like younger, you know young adult siblings taking on younger you know their younger siblings and no one takes them seriously. And then we've also heard stories of, you know, grandparents or even great-grandparents. I knew a great-grandma raising her kid, who was in the school where I worked who are sometimes, you know, experiencing ageism. So there's like there's so many different challenges and that just doesn't even scratch the surface.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, for sure I'm having. I have three grandchildren so far Since last time I talked to you. We have three and one on the way any day now and we love having them here. And I just mentioned to my daughter-in-law a couple weeks ago. I looked at her. I'm like I thought being a grandparent was all about saying yes, it was all unicorns and rainbows and, oh my gosh, I have to say no. And if somebody is, you know, having a temper tantrum, I've got to deal with that, right? If somebody is hitting their sibling, we have to deal with that. And I did not silly me, I thought it was all going to be fun.
Speaker 2:I can't imagine at my age, or thinking about what my mom did, taking on that responsibility.
Speaker 3:Yeah, now imagine they're not leaving. Yeah, and we talked about trauma. You know, almost all the circumstances I named could be extremely traumatic for all of the family members involved. And so now you're not just bringing in a kid with no additional needs, you're bringing in a child who's experienced often significant trauma. They've been removed from their parent, which is significant trauma, and you're dealing with the emotional ramifications of that, of losing your freedom and your livelihood, of probably struggling financially. I mean it's a lot, and especially for those kinship caregivers who are informal, they get no support, they don't get case management, they don't get financial payments, like a foster care situation would. I mean it's almost nothing. It's really really hard. It's been described as like a hidden kind of population because they're just surviving, but they really need a lot of support Right, and they're doing it out of love right.
Speaker 2:They're doing it out of love and loyalty and all of the things that really make a family and you're talking about. You know the trauma the child experience. Well, I'm not just, you know, assuming right that there's trauma for them too, that their loved one is that person who is struggling and can't provide, so there's a loss and a worry about that as well, I love that you said that, because I literally was just writing a literature review about that and there's not a lot out there about that.
Speaker 3:Yes, this doesn't affect the child in a vacuum, right. You know, when you're, when it's a grandparent that's often your child who is, you know, addicted to a substance, or incarcerated or died or what have you, you know there's your own sense of grief around that and all the other feelings, right. And then you're dealing with the child. I mean, then you know if there was harm done to the child, there's feelings around that, it's, it's a lot, it's a lot these caregivers are warriors.
Speaker 2:It is a lot and I can hear that like social work hard, that you may not have training, but you've definitely been. You've been hanging around the tribe for sure, oh yeah. So let's talk about Ken, carolina and your work there. So give us the details first, to kind of help ground this conversation. So what is it? Who funds it? Who's involved? All those things.
Speaker 3:Absolutely so. Kin Carolina is a comprehensive support program for kinship caregivers, and we are focusing specifically on those who are raising a child with a disability or special health care need. We found in a previous qualitative study that we did that a huge percentage of caregivers were raising children with some type of need that was, I guess, above the developmental norm right, not always diagnosed. But also trauma coping can manifest as symptoms of ADHD or other things, and so this is a population that does have a lot of needs, and so we're focusing specifically on them. And we're also based in South Carolina, which can be confusing sometimes because we're run primarily out of the University of North Carolina. However, we have partners actually across the country who have helped us build up this program, two of which are located in South Carolina, and that's how we came to start there. But also the need is huge in South Carolina because there's just a very significant rate of informal care there, much higher than many other states, and so we knew there was a population that needed help.
Speaker 2:Can I just jump in here, Data nerd right Data?
Speaker 3:oh yeah, oh, I can share some stats if you want.
Speaker 2:Well, I'm just curious because you're talking about informal right, the formal. I mean, we have a hard enough time tracking formal, yeah Right.
Speaker 3:Yes.
Speaker 2:People involved formally in the child welfare system, right? How do you know how big an impact it is informally if there's no legal agreement or there's no case involvement? Yeah, the short answer is, we don't.
Speaker 3:That's something we're trying to do in our research is try and establish some kind of prevalence. Our team has also been working on a national survey of kinship caregivers. But yeah, it is really really difficult. And in South Carolina there are estimates. So data, nerd stats. There are estimates. I think it's grand facts. I think it's from Grand Families or Generations United, I believe, is who puts these out. But they have a publication that says that for every child in formal care, so through a child welfare system nationally, they estimate that 19 are in informal care. In South Carolina that ratio is one to over 300. Oh Lord, and that is because of some of the practices in the state and how they manage kinship care there. So sometimes they place with kin and then close the cases so they're not formally in the system anymore. But that means that those caregivers are not receiving supports anymore either, and so that was a big motivator for us to start in South Carolina for sure. Oh my gosh.
Speaker 2:I can't even get my head around that. It's, yeah, it's pretty number.
Speaker 3:So I mean, like I said, a lot of the caregivers don't even know Um, and I can talk more about King Carolina, but as we try and recruit caregivers for the program, a lot of them don't always know the term, and that's something we're grappling with with our recruitment. Like, how do you succinctly describe this phenomenon other than this term?
Speaker 2:I'm just taking care of this kid. I don't know what you call it. I'm just doing what I need to do.
Speaker 3:Yeah, we've joked about getting a billboard that says, like, are you raising your grandchildren? Like, come see us?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah for sure. So how did you get involved in this?
Speaker 3:Was this part of that, that project that you were on that got moved, or yeah, yeah, so my, so I work, um, my, my boss, who is the Dean of the School of Social Work at UNC, chapel Hill I am on her personal research team, so it's really important to her to maintain her own research, and kinship care is her passion, and so when I met her that I started getting into kinship care as well. And, like I said, I didn't know the term but as soon as I heard the definition I could recall all of these caregivers I had worked with. So I was familiar a little bit, at least from the education side. But we were doing a qualitative study of focus groups and Delphi rounds with caregivers and with child welfare professionals during the pandemic. I was super pregnant while I was doing these focus groups and we just, like I said, we just found that actually almost 70% of our caregiver participants had a child with special health care needs, and so we started talking to our other research colleagues in this area.
Speaker 3:We had all applied for a grant together previously and didn't get it, but we're trying to think of other ways to work together and it just kind of, you know, one thing turned into another and we were presented with an opportunity to apply to the Duke Endowment, which is a big foundation in the Carolinas, and we were fortunate enough to receive a five-year grant to develop our program. So we are finishing up year two of the grant. The first year was largely planning, so we've been implementing for over a year. But yeah, it's been a great experience so far.
Speaker 2:So the Duke Foundation is the funder behind Kin Carolina Right the Duke Endowment.
Speaker 3:Okay, yes, awesome, and so you developed this initiative. Right, the Duke and Dad?
Speaker 2:Okay, yes, Awesome, and so you've developed this initiative. So what's involved?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so there's a lot. Basically, we have four types of supports that we offer families. The first is support groups with other participants. The second is peer mentoring. We call it peer liaisons, so these are people who have done the same thing. They have, they've been kinship caregivers of a child with additional needs. They just might be a little further along in their journey and they are paid. Our peer liaisons are paid as well. So we have a series.
Speaker 3:Our program is six months long but it's rolling. So we have a series of six trainings. They get one each month and then it just keeps repeating on everything from self-care to trauma, to navigating the IEP process in schools. And then the final piece is financial. And this is where we're so fortunate for the Duke Endowment support, because for participants we're actually able to offer $450 a month for participating in the six-month program Just based on research around universal basic income and like those cash payments and things like that to try and offset some of the needs that families have.
Speaker 3:And then we no, these are mostly virtual, actually mostly virtual supports, but we do get together twice a year.
Speaker 3:We've done family events at museums, offering like sensory or accessibility days to try and show them.
Speaker 3:Not only that there are resources in their community that are free, but also to just get people out and having fun with their families, because sometimes we forget to have fun when we're really stressed. But we're actually studying the program as a randomized control trial, so there's a big research component and our caregivers, when they are going through our screening and enrollment process, they are informed and we have a big consent process that if they say they want to enroll, they are going to be randomly assigned to either receive everything I just described or into our what we call services in the community group, which has they get like a huge resource guide community resource guide that we've created. I think it's 70 pages now and then they also get $100 a month for participating with us and taking their surveys. It was really important to us to make sure they did not go without. We didn't want to leave people worse off or that they were getting nothing, but we try and emphasize how important it is that they're helping us make sure this is effective.
Speaker 2:Right, yeah, exactly. So what are the ultimate goals of the initiative?
Speaker 3:Yeah, our, you know, theory of change is that if we can improve the caregiver's well-being, then that will trickle down to improve the child's well-being. By arming them with knowledge, some financial supports to offset that load and helping them hope and give them a place and a community to be able to share and learn from others, that their well-being will improve. And then those effects, can you know, impact the child as well.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and so the child outcomes then, I'm guessing, are there like emotional, behavioral, academic kind of outcomes?
Speaker 3:Yeah, we have a long survey, but we have for both, like adolescent age and earlier childhood. We have two different survey tools, that are, we use validated surveys for that that allow us to assess well-being, at least from the caregiver report point of view.
Speaker 2:So just curious, because you talked about having a, you know, you kind of went down the policy road right. What's the ultimate goal? What's the ultimate goal? What would you hope, or what would your team hope?
Speaker 3:for Like in reality or in an ideal world.
Speaker 2:In an ideal, always an ideal world. Let's not go let's not be in reality.
Speaker 1:In an ideal world right.
Speaker 2:You provide education, support resources, concrete resources, right Education, training, all the things, and the kids benefit. And then so what? Or what, I don't know, what is different?
Speaker 3:Well, I mean, before we even get to that, I mean, think about it All of these families are stepping up to raise these children who would otherwise be in foster care.
Speaker 3:So kinship families are saving this country, these states, counties, a huge amount of money, and so I think it's only fair that all families, regardless of court case, like if they can demonstrate that they are the child's primary guardian, then I think there needs to be compensation for that. There are some programs, like a KINGAP is a big program that's in a lot of states, where they do pay caregivers who are formal, through the system and have been licensed like a foster parent, and that's great, that's wonderful. Unfortunately, it's just that a lot of kinship caregivers don't even qualify to be in that process. So in an ideal world there will be, in terms of, like, their stability once they are placed outside of their family of origin, in terms of well-being, like there's so many benefits already, and so I think if the families were more the kinship families were more stable and more supported and able to thrive and just survive that sounds super cliche, then you know, then I think our kids would do so much better too a question.
Speaker 2:I wrote in my notes to you that well, we're both evaluators, so I have to go there, right what kind of outcomes, and I know you said the first year is implementation or the first year was planning, and then you had implementation, and so you guys really are just getting started, because I think what a lot of people don't know, and, unfortunately, what our politicians don't understand, is to do something this complex right, because social issues like this are so complex, it takes a lot of planning. It's not like you gave money. You gave us money yesterday and on Friday we had all these outcomes, right.
Speaker 3:But what are some?
Speaker 2:preliminary outcomes that you can talk about.
Speaker 3:Yeah, but to your point, like, the other big factor here is that most of us implementing this program were outsiders to the community, and so we definitely had that mindset that we knew that and we recognized that and we leveraged our partners who were in South Carolina.
Speaker 3:We leaned on them heavily to help us get ingratiated into this community. But we did a big needs assessment, like that was a lot of our planning was to like, just learn. Okay, we know kinship care, but what does kinship care look like here and what are the needs and things like that? I just wanted to say that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, I'm glad you brought that up because so many people. We talk about it a lot of times. We talk about involving the community, but it's not always done to the level it really needs to be. Yeah for sure, right, yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah, but to your question about outcomes. So you're right, we don't have a ton of data yet because so we survey our families when they enroll at the six-month point, which is after they've completed the program, and then six months later. So, because our program is rolling, our sample size right now is small because we don't have a ton of post data yet. We're still waiting for people to finish those surveys. However, we have recently run some early analyses, just descriptive analyses of our data that we have, Again, very small sample size, very preliminary, but we're encouraged by the results because we are seeing a lot of increases on the well-being scales, on some of the scales related to, like, the child and caregiver relationship or their caregiving experience. So, quantitatively, we're hopeful.
Speaker 3:Now, qualitatively, we run focus groups with the caregivers after they graduate. So these are just the people who are in our you know our treatment group and those have been so encouraging because the caregivers are just effusive about how much the program has helped them. I think it's been probably like 95% of these focus groups were unprompted. Caregivers have said like I don't feel alone anymore, it's been really powerful, and so they're feeling a sense of community, they're feeling like understood by other people they're feeling like they're not the only ones going through it. We've gotten a lot of great feedback about those peer supports. And we've gotten a lot of great feedback about those peer supports and then also like the knowledge they're gaining from the trainings and from other people who you know have resources or suggestions or experiences to share.
Speaker 3:The financial piece has been very helpful and it's always encouraging to me. I do the focus group, so I always love when the caregivers are able to do something a little fun or like splurge a little with that money. Like you know, someone said, oh, I just took the kids to the movies or we went out to eat just little things to make their life better. So we're really excited about our early qualitative results and we're, you know we're anticipating when the rest of, or like a larger sample of, the quantitative results come in. Right, right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's, that's awesome. Yeah, and I think about, like for me, when, when our kids were small. Of course you are, you are on the, you are on the, the, the starting path. I'm on the other side right, but you know when you're, when you're a young family and you don't have a lot, but you know when you're a young family and you don't have a lot right or in this case, a lot of cases right.
Speaker 2:These are older grandparents on very fixed incomes. I would imagine right To be able to take your kiddo out to have a pizza or to go to McDonald's or whatever it is. And, oh my gosh, even fast food is very expensive. Everything's expensive, right.
Speaker 3:Everything's expensive. Now, that just must you know. Getting back to your let's have fun, right? Lot of amazing resources, and so, like I said, we've been partnering with the local museums in Columbia, where we're kind of based, who are offering monthly or quarterly sensory days or accessibility mornings, in one case, and they're free to the public. So you know, a caregiver had shared with me like, oh, I could have never done that if you hadn't had that event, and I said, no, they're free all the time. And so I mean, when you're just struggling to make it through the day, you also don't have the time to be on the internet looking for all the free things in the community.
Speaker 3:So it's also great to be able to share those kind of resources with families too, that they may not even need the money to. There's just really cool things happening in the community.
Speaker 2:There are really cool things. I took my grands to the High Museum here in Atlanta last month with my daughter-in-law and we went on hush. When did we go? Oh, we went on a Friday, which is not, I think, toddler Tuesdays is when it's free to family, or maybe it's either Tuesday or Thursday, but once a month, right?
Speaker 2:Or is it once a week? I don't know. Don't quote me on this, I am a member of the high, just saying. But anyway, there is time where families can go. But to your point, they don't know about it. But here's something cool that I didn't know, that they added. Some foundation did this. I signed the kids up and they got a little art box with art supplies and it changes every month. Isn't that so cute? And every time they go they can get, you know, their little box filled with whatever the art supplies is for that month. But to your point, there's so many resources I had no clue.
Speaker 3:Yeah, like even I live in Columbus, ohio, and where our library system here is amazing. So even the library branches themselves are incredible. The main one is like a children's museum, like play area, but, um, they have they call it a culture pass and you can reserve admission to, like all these museums and parks and places. You don't have to pay, um, so, yeah, there's a lot out there, but it is sometimes hard to find if you're not, if you don't have the time to seek out those resources or you're not on like social media or whatnot.
Speaker 2:Yeah, for sure. And yeah, and my mother definitely was not on Instagram. Oh, certainly not Facebook or TikTok. You said that word, culture, and that reminded me. I wanted to ask you because I know you all talk a lot about the culture of care for families involved in care. So I wanted to give you an opportunity to talk about that a little bit, because it has to do with everything we've been talking about.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So the term culture of care, I don't know if he coined it, but I at least learned about it through my old professor, joseph Murphy at Vanderbilt School of Education, and he was talking about the context of schools, how basically schools can't be successful if they don't also offer this very like established sense of care and community for the children and their families. And that really spoke to me and I use it a lot in presentations to a lot of things. And I especially think it applies to kinship care, where these are families who, if you think about it, they're having to navigate so many systems just to be able to like exist with these children, Like they may not have documentation, they may be fighting for custody, they may not be able to take their kid to the doctor because they don't have a birth certificate like, or you know, like paperwork, like there's just so much in schools they may be. I heard of one of our I think it was a peer liaison but she was saying that she got kicked out of her schools, her granddaughter's contacts at school, because she was with his grandmother and not as parent. I mean, there's so many daily hurdles and so it's especially important to just really be empathetic and kind and like trauma, informedinformed and all of these things. So we really do prioritize that.
Speaker 3:Our team is very focused on valuing the voices of people with lived experience, so we have incorporated that throughout our program. Our peer liaisons serve on the project's advisory council. We, like I said, did our needs assessment, which was focus groups and things like that, with people with caregiving experience. We collect a lot of feedback from our participants, so that's really important to us because we wanted it to be culturally appropriate for them and also make people feel invested. And then I would say the other piece that we prioritize is accessibility. So we know that the people coming into our program are leading very busy, stressful lives. So we try to be accessible in a number of ways. One in terms of use a learning management system where we put the recording and they can engage with it. That way, if they can't attend, we offer multiple options for support groups, like time options and things like that. So we try to make the program very accessible. That way we try to provide supports for those who aren't as tech savvy.
Speaker 2:It's funny you should say that, because that's where my brain went. Like, do you help the? Grandmothers and grandfathers or aunties or whatever.
Speaker 3:The focus groups is funny because a lot of them will be like, well, the kids helped me get on. Oh, that's funny. You know, it's cool to see too that they feel a lot more confident with those things after six months of regularly logging on. You know they said, okay, I needed help at first, but then I got it after that. And then the other piece of accessibility which you know I will admit has been a learning opportunity for me is accessibility around disabilities.
Speaker 3:So you know, we're off this program for people raising children with disabilities and it would be really ridiculous of us to not also make our materials and things accessible. And so through UNC, I've been able to get a lot of support and training around like digital accessibility. They have an amazing digital accessibility office that she struggles with dyslexia and she struggles with reading herself and how difficult that was for her. Our surveys are like insanely long and it made me think when I heard that. I was like wow, like that has to be so intimidating. So I actually was able to like look up in the Qualtrics community how to add audio to surveys, and so I was able to record myself just reading the questions and answers, and now all of our surveys have that option for families as well, so we really are trying to learn how to be more accessible.
Speaker 3:I'm not going to say I'm an expert in that, but I'm trying to learn for myself there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, same, yeah. It feels like every day I learned like oh yeah, I wasn't aware of X, y, z.
Speaker 1:And I love.
Speaker 2:I love. I love that so much because you know, just think about how much that must be so exhausting brain wise to be struggling with words. So, yeah, that's amazing.
Speaker 3:Yeah, oh, I actually had her. I actually had her help me, like I um, I reached out to that caregiver and I was like I was really touched by what you said. Would you be willing to review, like here's what I came up with? I did some research like would you be willing to review, and she was amazing. She helped give me some tips for right, like how to use highlighting to draw your attention to your eyes, attention to things, things. And so it was. It was a great experience for me too.
Speaker 2:Right and you know that gives her an opportunity to provide, you know, real value. You're not, you're not being performative at all.
Speaker 1:You're really trying to meet people's needs.
Speaker 2:I love that, so I love how excited you are about this project. Probably I mean, you're always excited about your spreadsheets, but I love.
Speaker 3:I know I've tried to be less of the spreadsheet lady as I've evolved in life, but yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I just love that because you know, I always say that none of us got into this work because we thought we were going to be a billionaire. Right, we do it because we have a heart for service. So yay for you and your team.
Speaker 3:I know there's a whole team yes, definitely not just me, yeah.
Speaker 2:I know that, so is there anything about King Carolina that we have not talked about, that you would like to talk about? Well?
Speaker 3:I did want to share an opportunity. We are offering a three-day webinar series later this month. It's free and through UNC we've been able to offer free continuing education credits for social workers, psychologists and counselors, and those are through national organizations, so anyone anywhere can participate. But we're calling it the Kinship Town Hall Series and we want people to join us. We already have, like I don't know 150 people or something registered, so we really want to join us. We already have, like I don't know, 150 people or something registered, so we really want to keep spreading the word. But it's designed to be interactive and really lift up people's voices. We'll have simulations, kind of like role plays, with some of our caregivers and peer liaisons. We'll have a panel with them as well as just sharing information and engaging our audience. So definitely want to share that opportunity. We're excited about it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, terrific. So if you send me the links or the information, I'll be sure I put that in the show notes and I know you're pretty active on LinkedIn. Is there a Facebook page for King Carolina?
Speaker 3:There is, yeah, we are on LinkedIn and Facebook and you can just search Kin Carolina and find us that way, awesome, or? I'll share the links with you as well.
Speaker 2:All right, great, thank you for sharing that. So let me do some rapid fire questions. I've kind of added these in the last couple months because, I don't know, some of us have been a little stressed. So what is?
Speaker 3:giving you. I can't imagine why.
Speaker 2:I don't know. So what is giving you hope these days?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so there's two accounts on Instagram that make me happy or calmer. At least One is Upworthy. They just share stories about people being good humans and it's like so refreshing and sometimes adorable, and sometimes like really sentimental, but just great. And then Now, this Impact they've been sharing since the current administration took over. They've been sharing these like weekly roundups of things that I think they labeled them like here's what gave us hope this week, and so those are more political, of course, but they do remind me that there is good in the world and makes me feel a little better. And then we were talking about this before we started recording. But as a mom of a young child, I am hopeful for future generations because I feel like the way that we are raising children now is for them to be so much more emotionally healthy and aware and empathetic. I am hopeful for how this next group of humans will learn to relate to each other and look out for each other and care about the common good. So, yeah, my daughter and her peers give me hope.
Speaker 2:I love that. Yeah, we need more empathy in this world, I think. So what's the one piece of advice you have for community leaders during these trying times?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I don't know that I can say it's my advice but this is advice I am trying to take to heart when I'm overwhelmed by things is to remember what I can do within my sphere of influence, that I can't solve all the world's problems as much as I wish I could, but I can make things better within my circle, within my little world. So just trying to channel my energy there. Maybe I can't reinstate thousands of people's jobs or whatnot, or end wars and conflicts, but I might be able to still make someone's life better, or I may be able to, like share my voice. I'm trying to I'm not saying this from my perspective of saying these are the things I'm telling myself.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:I understand, like okay, yeah, okay.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's still things I can do. Yeah, what can I do within my spear of influence? Spear, spear of influence.
Speaker 3:I was thinking sphere, sphere like global.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yes, yeah, I was, I was really just making fun, but no, that's really true. Um, I've thought about for the last couple years um thinking big and thinking little. Right, and sometimes we do need to think little, and little doesn't mean not powerful yeah, not insignificant yeah little could be leveraged, little could be kindness, right yeah?
Speaker 3:Little could be kindness, right? Yeah, because I was just talking to my husband about this, like, okay, maybe this doesn't mean a lot for me or doesn't do a lot when it's just me, but if everyone is trying to make those little efforts, then it has to do something, right?
Speaker 2:Yeah, or at least that's what I'm trying to think in that way. Yeah, it has to. So that brings us to my last question. When you look to the future, what community possibilities do you see?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean, I think it's related to what I was talking about with, like future generations. I do think that younger generations not even just like current children, but even you know I was talking to a friend about her daughter who's in college right now I just I do think younger generations have been raised differently, with different mindsets and a greater focus on, like, what's right for people and how should I act towards others and what should I not tolerate for myself, and I do just hope that there is more, not only collaboration, but again just like consideration of what other people need, what is maybe good for other people. That doesn't matter about my own situation, you know, like what can I do just to help other people, or what can we do as systems, organizations, et cetera. I don't know. I think that's where I see some possibility.
Speaker 3:It's just infusing more of that mindset away from, like, personal gain and, and you know, towards more collective yeah, empathy and good.
Speaker 2:Yeah, collective empathy and good.
Speaker 3:I love that I should coin, that you should uh.
Speaker 2:So, amanda, how can people learn more about king carolina or get in touch with you or the team?
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, I'm happy for you to share my email address. You can email me directly or pretty much any of the contact methods for King Carolina are going to come to me because I am the project manager. So website, LinkedIn, Facebook, I'll get them all. So feel free to reach out and if I don't, one of my colleagues will.
Speaker 2:Awesome. Well, Amanda, it's been so good catching up with you. Thank you for saying yes and joining me today.
Speaker 3:Oh, this is exciting. I was happy to be here and I appreciate the platform to share our work.
Speaker 2:Awesome Congratulations to you and your team and all of those folks who are taking care of those kiddos.
Speaker 3:Yes, yes, thank you, anne.
Speaker 2:Hi everybody. Thanks so much for listening to Community Possibilities. This is the podcast that is all about imagining possibilities for our communities. I'm a podcast listener too, so I know you have lots of choices for the things you put in your ears. So thanks for listening.
Speaker 2:You know, for some of us it's kind of hard right now. I see you and I hear you. One of the things I'm focused on is bringing all the love and value I can to my clients and the communities we serve together. We've been busy revamping the resources on our website. We offer a wide range of free and low cost tools, and one of the things I'm most proud of is our new nonprofit mission statement template. It is gorgeous and will help you so much.
Speaker 2:There's no time like the present to truly rethink your mission and ensure that it excites the people you serve and those you're trying to attract to your cause. I hope you'll grab it at communityevaluationsolutionscom. Please be sure to visit the website over the next few weeks, as we'll be rolling out additional templates and resources related to strategic visioning and strategic plan development. In the meantime, we offer lots of other resources from our logic model template, our coalition self-assessment, nonprofit evaluation, capacity self-assessment and so much more. And if you're one of the nonprofits finding your budget stressed but need some help with evaluation, I hope you'll check out our course Powerful Evidence Evaluation for Non-Evaluators Now, lastly, before I let you go, please let me hear from you. Let me know what you're enjoying about the show. Send me an email if someone you know or know of would be a great guest on the podcast. Thanks, everybody, and don't forget to take a breath.
Speaker 1:Thank you ©. Transcript Emily Beynon.