“Our frontline staff are the direct heroes in this work during the pandemic,” said Denise Hinds, assistant executive director of Good Shepherd Services, a social service agency. “They have been the heroes for us, they have been the heroes for our children, our youth, and our families.”

Hinds joined other leaders in the New York City child welfare industry on August 12 for a virtual discussion titled “The Current and Future Impact of COVID-19 on Child Welfare in NYC,” which was organized by Fordham’s Graduate School of Social Service (GSS).

Shirley Gatenio Gabel, holder of the Quaranta Chair for Justice for Children at GSS, said that the goal of the of webinar was to understand how children and families who are a part of New York City’s child welfare system were receiving help during this time, and discuss new challenges and needs that have arisen. Children and families in the child welfare system are among those hit hardest by this pandemic, said Gabel, who served as moderator.

“The coronavirus pandemic has affected us all yet it has disproportionately hit hardest on those who were marginalized and vulnerable before the pandemic,” she said.

That’s one of the reasons why Gabel asked the Administration for Children’s Services (ACS) for the impact of drops in cases and referrals for preventative services. According to data from the New York statewide central register, intakes in April 2019 were 5,037 compared to just 2,292 in April 2020. Referrals to preventative services went from 1,299 in April 2019 to just 887 in April 2020, according to the data.

A Concerning Drop in Referrals

“Reports of cases to be investigated are significantly down from last year and referrals to preventive services are down from last year—the question is can we assume that this is good news or cause for concern?” she asked.

David Hansell, New York City commissioner of the Administration for Children’s Services (ACS) said that cases dropped abruptly at the start because many of the usual people who referred children were no longer seeing them regularly at school.

“The chart showed that in mid-March, at the very beginning of the pandemic in New York City, and right after the schools closed, we did see a very significant drop,” he said. “The month of April the number of reports dropped by 50%. That’s not entirely surprising, because in routine times, about a quarter of our reports come from school personnel. Others come from other providers who stopped seeing children in the early days of the pandemic.”
Still, Hansell said that the numbers of referrals has been slowly going back up to normal with community members, friends, and family stepping up when a child is in need.

“The number of reports we’re getting is almost back to the typical level we’d be getting during a summer month,” he said. “That suggests that community members and family and friends were really stepping up and providing good oversight of kids and making sure they were safe.”

Throughout the pandemic, case workers and social workers were often still seeing children and families in-person through home visits and at other meetings, such as children in foster care meeting with their biological families, particularly for those most in need.

Continuing to Serve Vulnerable Families

“We know that the critical work that we do on the ground for our children, youth, and families—we knew we needed people on the ground,” Hinds said.

She and Bill Baccaglini, president and CEO of New York Foundling, credited ACS with providing guidance, funding, and personal protective equipment for those who had to continue to work in the fields during this time.

Raysa Rodriguez, associate executive director at the New York Citizens’ Committee for Children, said that it’s going to take a lot in the long run to help stabilize some of these families who have been dramatically affected by the pandemic.

“The truth is that all the families we were worried about and fighting for pre-COVID … all of these communities are exactly the communities that have been hardest hit by COVID,” she said, citing particularly those that experience housing instability, overcrowding, and limited access to health care. “(We’ve seen an) incredible amount of loss—loss of life, loss of income—we don’t fully know the extent. When I think about what it takes to keep children safe, the reality is that it’s pretty simple, it’s stable families.”

New Telecare Skills

Baccaglini said one glimmer of hope he thinks the system should take out of this is the skills social workers learned in providing telehealth and telecare services.

“Coming out of this, I think if we don’t take the opportunity to fully examine how telecare, not just telehealth, fits in our system, we’re doing a real injustice to the kids and families we serve,” he said. “It’s not a home visit or a Zoom meeting—I’m talking about how this fits into the continuum of care. I am convinced that this will, going forward, play a critical role.”

The event was the first in a series of professional development programs for the Westchester audience, and was co-sponsored by St. Christopher’s, Inc., residential center, and Fordham’s Graduate School of Education (GSE).

“For an event to be this successful on its first attempt brings to our attention the need for more panel discussions focused on the child welfare industry,” said GSE alumnus Robert Maher, Ph.D., St. Christopher’s CEO.

Crises in the industry

Among the concerns that attendees focused on included: A “crisis” in obtaining a quality staff, given that wages for line workers are extremely low while, at the same time, children’s issues are becoming more challenging; the need for general funding and financing to cover more children with greater needs, in the face of fiscal austerity and tight budgets; racial imbalances among the children in care; and a lack of understanding of the complexity of competing local and national needs.

GSE Professor of Educational Leadership, Administration, and Policy Toby Tetenbaum, Ph.D., said the concerns that were addressed were of key importance to the educators and professionals in attendance.

“If you don’t have funding, you can’t get quality teachers and social workers, which makes the kids’ problems much more complicated. We need resources for solutions.”

Helping fund welfare challenges

The symposium was intended to be a kick-off to bring people in and make them aware of childrens’ needs with the hope, said Tetenbaum, that “more will be willing to donate” to help fund child welfare challenges.

Other speakers included Sheila Poole, acting New York State Commissioner of the Office of Child and Family Services (OCFS); Jim Purcell, executive director of the Council of Families and Child Care Agencies (COFCCA), who spoke about child welfare reform; Dr. Edward Placke, executive director of Green Chimneys; and Frank Spain, retired chief operations officer/CFO at Graham Wyndham Children Services,

Guest speaker Sam Ross, Jr., founder and managing director of Green Chimneys who is still active at age 88, will work with Fordham as an adviser on the professional development programs to be offered going forward.

“I believe in what we are doing,” He said.

—Veronika Kero

A foster care therapist works to make sure her kids “have better tomorrows”

A child’s drawing of two handprints sits atop Carolyn Catania’s bookshelf. Inside one is the child’s description of Catania: “She is kind, she helps kids feel better, and she likes coffee.”

One of the handprints is Catania’s. The other belongs to a girl Catania works with at Good Shepherd Services’ family foster care program in the Morris Heights section of the Bronx.

“This is my dream job,” says Catania, who provides individual supportive therapy to children ages 5 to 21 in New York City’s foster care system. “I feel lucky that I get to spend my days working to make sure my kids have better tomorrows by helping them heal from their past, learn to have hope, and recognize they are more than just a foster kid.”

A Long Island native, Catania majored in psychology at Fordham and went on to earn a master’s degree in social work at the Graduate School of Social Service—while also pursuing a master’s degree in public health at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and working full time at Good Shepherd Services.

She became a staunch advocate for change within the foster care system, striving to help those who work with foster children understand childhood trauma and mental health conditions. The goal, she says, is for children to stay stable in their foster placements, develop healthy relationships, and avoid retraumatization. She creates fact sheets and training sessions to make issues such as depression or post-traumatic stress disorder more approachable for staff members and families.

“I aspire to change the conversation tone from ‘What’s wrong with you?’ to ‘What’s happened to you?’” she says.

In 2016, after completing her MSW and licensure requirements, she was promoted to her current position as a therapist. She hopes to work in international child welfare, an area she glimpsed while participating in two “life-changing” projects, in Guatemala and South Africa, sponsored by Fordham’s Global Outreach program.

Kathy Sommerich, the senior program director of health and mental health services at Good Shepherd Services, praises Catania’s “passion for doing the right thing, even if it’s the most difficult,” and says the children she works with reap the benefits, including the little girl who made the handprint drawing.

Inside her own handprint, the girl wrote, “I am brave.”

—Stefanie Sorrentino

Read more “20 in Their 20s” profiles.

Slater, a clinical associate professor at the Graduate School of Social Service (GSS), has long had an interest in fashion, although it usually was only in service to her personal wardrobe choices.

So, she never expected that just a year after launching her fashion blog, Accidental Icon, she would top 21,000 followers on her Instagram account, make the cover of Grey magazine, and amass fans worldwide.

“Somehow, accidentally, while living my ordinary life, people seem[ed]to think I was a fashion icon,” she wrote in her first post. “Every day a person approaches and asks, ‘Do you work in fashion?’ (no) . . . or asks what fashion magazine I work for (none).

“If I got this far ‘accidentally,’ how far could I really go if I start learning and thinking about fashion with people who really do it and know it?”

An Accidental Icon

Slater is an unlikely candidate for fashion iconicity. She is the former director of the Child Sexual Abuse Project at Lawyers for Children, and is a designated child abuse expert for the New York City Family Courts. In addition to co-publishing the go-to book on social work practice and law, Slater established the first child advocacy centers in the city and developed a handbook for family court judges. At Fordham, Slater helped develop of the Law School’s Interdisciplinary Center for Family and Child Advocacy, and she currently teaches child welfare at GSS.

Over her four-decade career, fashion was not so much a hobby as an integral part of her daily routine. She dressed up to give lectures and even took classes at the Fashion Institute of Technology. As she approached her 60s, fashion became a means to confront the aging process.

“I began to use clothes and my appearance as a way to counteract some of the invisibility that comes with age,” she said. “As I started to take more risks, it in fact made me very visible. And people began to say, ‘You should start a blog.’”

With her daughter grown and her career settling into a steady pace, Slater decided to investigate the fashion blogosphere more deeply. Almost immediately she noticed the dearth of blogs written by or for older women.

“They weren’t really speaking to a woman like me—women who are not famous or celebrities, but are smart, creative, fashion-forward, engaged,” she said. “So I designed my blog almost in opposition to everything else out there.”

Slater launched Accidental Icon in September 2014. Barely a month later, a stroke of serendipity came during Fashion Week.

“I was decked out that day—I had on a Yohji Yamamoto suit, a top from Japan, and a Chanel bag,” she said. “I was walking by Lincoln Center, and all of a sudden, I was swamped by photographers taking my picture. And then tourists started taking pictures, because they saw the photographers doing it. And it was all because they liked what I was wearing.”

The encounter landed Slater’s photo in Downtown magazine and put Accidental Icon in the spotlight.

A Fashion-Forward Rebel

Accidental Icon largely consists of short essays that reflect on some aspect of Slater’s life and how her apparel gestures to her various identities, including as an academic, as a New Yorker, and as an older woman. The essays are paired with photographs taken by her partner Calvin in various spots throughout the city.

Later in the week, Slater posts an itemized list of what she was wearing in the photo from that week’s essay. Fridays feature a “Fashion Bibliography” of articles that she found unusual or inspiring that week.

The blog offers an outlet from the constraints of academic writing, Slater said. However, she doesn’t consider blogging to be inconsistent with her work as an academic or as a social worker.

“I think academia has always thought that fashion is a frivolous topic, but it’s not frivolous at all,” Slater said. “The more I research fashion, the more I realized it’s a powerful force. We talk a lot about how it’s oppressive, or how it promotes ideal body types, but we don’t talk about how it can be productive.”

To that end, Accidental Icon has helped shatter age biases in fashion. In a culture that extols youth and beauty, a fashion blog run by a 60-something college professor has been an act of rebellion. Surprisingly, the majority of her followers are young people who are drawn to the fearless authenticity that she promotes.

“There is a tide change among the younger generation. They’re getting sick of celebrities and want to think more about style and who they are,” Slater said.

“There aren’t age parameters in fashion. My motto has become, ‘Don’t tell me there are rules.’”

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.