A Legacy of Caring
Page 18
The joint annual meeting of CAS of Metropolitan Toronto and the Catholic Children’s Aid Society of Toronto was held at the Royal York Hotel in 1968.
Within the branches, family services and children’s services departments provided community-based programs and services. Family Services workers included those who worked in prevention and protection services as well as those who worked with unmarried parents. Children’s services workers supported children — and their care providers — in foster homes and provided adoption services.
For the first time in the society’s history, most of the agency’s social work staff were professionally qualified. By 1975, their average annual salary was $13,000, a rate that was competitive in the marketplace. By contrast, ten years earlier the workers’ annual salaries had averaged only $6,000.
For the first time in the society’s history, most of the agency’s social work staff were professionally qualified. By 1975, their average annual salary was $13,000, a rate that was competitive in the marketplace. By contrast, ten years earlier the workers’ annual salaries had averaged only $6,000.
Services that needed to be quickly available to all were located in Centralized and Specialized Services. These included homefinding and placement, institutions, group homes, homemakers, medical clinics and the emergency after-hours service. Finance and Administration Services included accounting, purchasing, statistical and service information, property and agency planning. Staff Resources included personnel administration, staff development, operational research and public relations.
Prevention and early intervention
Many discussions had taken place at Metro CAS about the need to examine the role of protection workers and to team up with other agencies in the community to prevent abuse, neglect and admissions to care. Writing in the early 1960s, Mona Robinson, supervisor of the Protection department, expressed the goal:
We believe that we must demonstrate to the community and to ourselves that a group of CAS workers with skill, imagination and desire can do a “preventive” job [by providing a helpful service] before a family actually breaks down.
We would like to plan a project here in Protection, where we would use one supervisor and three or four workers who will work in a certain district, serving all requests from that district and providing the most appropriate assistance we can identify and diagnose for a particular family.
It may be this team will have one or two skilled, experienced caseworkers to give intensive service to certain cases. It may be that some cases will receive service aimed at modifying or sustaining a family, not really solving basic problems, but helping the family to function.
We hope that we will work very closely with schools, churches, police, nurses, etc., and that communication between these groups and ourselves will be clear, honest and mutually helpful.
“We believe that we must demonstrate to the community and to ourselves that a group of CAS workers with skill, imagination and desire can do a “preventive” job [by providing a helpful service] before a family actually breaks down.”
— Mona Robinson
This vision formed the basis of the society’s recommendations to the province’s Advisory Committee on Child Welfare that children’s aid societies be mandated by the government to do prevention work. The agency’s lobbying efforts were reflected in the 1965 legislation that authorized, and led to the development of, the range of prevention programs described below.
Family services
Protection services quickly came to cover a wide and ever-changing spectrum of child welfare. Indeed, with the agency reorganization described above, the concept of protection workers was dropped in favour of family service workers, since, with the addition of prevention responsibilities, workers were placing emphasis on working with whole families and with the community pressures that affected them.
The concept of protection workers was dropped in favour of family service workers, since, with the addition of prevention responsibilities, workers were placing emphasis on working with whole families and with the community pressures that affected them.
Workers who provided services to children and families in the community began to focus more and more on helping children remain safely in their own homes and in assisting parents to care for them more effectively. They counselled families, talked with school principals, consulted with the police and made referrals to appropriate community services. What was a typical day for these front-line staff and how did they go about it? A 1972 article in Our Children, a Metro CAS journal that had been founded in 1964, provides the answer:
There’s no such thing [as a typical day] according to Angie Beckstead, who’s located at [Central Branch’s] District 4 offices at 951 Queen Street East. “You come in organized with your day’s work planned and then the phone starts to ring.” It may be a call from the police station where they’re holding a juvenile runaway . . . or a call from a mother who’s packing to leave home and kids.
These are the urgent calls. Others are not as critical, but are time consuming and can be frustrating. There’s the single parent who moves from place to place without notifying the agency. There’s the youngster with both physical and emotional problems who’s gone through all the available placements.
For Angie, who speaks Greek, there are also cases where she’s needed as an interpreter . . . and there are always the routine chores like correspondence with other agencies and endless paperwork. But it all gets done. The interruptions and emergencies are superimposed on the regular day’s work and if the result is overtime . . . well, that’s Family Service.
“There’s no such thing [as a typical day] according to Angie Beckstead. You come in organized with your day’s work planned and then the phone starts to ring. It may be a call from the police station where they’re holding a juvenile runaway . . . or a call from a mother who’s packing to leave home and kids.
These are the urgent calls. Others are not as critical, but are time consuming and can be frustrating. There’s the single parent who moves from place to place without notifying the agency. There’s the youngster with both physical and emotional problems who’s gone through all the available placements.
For Angie, who speaks Greek, there are also cases where she’s needed as an interpreter . . . and there are always the routine chores like correspondence with other agencies and endless paperwork. But it all gets done. The interruptions and emergencies are superimposed on the regular day’s work and if the result is overtime . . . well, that’s Family Service.”
— 1972 article from Our Children
Former district supervisor Connie Ross remembers ruefully the ever-present CAS worker’s dilemma, one that remains as potent today as it was then:
Half our life was spent explaining to the community that we’re not baby snatchers and the other half explaining why we can’t snatch babies when the neighbours think we should.
“Half our life was spent explaining to the community that we’re not baby snatchers and the other half explaining why we can’t snatch babies when the neighbours think we should.”
— Connie Ross
Despite these criticisms, workers focused on rehabilitating families, which they did through counselling as well as referrals for outside help, for medical care and day care, and for a friendly visit from a volunteer. With the assistance of night duty staff, they offered protection services twenty-four hours a day. It may have taken perseverance, but when there were positive results, it was one of the greatest satisfactions of the job.
Community development
The society believed that, to achieve lasting results, individual family service work needed to be supported by the development of skills and resources in the local community that would benefit all members of the community. The philosophy was quite simple. Children needed help, but so did their parents, and the agency had to work as closely as possible with those who were the most common sources of child welfare referrals: the police, public health departments, schoo
ls and local community organizations.
The society believed that, to achieve lasting results, individual family service work needed to be supported by the development of skills and resources in the local community that would benefit all members of the community.
Out of this belief rose the Community Protection Program. Each branch designated a number of staff as community protection workers who spent two days a week on work that was not related to cases. Our Children described how these workers put the theory into practice.
Jim Ziliotto works in the Ontario Housing project at McCowan Road and Eglinton Avenue. With colleagues from the Family Service Association and public health, he meets regularly with Ontario Housing representatives to address the many problems that centre around housing. One project is a play school for which the CAS has provided volunteer group leaders. This provides preparation for pre-kindergarten programs for the kids while giving their mothers a break. It is cooperative with mothers contributing 50 cents a week for juice and playthings if they are able and also helping to make toys and assist in the cleaning up.
Barbara Ander works in the Alexandra Park area, a neighbourhood of increasingly immigrant populations speaking Ukrainian, Portuguese, Italian and Chinese. She has focused much of her activity around the HELP unit, designed to handle emergencies over the weekend when most agencies are closed. From Friday through Monday afternoon, one local volunteer and one agency person is on duty.
The Community Protection Program tied in with the work begun by the agency and its community partners to develop interagency and interdisciplinary units located in public housing projects at Warden Woods, Lawrence Heights and Regent Park.
Doug Barr was on the site [of the Community Protection Program in Regent Park] every day, along with staff from several other agencies, social assistance workers, lawyers and doctors. Sheila Holmes, a resident, was coordinator of the unit, while many other residents volunteered their services to answer phones and serve as receptionists, stenographers and clerks. They took children to special classes, visited newcomers and baby-sat. Provision was made for teenage drop-ins, sewing groups and English as a Second Language classes for new immigrants.
The unit in Regent Park, the large downtown housing project that arose from the slum clearances described in Chapter 5, illustrates the effectiveness of this approach to prevention work. It was established in 1968 as the result of a tenants’ meeting organized by Doug Barr of Metro CAS. Traditional programs and individual casework were not having much effect, and residents had complained of duplication of services, having to travel to get assistance, and the “agency runaround.” The caseworkers who worked with them were frustrated by the continued cycle of poverty and hopelessness.
Doug Barr was on the site every day, along with staff from several other agencies, social assistance workers, lawyers and doctors. Sheila Holmes, a resident, was coordinator of the unit, while many other residents volunteered their services to answer phones and serve as receptionists, stenographers and clerks. They took children to special classes, visited newcomers and baby-sat. Provision was made for teenage drop-ins, sewing groups and English as a Second Language classes for new immigrants.
The unit was able to practice prevention by identifying neighbourhood needs and coping with them on the spot. Close contact with Ontario Housing staff enabled workers to prevent evictions by addressing the causes that led to families being asked to vacate their apartments. Juvenile offences were reduced and the number of children coming into the CAS’s care declined dramatically.
The unit was able to practice prevention by identifying neighbourhood needs and coping with them on the spot. Close contact with Ontario Housing staff enabled workers to prevent evictions by addressing the causes that led to families being asked to vacate their apartments. Juvenile offences were reduced and the number of children coming into the CAS’s care declined dramatically.
The unit workers were strongly encouraged by the results of their work. Still, there were some society staff and board members who did not fully support the community development concept and who, because of an inability to appreciate more abstract community development issues, were constantly asking the workers to justify what they did on the basis of numbers of individuals helped. At the same time, there were questions about the suitability of the program, which arose from beliefs held by some that community workers engaged too heavily in partisan political activity. In part to deflect these criticisms, the society continued until 1979 to divide community workers’ time between protection and prevention activities.
Homemaker service
In many situations, however, families needed to be given immediate, practical support to prevent children being admitted to care. In the 1960s and 1970s, agency homemakers provided an innovative program that did just this. Our Children described their work as emergency parents.
“Rather than bring the large family of children into care, one of the CAS’s ten staff homemakers is dispatched with her rollaway bed in a taxi to the family — tiding the children over a rough patch in their lives, teaching the mother as much as possible about budgeting, meal planning — all the homemaking and mothering skills the distraught mother may never have learned. She may have been a neglected child herself.”
— Our Children describes the
role of agency homemakers
A mother suffering a mixture of poverty, too many children and limited intelligence, attempts suicide. Fortunately, her efforts failed to find a way out of deep depression and, because her children are suffering neglect, the Children’s Aid is called by the police.
Rather than bring the large family of children into care, one of the CAS’s ten staff homemakers is dispatched with her rollaway bed in a taxi to the family — tiding the children over a rough patch in their lives, teaching the mother as much as possible about budgeting, meal planning — all the homemaking and mothering skills the distraught mother may never have learned. She may have been a neglected child herself.
The homemaker reports to the worker the strengths and weaknesses she finds in the family — at the same time sharing her skills with all its members. She hugs and comforts the children (some mothers have not learned their most basic needs), teaches them to clean their cuts with disinfectant, lets the harassed husband pour out his heart and shows the whole family that doing things together need not cost money and can be fun.
She acts as an emergency parent and her role is a teaching one rather than a housekeeping one. She is not a char, although many a time homemakers have rolled up their sleeves and scrubbed a filthy floor.
If the situation obviously requires longer than two weeks to get the family functioning again, Visiting Homemakers or another agency is called in. Our homemaker only handles emergencies — and the next day there will be another crisis in another family.
Alternate care
Alternate care was another preventive program, developed by the agency in the mid-1970s, intended to respond to the increasing number of older children — those over twelve years of age — who were being admitted to the society’s care. The outcome of out-of-home placements of teenagers was often seen as unsatisfactory, while budget restraints rendered problematic the expensive residential programs frequently required by these young people.
Community-based alternative care programs were designed to provide support for youth to enable them to remain in their own homes while providing them with the counselling and resources they needed. The first one got under way in 1976 and involved phasing out Moberly House as a residence and using it as a base for alternate care. Another was the Family Centre, a warehouse space in Parkdale, which agency staff and the families they served worked together to decorate colourfully. Program supervisor Hanna McDonough reminisces:
Community-based alternative care programs were designed to provide support for youth to enable them to remain in their own homes while providing them with the counselling and resources they needed.
We tried to address the problem of the
escalating numbers of teens coming into CAS care. We wondered if we could help parents to keep their kids at home by teaching parents child management and teaching kids self-management.
So several of us created the Family Centre. It had a homey kitchen, a well-stocked craft area, a big gym with a bright yellow floor and group rooms with pillows and comfortable sofas. The “Know Thyself Room,” soothingly equipped with wraparound pillows and a shag rug, was reserved for therapy with the kids. The kids came after school, had snacks, played basketball or did crafts. They talked to their worker and their parents came to group therapy once a week.
Self-help and peer support were the hallmarks of the program. Parents in the group supported each other by offering practical help. One week, for example, two parents, fed up with their children, in the group decided to exchange kids for the weekend. This exchange had a good payoff for all involved. Each parent had a break from their own problems and became much more insightful about each other’s difficulties managing their children.
Over time we created a positive peer culture where the kids with whom we had worked became mentors of the more recent arrivals. The parents and kids were very proud of their program.
“Self help and peer support were the hallmarks of the program. Parents in the group supported each other by offering practical help. One week, for example, two parents, fed up with their children, in the group decided to exchange kids for the weekend. This exchange had a good payoff for all involved. Each parent had a break from their own problems and became much more insightful about each other’s difficulties managing their children.”