Full Circle Family Engagement, Chatham, ON (2026)

11/01/2026

How care is provided is part of the care itself.

Consider a call bell.

Showing someone which button to press is a familiar part of providing care. But can they reach it? Can they physically press it? Do they understand what it does? Will they remember it is there when they become frightened or confused?

Being shown how to ask for help is not the same as being able to access it.

My experience spans different settings, and I’m grateful for the opportunity to help others see what those settings can learn from one another.

Across child welfare, recovery, family mediation, and healthcare, a shared question keeps emerging: does the help we offer work for the person receiving it?

Can someone carry out a safety plan with the support available to them? Navigate a recovery referral when they’re struggling? Meaningfully participate in a mediation process?

Providing an instruction, a resource, or a plan requires us to consider whether it works for the person relying on it.

This is where noticing matters. Knowing someone’s preferences. Understanding how they communicate. Attending to their comfort. Recognizing when an expectation exceeds what they can manage, and adapting our response.

These everyday interactions give meaning to dignity, safety, and person-centred care. They also help family members feel informed, included, and reassured.

We need working conditions that give care providers the time, support, and continuity to respond in these ways.

I’m excited to keep exploring these connections and developing work that helps us turn understanding into practice.

People experience our systems through what happens when they need us. We need to keep asking whether the help we offer is help they can actually use.

10/10/2026

The algorithm knows what captures our attention. That doesn't mean it knows what's good for us.

I think we need to distinguish between wellness awareness and wellness marketing.

Wellness awareness helps us understand physiological changes, recognize symptoms, assess risks and make informed decisions.

Wellness marketing can take those same concerns and turn them into an endless series of problems to purchase solutions for.

And wellness is about so much more than our physical health.

In my case, at this stage of life, it’s perimenopause, heart and stroke health, a pending empty nest, aging parents, community, career, grief, loss, joy and faith.

There’s no shortage of information, opinions, advice or people promising answers. Some of it is genuinely helpful. Some of it is questionable. And some of it is designed to make us feel that something is wrong with us that someone else can fix, for a price.

Take care of yourself. Stay curious. Don’t lose your sense of humour.

And perhaps most importantly, keep strengthening the art and skill of discernment.

Not everything that resonates is true. Not everything that is marketed as wellness contributes to our well-being.

Inhale. Exhale. Repeat. 51 and counting.

Keep going. ♥️💫

09/30/2026

Lately I have noticed how many conversations in child welfare are returning to reflective supervision, meaningful family engagement, critical thinking, coaching and relational practice.

These are good conversations. Necessary ones.

And after more than two decades in and around Ontario child welfare, I sometimes catch myself thinking: Haven’t we been saying this for a very long time?

Then I remind myself that workforces change. New practitioners deserve good teaching, coaching and mentorship. Knowledge evolves.

But an experienced field should also be able to transmit accumulated knowledge without expecting each generation to discover it for themselves.

So perhaps the question isn’t whether we need training. Of course we do.

Training cannot carry the responsibility for implementation on its own.

At some point, what we teach has to be supported by the conditions in which people are expected to practice.

Can we create the conditions in which people can actually use what they know about human beings?

Child welfare has to be accountable. Children and families deserve nothing less. But we are also trying to practice relationally inside an accountability architecture where what can be counted, documented and audited can become more visible than what can be felt, trusted and sustained.

A completed contact is visible. Trust isn’t.
A referral can be counted. Belonging can’t.
A case note has a timestamp. A grandmother becoming someone a child can call at 2 a.m. doesn’t.
A file can be closed. A relationship has no closure date.

So perhaps the question is:

How do we build an accountability architecture that is accountable for relationships too?

Training can introduce, challenge, deepen and remind. But organizations determine whether learning has somewhere to live.

Maybe that is the work in front of us: not simply knowing more, but creating the conditions where what we know can become embedded practice and remain there long enough to become knowledge we pass forward.

Because if relationships are the intervention, they cannot perpetually be the thing practitioners squeeze in after they have finished proving they did the work.

They are the work.

09/30/2026

September 30. 🧡

I am a settler, descended from people who came from Ireland, Poland, Britain and Scotland to Turtle Island, lands Indigenous Peoples had lived upon since time immemorial.

The place I call home, now known as Chatham-Kent, Ontario, is within the traditional territories of the Chippewa, Odawa, Haudenosaunee, Potawatomi and Lunaapeew Nations.

It is with great respect and gratitude that I have been raised here, that I have raised my own family here, and that I have been able to carry out much of my life’s work here.

I wasn’t taught enough about what that meant. Too many of us weren’t.

I wasn’t taught enough about the people who were here long before my ancestors arrived, about the treaties and responsibilities that made settlement possible, or about the systems deliberately created to separate Indigenous children from their families, languages, cultures and communities.

I have spent much of my adult life working with children and families. Over those years, Indigenous authors, Elders, survivors, colleagues, friends and communities have generously offered teachings that have changed how I understand family, safety, trauma, identity, culture, belonging and my own place within this history.

There is still so much for me to learn.

September 30 asks us to remember. To listen. To tell our children the truth. To honour survivors and the children who never came home.

But I keep thinking about what the late Honourable Murray Sinclair — Mizana Gheezhik, “The One Who Speaks of Pictures in the Sky” — asked of us:

The mountain has been described. The path has been shown. We have been called upon to do the climbing.

Maybe one of the questions for those of us who are settlers is simply this:

What does the climbing look like now?

Not only today. Tomorrow. In our homes. In our workplaces. In the systems we participate in. In how resources and power are shared. In whose knowledge we value. In whether Indigenous children, families and communities have the authority and resources to determine their own futures.

Learning matters. Listening matters.

What we do with what we learn and what we hear matters too.

Every Child Matters. 🧡

09/28/2026

Learning is only the beginning. Reconciliation requires follow-up, action, and change.

09/23/2026

It still stuns me to see “foster to adopt” advertised on Ontario child welfare social-media feeds in 2026.

Not because foster caregivers never become adoptive parents. They do. And sometimes that becomes the right permanency outcome for a child.

But the language we use creates expectations long before practice begins.

When we recruit someone to foster to adopt, what are we inviting them to imagine before they have even met the child, their parents, their family or their network?

Before reunification possibilities have been fully explored.

Before family and kin have been found and engaged.

Before we know what permanency should actually look like for this particular child.

A child entering foster care is not a child entering an adoption pathway.

If we are serious about family engagement, kin-first practice and relational permanence, then we also need to examine the architecture of expectation we create in child welfare.

Our language is part of that architecture.

What are we teaching people to expect before the work has even begun?

09/18/2026

As Kinship & Alternate Care Awareness Week ends in Ontario and September 30 fast approaches, I keep thinking about the connection between the two.

Twenty years ago, as Ontario formalized Kinship Service, I often said:

Government didn’t invent kinship.

Families and communities had always cared for children.

That truth asks something more of all of us now.

Residential schools are often spoken about as history. But the last one closed in 1996.

I was 21.

The removal of Indigenous children from family, community and culture did not simply end when residential schools closed. The systems that followed are not identical. But neither can we pretend there is no relationship between them.

In 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission released its 94 Calls to Action. Child Welfare came first.

And long before Ontario created categories called Kinship Service and Kinship Care, Customary Care reflected Indigenous communities’ own ways of caring for children. Ways rooted in family, community, culture and collective responsibility from time immemorial.

Ontario recognizes Customary Care more distinctly today. But it leaves me with a question:

What happens when we recognize wisdom, but keep it in a separate stream rather than listening, learning and allowing it to transform how we all practice?

I used to say my goal was for us to become all kin workers. I still promote this way of thinking and doing.

Not because Customary Care and mainstream Kinship are interchangeable. They are not.

But because the broader system still has much to unlearn and learn about children as members of families, networks, communities and cultures, not simply as individuals needing services or placements.

As a white settler woman, I cannot define reconciliation for Indigenous Peoples.

I can examine the system I participated in.

I can listen. I can question whose knowledge we treated as expertise.

I believe reconciliation in practice also requires us to notice when systems rename, professionalize or separate out wisdom that communities already held.

As orange shirts appear again this September, I hope awareness leads us there too.

Not only to remembering what happened.

But to examining what continues.

What are we doing differently because of what we now know?

09/17/2026

During awareness weeks, we understandably celebrate the people who step forward for children.

And that is important.

But twenty years in kinship practice has taught me that kinship needs more than our gratitude.

It also requires us to think beyond placement.

Too often, the question becomes:

Who can take this child?

It’s often a high-priority question. But it cannot be the only one.

Because when we reduce kinship to placement, we risk overlooking people who cannot provide a home but can provide something else a child desperately needs.

Someone who can take them to soccer.

Someone who knows their history.

Someone who can maintain a sibling relationship.

Someone who can offer weekends, holidays, meals or a familiar place to land.

Someone who knows they love peanut butter and jam… but not on the same sandwich.

Someone who can help buffer what has happened and participate in healing.

Someone who simply keeps showing up.

We also have to resist assuming professionals should determine who those people are.

Families need to help define who family is.

An agency may know who is documented in a file. Families know relationships, histories and connections that may never appear there.

Safety and assessment still matter. Always.

But kinship doesn’t have to be all or nothing.

Not being able to provide placement does not mean someone has nothing meaningful to offer a child.

Perhaps the provincial Kinship & Alternate Care Awareness Week is an opportunity to celebrate those who open their homes.

But also those who open their lives.

And to ask whether our practice makes enough room for both.

Because belonging is bigger than an address.

09/16/2026

For years, much of my work was about moving good ideas into everyday practice.

Kinship. Family engagement. Family Finding®. Natural networks. Relational permanence.

We learned. We trained. We developed tools, processes and different ways of asking questions.

At one point, we named the goal explicitly:

Best practice must become embedded practice.

I believed deeply in that. I still do.

But twenty years into this work, I understand “embedded” differently.

It isn’t demonstrated by a great program, innovative pilot or handful of practitioners who work differently.

It is demonstrated when families no longer have to be lucky enough to get the right worker.

When I researched what it would take to implement a “Kin-First Firewall”, the intention was to pause before a child was placed with strangers and ask again:

Who have we missed? What haven’t we tried? Who already belongs to this child? How is privilege operating? How is power being shared? How is dignity being maintained?

Eventually, I began saying something colleagues thought was a little crazy: I wanted to work myself out of my Family Finding® role.

The goal should be that we are ALL kin workers.

I didn’t want specialized family-engagement practice to remain special. I wanted it to become ordinary.

Because if connection, belonging and natural networks truly matter, they cannot depend upon one worker, team, project or funding envelope.

That leaves me with a harder question:

How do we know an organization has actually transformed rather than simply employing some people who practice transformatively?

I have to include myself in that question.

I stood in front of rooms talking about transformation and how our practice was changing. I believed in what I was presenting. I wanted our community to trust it too.

Looking back, I also wonder:

Was I helping change the system, or was my work sometimes helping the system look more changed than it actually was?

Perhaps the measure is simpler:

What was actually different for children and families?

What became embedded enough to survive restructuring, competing priorities and the person who championed it leaving the room?

What no longer depended upon getting the “right” worker?

Twenty years later, I still believe deeply in families and natural networks.

But the question I carry now is:

What have we done with what we already know?

And perhaps that is part of the purpose of an awareness week:

Not only to celebrate how far we have come, but to ask what still needs to evolve.

09/16/2026

One of the children who profoundly shaped my understanding of kinship was someone I never met.

Jeffrey Vincent Baldwin.

Jeffrey died in 2002, before I became a Kinship Service worker in 2006. He was five years old. His story became part of my learning early in that work, long before the coroner’s inquest would finally begin in 2013.

The length of time between Jeffrey’s death and that public examination of what happened stayed with me too.

Every Kinship Week I was involved with afterward, I made sure Jeffrey remained part of our learning.

All these years later, this provincial Kinship & Alternate Care Awareness Week should be no exception.

Because his story required those of us passionate about family and kinship to hold an uncomfortable truth:

Family does not automatically equal safety.

Recognizing families as experts in their own lives cannot mean assuming every family relationship is safe.

And kinship cannot mean locating someone biologically related to a child and assuming belonging takes care of everything else.

But Jeffrey’s story didn’t make me less committed to family or natural networks.

It made me more rigorous about what that commitment requires.

Know the history. Ask better questions. Share information. Listen. Assess.

Don’t confuse familiarity with safety.

And never let meeting a standard stop us from asking whether something is actually working.

Over time, an important tension shaped my practice:

Safety AND connection.

Not one at the expense of the other.

Children need protection from people who may harm them. They also need protection from unnecessary separation, instability and the loss of people who safely love them.

Years later, my Family Finding® learning with Kevin Campbell pushed my thinking about safety, connection and the impact of our interventions even further.

It taught me to become more intentional about the questions we ask, looking not only at adversity within a child’s family, but also at what had happened during our involvement:

How many caregivers? Workers? Clinicians? Homes? Schools?

How many paid supports compared with unpaid relationships and connections that nourished belonging?

And eventually:

If nothing changes, if we practice nothing differently, where will this child be in five years?

That question still matters to me.

Inquests matter. Recommendations matter. Standards, policy and training matter.

But remembering children like Jeffrey asks something more of us.

What actually became different because of what they taught us?

Our practices must continue to evolve.

May we always remember.

May we use our courage not to ignore what we know to be true.

Jeffrey Vincent Baldwin
January 20, 1997 — November 30, 2002