Getting to the root: Dismantling racism in family
live webinar - 3 CEs pending approval from NASW NH
Getting to the root: Dismantling racism in family separation systems
Presenters: Dr. Sherri Simmons-Horton, Dr. Sharon McDaniel, Dorothy Roberts, Sixto Cancel, Juanetta Jalaine, Dee Bonnick
Sponsored by the UNH Department of Social Work Gorroff Fund; NASW NH Chapter; & UNH Sustainability Institute
3 Clinical Category A CEs approved by NASW NH for relicensure. Approval #4086
The UNH Department of Social Work Gorroff Fund, the UNH Sustainability Institute and the NASW NH Chapter are proud to host this webinar with national experts focused on eliminating racial disparities and oppression in the child welfare system. Attendees will learn the history of family separation policies dating back to slavery, and how racist practices continue today. Keynote speaker and award winning scholar, Dorothy Roberts, will discuss her current research and most recent book, Torn Apart: How the child welfare system destroys black families and how abolition could build a safer world (Basic Books, 2023). Ms. Roberts is joined by a panel of child welfare reformers, Dr. Sharon McDaniel, Sixto Cancel, Juanetta Jalaine, and Dee Bonnick, each who have utilized their lived experience in the child welfare system as a catalyst to pursue necessary system changes. Webinar attendees are encouraged to actively engage in critical conversations with the presenters/panelists in an effort to understand how an anti-racist approach can improve the lives of children and families. Dr. Sherri Simmons-Horton, an expert in addressing racial inequities and current UNH Social Work professor, serves as the moderator for this important presentation and discussion.
Social Work Students, Child Welfare Professionals, Birth/Foster/Adoptive Parents should please email Lynn Stanley for free, non-CE promotional code or CE registration fee waiver - lynncstanley@gmail.com
- The zoom link will be sent to participants prior to the event.
Presenter bios
Sherri Simmons-Horton, Ph.D., LMSW:
Sherri Simmons-Horton is an assistant professor of social work at the University of New Hampshire. She has over 25 years of practice experience in the child welfare system, with a focus on addressing racial disparities present for Black children, youth, and families.
Simmons-Horton’s practice experience ranges from case management to supervision and consulting with private child-placing agencies in Texas. Her research focuses on youth involved in the juvenile justice and foster care systems (dual-status youth), systemic race inequities in the child welfare system, and resilience of Black youth and families. Simmons-Horton is an advisory board member with the Black Administrators in Child Welfare and a staunch child, family, and youth advocate, with a strong interest in practice and policy strategies to dismantle racial inequities oppressive practices in the child welfare and juvenile justice systems.
Sharon McDaniel, Ph.D., Ed.D., MPA:
Dr. Sharon L. McDaniel is the founder, president and CEO of A Second Chance, Inc. (ASCI), the nation’s leading nonprofit voice on kinship care. She has more than 36 years of professional experience as an award-winning child welfare leader in Pennsylvania.
Notable affiliations include: Trustee of Casey Family Programs; Jim Casey Youth Opportunity Initiative; Congressional Caucus on Foster Youth; Quality Improvement Center on Post Permanency Services through HHS and Spaulding for Children; Federal Quality Child and Family Services Review; U.S. Department of Health and Human Services National Advisory Kinship Panel; National Center on Grandfamilies Council for Generations United; Casey National Center for Resource Family Support Advisory Board; Children’s Defense Fund; Pennsylvania Quality Assurance Committee for Child and Family Service Review; Allegheny County Children’s Cabinet.
Civically, she is the president of Black Administrators in Child Welfare, on the board of Coro Pittsburgh, the founder and immediate past president of the African American Strategic Partnership and a board member at Footbridge for Families.
Dr. McDaniel notably served as a co-investigator and author of “Subsidized Legal Guardianship: A Permanency Planning Option Study for Children Placed in Kinship Care” and “Subsidized Legal Guardianship Update.” Her research supported the development of a subsidized legal guardianship proposal for Pennsylvania, which, at that time, had no such legal status in its legislation.
In 2014, she published On My Way Home: A Memoir of Kinship, Grace, and Hope to underscore the purpose of kinship care, empowering families to save the lives of their children. This intimate account of her life begins when she was only 6 years old and removed from the care of her young, widowed father, separated from her brother and sister and forced into the child welfare system in Pittsburgh. Before emancipating at age 17, her journey was one of finding home—a quest that unknowingly became her life’s calling.
In 2021, her dissertation, Black Female Executives’ Perceptions of Their Advancement, Vulnerability, and Self-Efficacy in Philanthropy was published. Through the theoretical frameworks of Black feminist thought and critical race feminism/theory, her study explored the social constructs of race and gender and how the intersection of these distinguishing identities informs Black women’s leadership advancement, vulnerability, and self-efficacy experiences at the apex of philanthropic foundations. Her study additionally explored the study participants’ self-efficacy to better understand the role of this social cognitive theory in addressing their intersectional experiences in predominantly White male institutions.
Over the past 36 years, Dr. McDaniel has authored several articles and papers on child welfare and has received numerous local and national honors and awards. She has also been devoted to higher education, earning her master’s degree followed by her doctorate in education, as well as attending Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government for Executive Education in Nonprofit Governance and the University of Chicago’s Executive Education in Investment Management. She recently obtained her second doctorate.
Additionally, as a sought-after lecturer, she has presented at the University of Barcelona, Oxford University, Howard University, and others.
Dorothy Roberts, JD:
Dorothy Roberts is the 14th Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor and George A. Weiss University Professor of Law & Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, with joint appointments in the Departments of Africana Studies and Sociology and the Law School, where she is the inaugural Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights. She is also the founding director of the Penn Program on Race, Science, and Society. An internationally recognized scholar, public intellectual, and social justice advocate, she has written and lectured extensively on race, gender, and class inequities in U.S. institutions and has been a leader in transforming public thinking and policy on reproductive freedom, child welfare, and bioethics. She is the author of Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (Pantheon, 1997/Vintage, 2017), Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare (Basic Books, 2001), and Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century (The New Press, 2011), and Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World (Basic Books, 2022), as well as more than 100 articles and book chapters, including “Race” in the 1619 Project book.
Roberts has served on the boards of directors of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Black Women’s Health Imperative, and National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, and her work has been supported by fellowships from American Council of Learned Societies, National Science Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Fulbright Program, Harvard Program in Ethics and the Professions, Stanford Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, and Northwestern Institute for Policy Research. Recent recognitions of her work include 2022 election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; 2022 Juvenile Law Center Leadership Prize; 2019 Honorary Doctor of Law Degree, Rutgers University-Newark; 2019 New Voices for Reproductive Justice Voice of Vision Award; 2017 election to the National Academy of Medicine; 2016 Society of Family Planning Lifetime Achievement Award; 2015 American Psychiatric Association Solomon Carter Fuller Award. Her TEDTalk, “The Problem with Race-Based Medicine,” has 1.5 million views.
Sixto Cancel:
Sixto Cancel is the Founder and CEO of Think of Us. Think of Us (TOU) is a Research + Design Lab driving systematic change in child welfare. Through focused projects and sweeping initiatives, TOU drives structural changes in child welfare policy and practice.
Sixto was named as Forbes Top 30 Under 30 Social Entrepreneurs and is on the 2021 Forbes Under30 Lister Board. Sixto has been recognized by the White House as a “White House Champion of Change'', a “Millennial Maker” by BET, and named “Top 24 Changemakers in Government under 24” by the Campaign for a Presidential Youth Council and Sparkaction. Sixto has served as a Young Fellow at Jim Casey Youth Opportunities Initiative since 2010 where he has played a key role in the initiative’s work of extending foster care permanency for older youth. Sixto is a Clinton Global Initiative University Alum, a FastForward Alum, an Ashoka Fellow, a Board Member of Adventr – an interactive SMART video tech company – and most recently on the Advisory Board for Box, Inc. Sixto and the team at Think of Us are working to ensure that every person has the conditions they need to heal, develop and thrive.
Juanetta Jalaine, MBA:
Juanetta Jalaine is a Therapeutic Behavioral Coach serving children in Texas placed in the child welfare system. Originally from Tampa Bay, FL, she has over 17 years of experience in child welfare. Juanetta now motivates others by speaking on her unique perspective as a professional who has aged out of the foster care system. With a Bachelor of Science in Criminal Justice and Masters in Business Administration, Juanetta continues to defy the odds of a statistical “foster child's” trajectory. “Children from “broken homes” are not “broken,” they just need support for their trauma.” In her free time she volunteers with the homeless, youth and veterans. Juanetta is passionate about helping people cope with trauma and separation from their natural families. Her lifelong goal is to change the perspective and elevate individuals to be a better version of themself through perseverance and determination. “I push through my struggles daily to be a voice for the voiceless. The world doesn’t owe us anything, we owe the world! What’s your contribution?”
Dee Bonnick, MSW
As a National Family Consultant with the Center since 2015, Dee Bonnick works on developing resources in the areas of family engagement, leadership, and in-home services. Ms. Bonnick also serves as a consultant in tailored service delivery directly to states, where she works to support the implementation of family engagement infrastructure.
Ms. Bonnick was the lead of the Family Leaders in Child Welfare Center peer group, where she used her lived and professional expertise with family engagement to moderate discussions, contribute to program planning, and facilitate peer engagement. Currently, she also serves as Education Consultant with the Connecticut State Department of Education, where she advocates for youth who are under the guardianship of Connecticut’s Department of Children and Families.
Ms. Bonnick has both lived and professional experience in child welfare that spans most of her life. She has lived child welfare experience and has worked as a parent consultant in child welfare in her home state of Connecticut for over 10 years. Ms. Bonnick was a family advocacy specialist supervisor for a statewide nonprofit organization for children’s behavioral health and has worked on numerous projects to improve family engagement, partnership, and leadership and continues to champion for equity and social justice in marginalized communities. Ms. Bonnick has an extensive background in the fields of mental and behavioral health, as well as macro-level systems change. She holds a bachelor of social work degree from Southern Connecticut State University and a master of social work from New York University, where she was the 2017 Silver School of Social Work, Social Justice Award recipient.
We are committed to providing information and resources to help all social workers in their professional lives. We are able to do this because of NASW Members - membership dues are a major part of our Chapter's budget. If you are not a member, please consider becoming one today. When you become a member of NASW, you automatically become a member of your Chapter and help support our work.
live webinar - 3 CEs pending approval from NASW NH
Getting to the root: Dismantling racism in family separation systems
Presenters: Dr. Sherri Simmons-Horton, Dr. Sharon McDaniel, Dorothy Roberts, Sixto Cancel, Juanetta Jalaine, Dee Bonnick
Sponsored by the UNH Department of Social Work Gorroff Fund; NASW NH Chapter; & UNH Sustainability Institute
3 Clinical Category A CEs approved by NASW NH for relicensure. Approval #4086
The UNH Department of Social Work Gorroff Fund, the UNH Sustainability Institute and the NASW NH Chapter are proud to host this webinar with national experts focused on eliminating racial disparities and oppression in the child welfare system. Attendees will learn the history of family separation policies dating back to slavery, and how racist practices continue today. Keynote speaker and award winning scholar, Dorothy Roberts, will discuss her current research and most recent book, Torn Apart: How the child welfare system destroys black families and how abolition could build a safer world (Basic Books, 2023). Ms. Roberts is joined by a panel of child welfare reformers, Dr. Sharon McDaniel, Sixto Cancel, Juanetta Jalaine, and Dee Bonnick, each who have utilized their lived experience in the child welfare system as a catalyst to pursue necessary system changes. Webinar attendees are encouraged to actively engage in critical conversations with the presenters/panelists in an effort to understand how an anti-racist approach can improve the lives of children and families. Dr. Sherri Simmons-Horton, an expert in addressing racial inequities and current UNH Social Work professor, serves as the moderator for this important presentation and discussion.
Social Work Students, Child Welfare Professionals, Birth/Foster/Adoptive Parents should please email Lynn Stanley for free, non-CE promotional code or CE registration fee waiver - lynncstanley@gmail.com
- The zoom link will be sent to participants prior to the event.
Presenter bios
Sherri Simmons-Horton, Ph.D., LMSW:
Sherri Simmons-Horton is an assistant professor of social work at the University of New Hampshire. She has over 25 years of practice experience in the child welfare system, with a focus on addressing racial disparities present for Black children, youth, and families.
Simmons-Horton’s practice experience ranges from case management to supervision and consulting with private child-placing agencies in Texas. Her research focuses on youth involved in the juvenile justice and foster care systems (dual-status youth), systemic race inequities in the child welfare system, and resilience of Black youth and families. Simmons-Horton is an advisory board member with the Black Administrators in Child Welfare and a staunch child, family, and youth advocate, with a strong interest in practice and policy strategies to dismantle racial inequities oppressive practices in the child welfare and juvenile justice systems.
Sharon McDaniel, Ph.D., Ed.D., MPA:
Dr. Sharon L. McDaniel is the founder, president and CEO of A Second Chance, Inc. (ASCI), the nation’s leading nonprofit voice on kinship care. She has more than 36 years of professional experience as an award-winning child welfare leader in Pennsylvania.
Notable affiliations include: Trustee of Casey Family Programs; Jim Casey Youth Opportunity Initiative; Congressional Caucus on Foster Youth; Quality Improvement Center on Post Permanency Services through HHS and Spaulding for Children; Federal Quality Child and Family Services Review; U.S. Department of Health and Human Services National Advisory Kinship Panel; National Center on Grandfamilies Council for Generations United; Casey National Center for Resource Family Support Advisory Board; Children’s Defense Fund; Pennsylvania Quality Assurance Committee for Child and Family Service Review; Allegheny County Children’s Cabinet.
Civically, she is the president of Black Administrators in Child Welfare, on the board of Coro Pittsburgh, the founder and immediate past president of the African American Strategic Partnership and a board member at Footbridge for Families.
Dr. McDaniel notably served as a co-investigator and author of “Subsidized Legal Guardianship: A Permanency Planning Option Study for Children Placed in Kinship Care” and “Subsidized Legal Guardianship Update.” Her research supported the development of a subsidized legal guardianship proposal for Pennsylvania, which, at that time, had no such legal status in its legislation.
In 2014, she published On My Way Home: A Memoir of Kinship, Grace, and Hope to underscore the purpose of kinship care, empowering families to save the lives of their children. This intimate account of her life begins when she was only 6 years old and removed from the care of her young, widowed father, separated from her brother and sister and forced into the child welfare system in Pittsburgh. Before emancipating at age 17, her journey was one of finding home—a quest that unknowingly became her life’s calling.
In 2021, her dissertation, Black Female Executives’ Perceptions of Their Advancement, Vulnerability, and Self-Efficacy in Philanthropy was published. Through the theoretical frameworks of Black feminist thought and critical race feminism/theory, her study explored the social constructs of race and gender and how the intersection of these distinguishing identities informs Black women’s leadership advancement, vulnerability, and self-efficacy experiences at the apex of philanthropic foundations. Her study additionally explored the study participants’ self-efficacy to better understand the role of this social cognitive theory in addressing their intersectional experiences in predominantly White male institutions.
Over the past 36 years, Dr. McDaniel has authored several articles and papers on child welfare and has received numerous local and national honors and awards. She has also been devoted to higher education, earning her master’s degree followed by her doctorate in education, as well as attending Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government for Executive Education in Nonprofit Governance and the University of Chicago’s Executive Education in Investment Management. She recently obtained her second doctorate.
Additionally, as a sought-after lecturer, she has presented at the University of Barcelona, Oxford University, Howard University, and others.
Dorothy Roberts, JD:
Dorothy Roberts is the 14th Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor and George A. Weiss University Professor of Law & Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, with joint appointments in the Departments of Africana Studies and Sociology and the Law School, where she is the inaugural Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights. She is also the founding director of the Penn Program on Race, Science, and Society. An internationally recognized scholar, public intellectual, and social justice advocate, she has written and lectured extensively on race, gender, and class inequities in U.S. institutions and has been a leader in transforming public thinking and policy on reproductive freedom, child welfare, and bioethics. She is the author of Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (Pantheon, 1997/Vintage, 2017), Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare (Basic Books, 2001), and Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century (The New Press, 2011), and Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World (Basic Books, 2022), as well as more than 100 articles and book chapters, including “Race” in the 1619 Project book.
Roberts has served on the boards of directors of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Black Women’s Health Imperative, and National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, and her work has been supported by fellowships from American Council of Learned Societies, National Science Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Fulbright Program, Harvard Program in Ethics and the Professions, Stanford Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, and Northwestern Institute for Policy Research. Recent recognitions of her work include 2022 election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; 2022 Juvenile Law Center Leadership Prize; 2019 Honorary Doctor of Law Degree, Rutgers University-Newark; 2019 New Voices for Reproductive Justice Voice of Vision Award; 2017 election to the National Academy of Medicine; 2016 Society of Family Planning Lifetime Achievement Award; 2015 American Psychiatric Association Solomon Carter Fuller Award. Her TEDTalk, “The Problem with Race-Based Medicine,” has 1.5 million views.
Sixto Cancel:
Sixto Cancel is the Founder and CEO of Think of Us. Think of Us (TOU) is a Research + Design Lab driving systematic change in child welfare. Through focused projects and sweeping initiatives, TOU drives structural changes in child welfare policy and practice.
Sixto was named as Forbes Top 30 Under 30 Social Entrepreneurs and is on the 2021 Forbes Under30 Lister Board. Sixto has been recognized by the White House as a “White House Champion of Change'', a “Millennial Maker” by BET, and named “Top 24 Changemakers in Government under 24” by the Campaign for a Presidential Youth Council and Sparkaction. Sixto has served as a Young Fellow at Jim Casey Youth Opportunities Initiative since 2010 where he has played a key role in the initiative’s work of extending foster care permanency for older youth. Sixto is a Clinton Global Initiative University Alum, a FastForward Alum, an Ashoka Fellow, a Board Member of Adventr – an interactive SMART video tech company – and most recently on the Advisory Board for Box, Inc. Sixto and the team at Think of Us are working to ensure that every person has the conditions they need to heal, develop and thrive.
Juanetta Jalaine, MBA:
Juanetta Jalaine is a Therapeutic Behavioral Coach serving children in Texas placed in the child welfare system. Originally from Tampa Bay, FL, she has over 17 years of experience in child welfare. Juanetta now motivates others by speaking on her unique perspective as a professional who has aged out of the foster care system. With a Bachelor of Science in Criminal Justice and Masters in Business Administration, Juanetta continues to defy the odds of a statistical “foster child's” trajectory. “Children from “broken homes” are not “broken,” they just need support for their trauma.” In her free time she volunteers with the homeless, youth and veterans. Juanetta is passionate about helping people cope with trauma and separation from their natural families. Her lifelong goal is to change the perspective and elevate individuals to be a better version of themself through perseverance and determination. “I push through my struggles daily to be a voice for the voiceless. The world doesn’t owe us anything, we owe the world! What’s your contribution?”
Dee Bonnick, MSW
As a National Family Consultant with the Center since 2015, Dee Bonnick works on developing resources in the areas of family engagement, leadership, and in-home services. Ms. Bonnick also serves as a consultant in tailored service delivery directly to states, where she works to support the implementation of family engagement infrastructure.
Ms. Bonnick was the lead of the Family Leaders in Child Welfare Center peer group, where she used her lived and professional expertise with family engagement to moderate discussions, contribute to program planning, and facilitate peer engagement. Currently, she also serves as Education Consultant with the Connecticut State Department of Education, where she advocates for youth who are under the guardianship of Connecticut’s Department of Children and Families.
Ms. Bonnick has both lived and professional experience in child welfare that spans most of her life. She has lived child welfare experience and has worked as a parent consultant in child welfare in her home state of Connecticut for over 10 years. Ms. Bonnick was a family advocacy specialist supervisor for a statewide nonprofit organization for children’s behavioral health and has worked on numerous projects to improve family engagement, partnership, and leadership and continues to champion for equity and social justice in marginalized communities. Ms. Bonnick has an extensive background in the fields of mental and behavioral health, as well as macro-level systems change. She holds a bachelor of social work degree from Southern Connecticut State University and a master of social work from New York University, where she was the 2017 Silver School of Social Work, Social Justice Award recipient.
We are committed to providing information and resources to help all social workers in their professional lives. We are able to do this because of NASW Members - membership dues are a major part of our Chapter's budget. If you are not a member, please consider becoming one today. When you become a member of NASW, you automatically become a member of your Chapter and help support our work.