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Compassion Through Co-Design: Using Human-Centered Design to Promote Family Engagement
By Kate McKerlie, MSSW, MPH, Director of Communications, Texas Institute for Child & Family Wellbeing
The child welfare system often discourages caregivers of children in an active case from engaging with the child’s biological family. This can lead to fear, mistrust, and miscommunication during an already stressful time. Foster, adoptive, and kinship caregivers can best help children in their care thrive by building a supportive network around the child’s whole family. Establishing a compassionate relationship with the child’s family is healing and transformative for everyone involved.
In 2023, our team designed and led a year-long multimedia campaign for caregivers encouraging family engagement and—when possible—successful reunification. We used a human-centered design (HCD) approach to collaborate with caregivers and birth parents. The resulting Compassionate Caregivers campaign provides caregivers with resources to engage meaningfully with a child’s family.
Our Approach
“How dehumanizing it was to see them be a part of a system where people assume that you aren’t doing the best that you can most of the time. Like they assume that parents are just lazy, that they intentionally did everything wrong.”
– Compassionate Caregivers Advisory Group Member
Engaging with a child’s biological family while caring for their child seems like a simple act, but it’s not easy. Caregivers may be hesitant to engage with the families of the children involved in child welfare. Likewise, families involved in the system may not want to be engaged at this stressful time. Often, this hesitancy is perpetuated by long-standing societal issues outside and within the child welfare system that fuel fear, prejudice, and stigma. The Compassionate Caregivers multimedia campaign seeks to address this bias by sharing the lived experiences of those involved in child welfare. In addition, the campaign provides actionable strategies for family engagement.
Human-centered design is a collaborative, iterative, and people-centered approach to solving complex challenges. While using this approach, we formed an advisory group of caregivers and parents with current or past involvement with child welfare. The advisory group met for eight months before the campaign launch and nine months after the launch. In this time, the group engaged in parts of the campaign based on their interest and experiences with the child welfare system.
Human-centered design relies on a co-creation process between designers and users. Because of this, we utilized a three-phase iterative process during campaign development and implementation. Like any human-centered design process, we bounced back and forth between phases and remained flexible throughout the design process.
The Human-Centered Design Process
Human-centered design can be a non-linear process through each phase, but should always be grounded in the needs and lived experiences of those it is for.
The inspiration phase focuses on gathering as much information as possible to understand the problem you want to solve. Human-centered design uses multimodal engagement tools, which allow participants to share information comfortably and in a variety of ways. In our inspiration phase, we held several interactive meetings. During these meetings, we asked the advisory group to identify motivations and strategies for engaging birth families. The group mapped out these behaviors and strategies along the timeline of a child welfare case where a caregiver would be involved. In this phase, we conducted 16 individual interviews with our advisors to explore their experiences with the child welfare system and family engagement. Eight advisory group members also created photo journals chronicling what family engagement means to them.
Family engagement photo journal example
The advisory group completed several surveys on how they seek information about caregiving and preferences for receiving this information. Through this work, the group identified three key moments where we could develop resources to support caregivers in any child welfare case. These pivotal moments broke down to:
- The introduction, when caregivers first meet the parents;
- Maintaining a relationship with the parents throughout the time their children are in care; and
- The transition at the end of the case, when children return to their parents.
Designers begin to identify and test solutions to the problem in the ideation phase. Our team created a campaign map outlining the specific resources needed for the campaign. Advisory members co-developed tips, worksheets, video concepts, and words of encouragement on how caregivers can put their compassion toward a child’s family into action. Our second campaign strategy involved introducing real families and caregivers with experiences in family engagement via campaign videos. Several caregivers and parent advisors shared their stories through video interviews. During this phase, the advisory group met regularly to determine a campaign name, tagline, and key messages. We used several interactive activities to determine campaign messaging. These activities included “empathy mapping,” where the advisory group brainstormed how they wanted other caregivers to “feel,” “say,” “do,” and “think” when encountering the campaign. The group also deliberated on several campaign visual branding prototypes.
In the implementation phase before the launch, the advisory group provided feedback on almost every campaign material. This ranged from written and video resources to the overall look of the campaign website pages and sample social media posts.
Finally, our team launched the campaign at the annual TACFS Texas Child Care Administrators Conference. We invited advisory group members to participate in a panel discussion on family engagement and the campaign development. The advisory group continued to meet during the year-long campaign. They also actively promoted the campaign, presenting at conferences and caregiver trainings and spreading the campaign materials through their networks. The group provided several recommendations to improve the campaign during this time. Some of these recommendations included recruiting more birth parent voices to the group and featuring them in the campaign. Several new advisors were engaged to participate in group meetings and share their experiences. The group also decided to start a peer mentoring group, where the advisory group members could mentor other caregivers interested in family engagement.
Advisory group member Mary Romos shares how engagement with her child’s foster caregivers was life-changing.
Lessons Learned
“My favorite part [of this campaign] has been meeting exceptional caregivers who are willing to share their homes and hearts with children and families who need it the most.”
– Compassionate Caregivers Advisory Group Member
This project gives us a real-world example of how human-centered design approaches can help to address controversial issues and provide space for the expression of those with lived experience.
The year-long campaign housed a campaign website and three social media platforms. From these platforms, we released eight instructional resources, 32 videos, and 365 social media posts. The campaign received over 21,000 impressions across all platforms throughout the campaign year. This modest campaign reach was entirely organic and driven by the advisory group team and campaign design team. Future initiatives may consider employing paid/earned media advertisements and partnering with content creators already in the subject space to improve reach. Anecdotally, we learned child welfare entities in other states used our campaign materials for their own family engagement work.
Among our accomplishments, we most valued the rapport and relationships we built with the advisory group members. The advisory group met virtually and consisted of caregivers and parents statewide who likely wouldn’t have met otherwise. Despite the virtual environment, human-centered design tools allowed group members to creatively contribute and bond. Initially, we planned to end the advisory group at the campaign launch, but the group expressed interest in continuing to meet. This led to the formation of a peer-mentoring group in hopes of helping more caregivers.
Human-centered design projects in child welfare, like any initiative involving those with lived experience, have the potential to fall into tokenism and even perpetuate the stigma and power structures they seek to address. Within our project, we consulted and co-created with our advisory group. This project could have easily moved towards a community-owned model where the advisory group would have taken over all content development and implementation. However, we did not have the resources to support this. Projects engaging those with lived experience should consider how to expand initial project deliverables to capitalize on providing a positive space and reliable outlet for those whose voices are not traditionally heard.
Thank you to the 33 advisory group members with lived experience who co-created this multimedia campaign with the campaign design team.
Read More:
A Grandmother’s Love: Family Engagement and Kinship Care
Building Strong Communities With Family Engagement
Honoring Youth Voice in Adoption
Family Engagement as a Relational Approach