Long before his 30+ year career in social services began, Charles Bradley got a profound insight into the needs of vulnerable youth. It came in the form of a knock on his bedroom window by his high school best friend, Jay.
“At age 16 and 17 I never asked what his family situation was in detail, but I knew when Jay knocked on the window, he needed a place to stay,’ said Bradley, who is Director of Social Services for Mecklenburg County, North Carolina. “I never asked him the nights that he didn’t come to our home where he was. As an adult I reflect upon where was Jay, but many nights during the week, he would knock on the window and he would come in and my family would feed him and we would go off to football practice the next day.”
Those interactions followed Bradley into a college internship at a locked-down juvenile detention facility, and then to a career start as a social worker in Hartford, Connecticut. In 2024, as he oversees the foster care system for Mecklenburg County, Bradley told NPF Future of the American Child Fellows that his early lived experiences provided him with crucial insights for analyzing key challenges and directing structural changes.
“I reflect on those things because those are two informative experiences that shape how I lead in child welfare, where natural supports are important to families,” he said. “So, using and leveraging kinship care, extended family, paternal family is critically important for the overall safety and wellbeing of children. So those two things shaped me to the social worker and leader I am today.”
Confronting Race and Equity in Foster Care
Possibly the most critical step toward transforming foster care systems has been the acknowledgment of the role race has played in out-of-home placements over the past few decades, Bradley said.
When I transitioned into a social worker, there wasn’t an appetite climate culture of discussing what was quite obvious. And as things evolved around race and having the difficult conversations and identifying the disparities and looking at the numbers and the data, the obvious became clear and there was a willingness in the field to discuss why does that exist? Why do we see more children of color entering these systems and what are some of the root causes and beginning to address that.”
“Those conversations matter, and not just for children of color,” Bradley said.
“What we know, child abuse neglect affects all socioeconomic communities, and it doesn’t just happen in the Black community, that there are children that are white that we are missing because of our lack of awareness of equity. So, we want to ensure that children of color are not entering our system unnecessarily, but what we also hold in mind is that there are vulnerable white families that are not being seen and not being heard and not being served well because of the equity lens that people may not have as they go about their work.”
Because most children are identified and directed toward the child welfare system through referrals from schools, medical facilities or law enforcement, it’s important to understand who’s doing the reporting, and that their own cultural lens might have an impact on who gets reported and who doesn’t.
“What we find is that there’s not a balance in that reporting, that the racial equity lens that people use is that many times social services is for referring families of color and not serving our white community,” Bradley said. “And when our white community is not served well, we see some of the most egregious fatalities because they’ve touched systems and people have chosen not to make those reports. So, when we talk about our racial equity is to serve all children well, we want to make sure that our African-American children, Black children, Hispanic children, our indigenous children are not coming to our system unnecessarily. And we also hold in mind the safety and wellbeing of white families that are not being reported at the same rates, but experiencing child abuse and maltreatment.”
An Evolving System
Mecklenburg County’s social services department has come a long way from when Bradley arrived in 2004. “What I found and what I still see today is we have some amazing social workers that are compassionate, caring and want to do good work for families and for community. I still see that now. I saw that we lacked some of the infrastructure. At the time I came, we didn’t have a computer system. We were documenting everything by pen and paper. Remember in 2004, we did have the internet, we did have computers, but here in North Carolina, everything was pen and paper. So those were things that we had to address. We had community partnerships, but we needed to do more in terms of engaging our community.”
“My vision for transforming child welfare in Mecklenburg County is to ensure that every child has a family. That while abuse and maltreatment may occur, that is our responsibility to work hard, to resolve the issues that brought them into care or to connect them with their family. And our first choice, we call ourselves a kinship first agency, that our first exploration for safety when children can’t be at home is to be with kin. And then we’re committed to having children and families decrease the use of residential facilities, so emergency placements and psychiatric residential treatment facilities, we want to minimize their use. Yes, there’s a role for those settings, but they should be short term and that we need to bring children back with families and preferably kin.”
Access the full transcript here.
This fellowship is funded by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and the Heising-Simons Foundation. NPF is solely responsible for programming and content.
