Strengthening New York's Safety Net

HeartShare brought Victor Kiani in to advise the staff who handle New York's hardest cases. Before the year was out, the city came for the same counsel.

HeartShare has been at this since 1914, when it was founded to look after teenagers leaving orphanages into a city with no protections waiting for them; its hundred-plus programs now reach some nineteen thousand New Yorkers, foster youth and their families among them. Kiani worked out of the New York City headquarters, where frontline staff came in for panel sessions: three seats up front, advising the people who carry the city's hardest cases. He held one of the three.

The questions that filled those sessions were questions of judgment under pressure: a placement breaking down late at night, a parent in crisis on the phone, the distance between the approved answer and the right one. The manual covers the cases that behave; the job is everything else.

Figures: NYC Administration for Children's Services; the city's foster-care census at its modern low, 2019; the U.S. Government Accountability Office on caseworker turnover.

The organization treated him the way industries treat their experts: it put him in front of practitioners and let him shape what they practiced. Kiani steered the sessions toward exactly those cases, the ambiguous, human ones a formal curriculum skips; advised on how the learning environments ran; guided the practical applications staff rehearsed; and took what came up in the room away as research for the next session. The aim, every session, was to strengthen the judgment a worker needs on the nights no script applies.

New York City noticed. It appointed Kiani to the Administration for Children's Services Workforce Development Advisory Council, advising the assistant commissioner on services for vulnerable youth and families across the city. He was twenty.

That question became his agenda on the council. He and a friend took it upon themselves to put the foster-youth community's own concerns in front of the room, including the college students still in care, a group the numbers treat brutally: by the federal government's own surveys, roughly one in five young people who age out of foster care reports homelessness within two years. The point he kept making was simple: the people those meetings were about should be heard in them.

HeartShare gave him the front of the room; the city gave him a seat at the table. For two years, he used both to make the people who hold the folders better at the job.