2019–2020
Strengthening New York's Safety Net
HeartShare brought Victor Kiani in to advise the staff who handle New York's hardest cases. In 2019, the city also invited him to join its child-welfare agency's advisory council.
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.
- Children in New York City's foster system, down from 50,000 in the 1990s
- 8,000
- Reports of abuse or neglect ACS investigates each year
- 55,000
- Annual turnover among frontline child-welfare workers nationwide
- 30–40%
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.
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.
Each session shapes the next
Judgment develops through practice
Bring the difficult cases
Start with the ambiguous situations a formal curriculum can miss.
Guide the practice
Help frontline staff work through the practical application.
Take the questions seriously
Carry what comes up in the room beyond the session.
Research for the next session
Use those questions to prepare the next round of learning.
What the room raises shapes what comes next.
In 2019, he was invited to join the Administration for Children's Services advisory council, advising the assistant commissioner on services for vulnerable youth and families across the city. He was twenty.
How are we supposed to know how to help others if we don't communicate with them?
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.
He advised at HeartShare through the end of 2020, and on the city's council until April 2020.