My sister Andrea Goetz is my best friend, my hero, and one of my all-time favorite people. She is also Assistant Commissioner of Clinical & Support Services at Administration for Children's Services in Manhattan, and she and I wrote this poem together to honor the New York City Administration for Children's Services staff.
(There's some in-jokes and jargon but if you've ever worked in an office, I'm sure you'll get it.) Ode to the Child Welfare Worker In the shadowy dawn of pre-history, a woman arrives at a cave."Hello? Mr. and Mrs. Ugg? I've noticed that Little Ugg Junior has been playing with fire while the other children are doing cave drawings, and I wanted to check and make sure everything is OK. You don't mind if I take a few notes, do you?"Yes. It's true."Social Worker" is, in fact, the world's oldest profession.
You see, we put the "BC" in BCW...
Throughout peacetime and wartime and boom times and bust,
There has never been a moment when your work was not needed.
And your friends say, "I don't know how you do it."
And you think, "I don't know how I could not do it."
Because you have a vision that children's lives are trauma-free.
And you can't just phone that in.
You have been called to make the world a better place for children and families, and every time you think about quitting (OK, every day, when you think about quitting) you hear your hopeful heart say, "No, no...not yet. There is still work to do."
You meet people at their worst hour, in their deepest crisis, but you know they are not defined by their pain.
You greet them with dignity.
You greet them with compassion.
You greet them with the empathy and skills build on the core competencies that utilize best practice to ensure that services are strength based, family focused, child centered, trauma informed, non-stigmatizing, LGBTQ friendly, racially equitable and culturally sound.
And they can't always say, "Thank you."
But we can.
I can.
Thank you.
Now, we all know that the paperwork and the reports alone will take you 30 years. But you are a full-time, multi-tasking ninja. You got this. You work at ACS.
You dress in coordinated color combinations for every possible celebration, and you glory in the heritage of your brothers and sisters, and you grieve together and give thanks together, and you fall on the sword, and you strive - oh how you strive together, and you know better than to try to get into Connections when you are in a hurry.
You remember BCW and OCACM and FRP and TFBH and the UCR.
And maybe it occurs to you now, that you have forgotten more acronyms than any one person should ever know.
But it's not really the acronyms that you remember.
It's Eliza
And Kelvin
And Orlando
And Jerome
And Angela
And the people say, "I don't know how you do it."
And you think, "I don't know how I could not do it."
And the fact is, you can't stop doing it.
On the subway, in the restaurant, in the park
You are always checking to make sure the kids are all right.
You are God's Chosen Lifeguard.
You are the Angel with a Clipboard.
You are the Listener.
So march on, you Gladiators of Bureaucracy, and know that someday
OCFS will issue an ADM that will require a steering committee to convene a work-group to call a meeting to discuss missed opportunities and lessons learned that will inform guidelines that will frame a policy.
And know, that someday, you will get a response from the Staffing Action Committee. (Who are they, anyway?)
And someday, you will hear about a family you served who is now doing just fine.
And they can't always say, "Thank you."
But we can.
I can.
On behalf of those who marched before you, and those who will carry on after you go, I honor you.
Thank you.