For over a decade, investment days has been a defining benefit of working at thoughtbot. By having a day out of the week to focus on improving ourselves, the company, and the community, we’ve built and contributed to amazing open source projects used by thousands of developers. Now that’s impactful!
What’s less known about our investment days is that we can donate our time and expertise to work on social causes. This means lending a helping hand to nonprofits and NGOs at no cost. Put that into perspective, if every thoughtbotter contributed a reasonable amount of investment time to social causes, that’s potentially $400,000 worth of services every year towards social good.
Challenges of child welfare at tribal nations
About a decade ago, prior to thoughtbot, I worked for a non-profit helping to build the case management system for the State of Indiana’s child welfare IV-E practice. We then tried to service tribal nations in the US, because caseworkers there faced a daunting challenge: Indigenous children are twice as likely to have allegations of abuse substantiated and four times more likely to be removed from their home. Unfortunately, the difference between States and tribal funding for technology was just staggering.
Despite having access to the same federal policies, match requirements, economic conditions, and lack of tax revenue means that tribes would never have equitable access to the same kind of adaptable, tailored-fit, strategic technology that states have.
But imagine if they did.
Every tribal nation would be empowered to build culturally responsive solutions unique to their practices. They can apply data best practices and put more focus on metrics that they decide to be important to measuring outcomes. And beyond just streamlining processes, they can diverge from common state functionality and move towards technical innovation for their nation.
Imagine having had the tools to lessen the impact of COVID-19, which disproportionately affected tribal nations. Electronic signatures, voice signatures, virtual visits, transcriptions, offline peer-to-peer case management, or even something as simple as digital forms would’ve been impactful for the communities that often had no way of handing in physical documents to caseworkers.
Helping the helpers
A lack of resources is a hard problem to solve, but perhaps there is a small step forward — one that offers a measure of equitable access to technology for the helpers who need it the most.
We’d like to extend an invitation to US-based tribal nations operating, planning to operate, or will operate a IV-E, IV-B, or IV-D program to participate in our investment days. Tribal nations can request consulting hours from any interested developers, designers, or project managers to contribute to internal projects at your nation at no cost. You may also document these contributions as an in-kind match for your respective programs.
We understand that an influx of technical expertise can feel overwhelming, but we’re here to help and guide you like we’ve done for many of our success stories. We’ll work with your nation to learn where the most impact can be made. Generally, you can use these contributions towards any maintenance or feature development for your automated child welfare management system like AFCARS or CCWIS, child support enforcement system, or any general database system.
If your nation is interested in participating, please reach out to Johny, tribal advocate at thoughtbot.