Reforming Child Welfare

As the director of the District of Columbia's Child and Family Services Agency, Olivia Golden led reform of a system in federal receivership. Now, in Reforming Child Welfare, she uses her expertise as an administrator, an academic, and an advocate to pinpoint the factors that lead to success. “Writing from the inside,” she maintains, “makes it possible to analyze, in retrospect, what we thought we were doing, what it felt like, and what led us to good or bad choices.” By sharing her personal story, along with her analysis of the research literature and two other case studies in Alabama and Utah, Golden finds fresh insight on improving outcomes for imperiled children and families.

Olivia Golden is a senior fellow at the Urban Institute. She is an expert in child and family programs at the federal, state, and local levels with a special interest in the way services are delivered on the front lines, and her career has combined senior positions in government, the advocacy world, and academia. From 2001 to 2004, she served as director of the Child and Family Services Agency of the District of Columbia, leading the agency out of federal court receivership and making critical improvements in services to children. From 1993 to 2001, she served in two presidentially appointed positions within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, first as commissioner for Children, Youth, and Families and then as assistant secretary for Children and Families. In these roles, she was responsible for over 60 federal programs, including Head Start; Early Head Start, which was created during her tenure to extend the benefits of Head Start to babies and toddlers from birth to age 3; federal child care programs, which were greatly expanded during those years; child abuse and neglect programs, including the implementation of the Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997; and the implementation of welfare reform and major changes in the nation's child support program. She was also director of programs and policy at the Children's Defense Fund (1991-1993), lecturer in public policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University (1987-1991), and budget director for the Executive Office of Human Services in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (1983-1985). Her last book, Poor Children and Welfare Reform, was published in 1992.