Ten of Ten’s immersive experience opened the way for human connection, discussion, and solutions. Innovators shared their personal and professional insights on the current child welfare system and worked together to design a new system. Diverse perspectives brought out strong differences of opinions and ideas about how to reach this goal. For example, some innovators disagreed on whether child welfare should focus more on the needs of the child or on the needs of the parents.
Innovators found common ground in the belief that a child’s family and surrounding community are vital to solving the challenges they face. When the Ten of Ten prototypes and feedback were analyzed and coded, common insight emerged around the critical role of family and an urgent need to focus on what the family needs to prevent children from entering the system in the first place. An important pillar of follow-up from the Ten of Ten became: "How do we engage in a supportive family-driven approach to keeping children safe?”
The innovators and thought leaders came up with thirty different prototypes for what steps to take next. On the final day, groups presented their key findings, inspiring one another to think in new ways and apply strategies to the child welfare problems they encounter in their own organizations.
Ten of Ten was convened to design a new system. In the end, innovators surprised even themselves with the idea that designing an entirely new child welfare system would do little to stop the traumatic cycle of removing children from their families.
Instead, the discovery from those three and a half days lives in the realization that there is already a system that works for children, and it is one of the oldest systems of humanity: the family system. Insights confirmed that new solutions need to focus on supporting families and preventing the separation of children from their trusted adults, even if that means defining family more broadly to keep children safe.
