Introducing our new Executive Director, Chesley Richardson!

In this episode, Project Coordinator Heather Jones interviews the new Executive Director for Prevent Child Abuse Florida, Chesley Richardson. 

Transcript

Introduction: 

Welcome to the Pinwheel Podcast, Hope for Florida’s Families. I’m your host, Heather Jones, Project Coordinator of Prevent Child Abuse Florida. 

Heather: 

Hello, and welcome to this episode of the Pinwheel Podcast! Today, we have our new executive director of Prevent Child Abuse Florida, Ms. Chesley Richardson. 

Chesley: 

Hi! So nice to be here. 

Heather: 

It’s great to have you! I just have some questions so that our listeners can get to know you better. The first question is, “what brought you into the career path of child welfare?”

Chesley: Oh, that is a long story that I’m going to try to make really short for us. But it’s also one of those stories that feels like a million years ago, but yesterday, all the same. So, I graduated from Florida State University with a degree in health education. I always wanted to go to school to be a health teacher. I had an amazing health teacher in seventh grade and that was my dream. As soon as I graduated, health education was no longer offered in schools as a complete course. So, a lot of times, they would have a P.E. teacher teach health, or they might get a health unit in a biology class or a home economics class, and none of those other subjects were for me. I really didn’t know what I wanted to do with that degree, so that led me to sitting at home, doing DIY projects and painting rooms and furniture and all of that. I was newly married, and all of a sudden, my parents were like “you gotta go get a job!” Like, “this is nice, you’ve had some time alone, hanging out, trying to figure out your career, but you need to go get a job.” So, both my parents were long-time DCF workers, had retired from DCF, and probably at some point my mom and stepdad had said “you know, this is not the job you wanna do,” but then turned and said, “you’re going to work. We know there are needs out there for case managers.” And so, they gave me the right people to talk to and low and behold interviewed and became a protective services case manager here in Leon County. From there, I took on lots of different roles in child welfare, lots of special projects, went into foster home licensing and intake and placement. I did some work with diligent searches, trying to find family members for kids that were in foster care to get them out of licensed care and into the homes with family, and did all sorts of things with the lead agency here in town, and also moved to Panama City and did the same work over there. So, after moving to Panama City, we moved back to Tallahassee very quickly, we had three kids at this point, and I knew that direct services with families and being on-call was not an area that I was going to be able to sustain. I looked into some other career choices and found Healthy Families Florida had an opening for Program Specialist. Now, I had no idea, really, what I was getting into when I came over here. But, immediately, going to training and learning about primary prevention, it became very clear to me that the world I had been working before was needed, but also there were so many things that could be changed in that world if the focus became primary prevention for children and families. 

Heather:

Awesome! I would love to see some of those DIY projects, though, because I am a DIY-er myself [laughs]. So, my second question is “what is something you wish you’d known earlier?”

Chesley:

Yeah, so, just talking about that primary prevention, I feel like world of child welfare, especially when you go in as a very young case manager, you don’t hear the word “prevention,” you don’t hear about prevention efforts because you’re already deep in it. So, I wish I had known more about the different services available to families before they ever became involved in the child welfare system. 

Heather:

Yeah, for sure, what we really strive for is spreading awareness of these prevention tactics that can keep families out of the system but still get the help that they need. So, that is definitely a main mission of ours. 

Chesley:

Yes. 

Heather:

Do you remember a moment where you felt you made a difference in the life of a family?

Chesley:

Oh, gosh, there’s – I’ve probably worked with over hundreds of families over the twenty-one years that I’ve been in this world, and I think all of them had times where myself and my coworkers or the programs I was working for made differences. You know, it’s kind of heartbreaking sometimes when you think about – you think you take a couple steps forward with a family and they’re really on the right path, and then something happens. It’s something out of your control, out of their control, and they might take a step backwards, and that was really hard for me to keep control of when I was working directly with families. I really internalized a lot of that, and what did I do wrong? You know, what was I not giving to the family that they needed? It took a long time, and probably a little bit of maturing to know that’s not what I was there for. I’m not coming into their homes and working with them to fix them; it was my role to come in and support them on their journey and give them the tools. So, once I was able to kind of make that mind-shift for myself, I think that it helped in the way that I worked with families from there on out. 

Heather:

Excellent! Yeah, I know that working in direct services can really take a toll, as far as personal responsibility and compassion fatigue, so I totally understand that and I’m glad you had that realization that supporting families is what we’re here for and building on family strengths is what we strive for. Another question is: what are some of the challenges that the field of child welfare faces today?

Chesley:

I think a lot of the challenges are challenges that were there back when I was first starting too. And it’s not to say that the field hasn’t made progress, but the world has changed a lot. I feel like case managers, child welfare workers, case managers, that whole realm of family support really needs a lot of training and ways of working with families and making sure that the services that they are providing are centered on that family. Not just checking boxes, not just making sure that we’re meeting deadlines or documenting what we need to because somebody higher than us said so, but training on how families exist in this world and how families that have trauma may not even recognize they have trauma, and trauma that I have looks different than the trauma that you have. So, kind of that deeper, more social-emotional kind of work with families and children. I think that may be a place that we could enhance professional development for child welfare workers or social workers that are working with families and kids. 

Heather:

So how do you think your team here at Prevent Child Abuse Florida can help solve some of those problems?

Chesley:

Well, now that we have had the opportunity to kind of merge what we were already doing with professional development, with the great efforts of Prevent Child Abuse Florida, I think we have the opportunity to bring some great training to the child welfare field and to our community partners, through not only the trainings that we already offer, but also keeping track of child welfare trends and developing new trainings for professional development with those experts in the field. We have recently been awarded the honor of being able to provide Florida Certification Board Continuing Education Credits for our trainings. So, I think that will help us to provide the support that child welfare professionals need in order for them to continue their learning throughout their careers.

Heather:

Awesome, that is great news! I also wanted to ask: what is some advice you would have for those who are just starting their career in child welfare?

Chesley:

Probably going back to don’t take it so hard on yourself. I think anyone that goes into this field, or falls into this field kind of the way I did, wants to help people, right? That’s what everybody says, “oh I’m in this field to help people.” But understanding that helping people takes a big toll on yourself. So, making sure that you’re understanding that you can do all the things that you possibly know to do, and families will still take their own journey, and that’s okay, and that’s expected, and that’s what we want. We want families that we’re working with to take ownership of their life’s path. And sometimes that does not exactly look the way we think the path should go, and that takes a toll. So, making sure that we’re keeping care of ourselves, and keeping track of our own wellness, making sure that we have a support system ourselves, is very important in this field. It causes burnout, and like you said, compassion fatigue, and that’s not what anybody wants to see, we want people to stay in this field for a long time, because they came into it and stayed because of some reason, internally. But we want them to stay, so we have to take care of that inner person, too.

Heather:

Yeah, definitely, self-care is extremely important in this field, and I love that you mentioned that. Speaking of compassion fatigue, we do have a training here as far as handling that, don’t we?

Chesley:

Yes, we do!

Heather:

So, speaking of the trainings, what does the future hold for this new prevention services unit?

Chesley:

Oh my gosh, I don’t even know how to narrow this down. Being in this role for a whole twenty-six days, at this point, I have lists and lists and lists going of all of the things that I think we can either improve or build upon or just create because of the amazing talent that we have with this group now, now that we’ve taken this Prevent Child Abuse Florida team from a staff of three to a staff of nine, I think, with an extra cadre of contracted trainers. I think we have the ability to really shake things up and provide a lot of support for our partners and bring out a lot more partners throughout the state. So, come down, see my office, Heather! I’ve got chart papers all over the walls of all the ideas and I’m just really excited to move forward and brainstorm with you and the rest of the team on how we can move forward. 

Heather:

We are looking forward to that so much, Chesley! We are really happy that you joined our team. 

Chesley:

Aw, thank you!

Outro: Thank you for listening to The Pinwheel Podcast, hope for Florida’s families. To contact us or learn more, visit PreventChildAbuseFL.org.