Adrienne-What and How am I Thinking about my Shared Topic?

            The first over-night exposed me to different thinking than I had been doing alone. I learned a little about different aspects of Vermont’s Department of Children and Families and the changes that need to be made within the organization. While this problem is definitely interesting to me, I would still like to focus on my original issue. I don’t say this out of disregard for the multitude of issues involved in the topic of foster care in Vermont, but because I don’t want to compromise my personal goals just because this project became unexpectedly group-oriented.

            I’m not sure if my thinking on the issues regarding life in foster care have changed, but I attribute this stagnant thought to the fact that I haven’t done much research in the past couple weeks. My first objective after the over-night was to establish contact with a social worker and possibly find contacts through them. This was only partially accomplished; I’ve found a pair of promising e-mail addresses, but because it was so late in the week I decided to postpone initial contact until Monday the 16^th.

            During future research, I’d like to answer a variety of questions I have about foster care in Vermont. What are the best and worst outcomes of life in foster care? How can we minimize these worst outcomes? What factors lead to placement in foster care and how can they be eradicated? What problems do children face after leaving foster care, and while in it?

            I think I’ll be able to answer some of these questions be gathering information from a variety of people within the foster care system. Some helpful sources may be social workers (both current and retired), foster parents, employees of the Department of Children and Families, and maybe even foster children themselves. I would really love to communicate with children in the current foster care system or those who have recently emerged from it because they have the insight I need to answer my questions. Information from other sources is valuable, but children will be able to give me direct insight into their lives. However, I doubt that this will be possible.

            In the future I plan on conducting interviews with at least one social worker and a DCF worker. These are my minimum goals for interviewing, and I’m open to conducting more. However, I believe online correspondence is also a valuable resource, and has the added benefit of requiring less planning and no travel involved. I’ll be initiating contact with the social workers I mentioned above in the next couple days.

            Although I haven’t made much progress over the past weeks, I believe that a Google Hangout with my group this evening will inspire me to get cracking. I look forward to hearing about my group-mates accomplishments and working together to accomplish our common objective in the next few months.