Sponsored by the Lac Courte Oreilles Child Support Program as part of a federal 1115 grant through the Administration for Children and Families’ Office of Child Support Enforcement, the Good Life Camp provided training in the Ojibwe language and taught protocols for song and dance and Ojibwe regalia, while also making sure campers understood the meanings behind them and their connections to the larger culture and the kinds of choices and values youth should bring to their own decisions about parenting.

This addition of Community Table Talks is focused on Child Welfare. We invited 4 great guests and asked them to answer two questions in about 5 minutes. The questions are 1. What is the most pressing issue we are facing in child welfare? And 2. What is the number one way we can make a substantial difference?

Joining us on this episode is Judge Ann Meinster, Korey Elger, Ángela Quijada-Banks and Bill Delisio.

In this episode we proudly present the first podcast interview with the new OCSE Commissioner Tanguler Gray. In this episode we celebrate her success, talk about her background, and get just a little preview of her approach to this new and exciting role. We get to also get a sense of her warm and welcoming personality, her sense of humor, and her commitment to the program and child support professionals across the country.

As most of our listeners know, the child support program has been evolving since it’s creation as part of the Social Security Act in 1975. One of the most significant changes we have seen – and probably the hardest to accomplish – has been the transition from being focused on enforcement to being focused on families. The Child Support program, and the people we serve in the program, has contact with more families than any other social service program and with that we have both a great deal of responsibility as well as a great deal of opportunity.

We were so pleased to welcome to the podcast Ángela Quijada-Banks.

Ms. Quijada-Banks is a NAACP Image Award–nominated, American best-selling author, Founder and C.E.O of Soulful Liberation (a Book publishing company and podcast), and Consciously Melanated Queens, a community to support young women of color to uncover their divine purpose and holistically heal.

In our second Community Table Talks episode, we ask about leadership. This is one of the topics we tend to hear a lot about but can never get enough of. The questions we posed to our guests were pretty straightforward, trying to get at how they continue to grow and learn as a leader, and also to talk about important risks during the course of their careers. But as is often the case with our show, the conversations take a lot of turns and we learn a lot about our guests, about their leadership ideas, and we gain some really good lessons that most of us can relate to.

Did you know that 7 out of every 10 Americans use social media? Because of this high saturation, which only continues to rise, it stands to reason that digital outreach is a critical communication tool no matter what your message is or where it originates. Digital outreach is not only effective for eCommerce sites or businesses that produce products. The human services field can benefit immensely as well and for a number of fundamental reasons.