Amy Conley Wright

• MSW, Ph.D
• Professor (Associate) at The University of Sydney

This article examines parental advocacy for young children with disabilities using a subset of data drawn from a larger exploratory and descriptive study on parental advocacy for children with disabilities from birth to age 18 with a sample of 400 participants. Because this article focuses on parents of children from birth to age 6, only parents (n...

This article provides a case study of a project to improve the health, safety, and development of children birth to 6 years old in a large orphanage in Nepal. Two interventions were conducted: improvement of physical infrastructure and training, mentoring, and support for caregiving staff. As a result of these interventions, positive outcomes in te...

Six Steps to Successful Child Advocacy: Changing the World for Children (by Amy Conley Wright and Kenneth J. Jaffe) offers an interdisciplinary approach to child advocacy, nurturing key skills through a proven six-step process that has been used to train child advocates and create social change around the world. The approach is applicable for micro...

Authentic performance assessment connects active learning pedagogy with assessment of student learning. For family sciences, authentic performance assessment presents an opportunity to evaluate knowledge and skills related to working with families within the classroom context. This form of assessment can be combined with popular teaching strategies...

The practice of policy advocacy by organizations has outpaced its theoretical development. Yet the importance of a theoretical grounding for advocacy campaigns has increased with the need for accountability and an understanding of advocates' contributions to policy development. This article synthesizes practitioner and academic literature on policy...

Development of cultural identity is understood to be central to well‐being; however, it is not always prioritised for children in out‐of‐home care (OOHC). This paper examines current policy and practice designed to support the cultural identity and connection of non‐Indigenous culturally and linguistically diverse children (CALD) in OOHC, who make...

Maintaining the parent–child relationship while a parent is incarcerated is critical to the well-being of both parent and child. There is some evidence that video visits can be beneficial when they are used to supplement rather than replace in-person visits. This study explores how video visits support the father–child relationship during parental...

Family visits for people in Australian correctional centres stopped during the COVID-19 pandemic. Video visitation was introduced in most jurisdictions as an alternative option. This paper presents the findings from the first multi-jurisdictional study to explore the experiences and impacts of video visits between fathers in prison and their childr...

Video visitation developed rapidly in Australian correctional centres when in-person visits stopped to reduce the risk of COVID-19 transmission. Using mixed methods, this report presents findings from the first multi-jurisdictional study exploring the experiences and impact of video visits between fathers in prison and their children. Findings show...

Background Across the care economy there are major shortages in the health and care workforce, as well as high rates of attrition and ill-defined career pathways. The aim of this study was to evaluate current evidence regarding methods to improve care worker recruitment, retention, safety, and education, for the professional care workforce. Method...

Vulnerability is not a fixed state; people and families can move in and out of experiencing vulnerability throughout their lives. All families are at risk of experiencing vulnerability at some point, which means that social workers and other professionals must be equipped with the skills to effectively provide them with support. Working with Famili...

Peak bodies (“peaks”) are funded by Australian governments to fulfil a multifaceted role, including presenting a collective voice to government on behalf of their nongovernmental service provider members and the vulnerable client populations they serve. However, the relationship between peaks and governments has been fraught, with governments impos...

Contact visits, or family time, enable children in out-of-home care to sustain relationships with their birth families. In Australia, direct contact including face-to-face visits is typical for children on long-term orders, including guardianship and open adoption. Caseworkers are charged with supporting relationships between children’s birth famil...

The use of digital communication technology by children residing in out-of-home care or adopted from foster care has mainly been approached hesitantly and from a risk paradigm. The Covid-19 pandemic catalysed many digital and social work intersections, including practices used for birth family contact where in-person visits were supplemented or rep...

Social distancing due to COVID‐19 forced changes to contact with birth relatives for children in out‐of‐home care. This required a shift to using technologies, which was previously underutilized and viewed as risky. In an action research study, 33 caseworkers in New South Wales, Australia, reflected upon adapting their practices. Three key themes c...

Objective Birth family contact can be undermined by relationship difficulties between adults from children's two families, especially in relation to role ambiguity for mother figures. Research to understand relationships between birth mothers and female caregivers across all placement types is needed. Background In Australia, children in long‐term...

A proliferation of programs and interventions aim to promote permanency for children and young people in contact with the child welfare system. Many are manualized and evaluated at the program-level rather than at practice-level. Interest is growing in the common elements approach, to determine which individual program components are most useful fo...

Recognising that children are dependent on their legal guardians to realise their rights, Article 5 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child asserts that children’s views about decisions that affect them should be given due weight, in line with their age and ‘evolving capacities’. For children under the care of the state, the making of an ad...

Trauma knowledge and skills are needed to support relational safety for children in out-of-home care and birth family contact is a particular area where trauma-informed approaches are critical. Mixed methods were used to understand the application of trauma-informed approaches to contact in New South Wales, Australia. A total of 118 caseworkers and...

Visual research methods reduce reliance on verbal communication and offer an avenue for non-verbal storytelling. Body mapping is a visual arts-based research method with its origins in art therapy and community development. It has been successfully used to explore embodied experiences of marginalised social groups. Participants engage in sensory an...

This study explores issues on post-adoption services in intercountry adoptions based on the perspectives of adoption professionals from Taiwan and Australia. Findings revealed that both birth and adoptive families identify service needs for material and emotional support and connection after the adoption process is finalized. However, the current l...

Intercountry adoptees face many challenges in developing their identity and achieving a sense of belonging in post-assimilation Australia. This study uses a constructivist approach to analyse narrative interviews with a sample of Taiwanese intercountry adoptees in Australia ranging in age from early to middle adulthood. Social identity theory and p...

For children in care, sibling relationships can be one of their most important life-long relationships. This study describes the nature and complexity of the sibling networks of children adopted from out-of-home care in New South Wales (NSW), Australia. A case file analysis was undertaken of 89 case files for the adoption of 117 children from care,...

Connection and reunion is central to adoption, though complicated by geographical, cultural and linguistic differences in the intercountry adoption space. Drawing from narrative interviews, this study investigated perspectives on connection from the perspectives of adult adopted persons and adoptive parents in Australia, from families of origin in...

The preceding chapters have illustrated that a limited set of tactics can be utilized in a variety of ways, depending on the viewpoint of the advocates. The six strategies described in this book identify unique viewpoints of nonprofit organizations on the processes of policy change and how they seek to influence those processes.

For decades leading to 2013, California’s system for financing primary and secondary education was the twisted outcome of lawsuits, ballot initiatives, and legislative fixes that started in the 1970s with the landmark Serrano v. Priest cases. Those cases rightfully concluded that the quality of public education in California’s districts may not be...

Tiffany Schauer was an environmental attorney for over ten years, including five with the US Environmental Protection Agency, through the mid-1990s. During those early years of her career, she discovered that “the attacks on environmental regulatory standards and enforcement program funding decisions are not occurring in statehouses and legislative...

The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights (LCCR) of the San Francisco Bay Area “…advances, protects and promotes the rights of communities of color, immigrants and refugees - with a specific focus on low income communities and a long-standing commitment to African-Americans - by leveraging the power of the private bar to support direct service, impac...

Kate Kendell had spent most of her career advocating for civil rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people.

To Jessica Gunderson, summer slide isn’t a children’s playground structure. It’s a pernicious problem affecting students from low-income communities, and it was a main target of her work when she was the policy director for Partnership for Children & Youth (PCY). Summer slide refers to the well-established pattern of learning gains during the schoo...

In the morning of his first day at a new job as executive director of a regional theater arts nonprofit, Brad Erickson received a phone message marked urgent. The message wasn’t even addressed to him by name, because he was new to the post. It was from the California Arts Council, an arts advocacy organization, asking Erickson to contact key state...

This chapter introduces the concepts of tactics and strategies used in policy advocacy, and discusses how the strategies and case studies presented in the following chapters of the book were derived. Policy advocacy strategies are comprehensive, long-range approaches to policy change, while tactics are the specific advocacy activities employed with...

The strategies presented in this book (Chapters 3–8) are ordered by the advocates’ levels of engagement with formal players in policymaking. They started in Chapter 3 with the public lobbying strategy, in which advocates lobby elected representatives and other government officials, with little to no public engagement. The final strategy defined in...

Background: Most Australian children in permanent care continue to see birth relatives. In New South Wales, foster and kinship carers are encouraged consider open adoption and guardianship, which reduces caseworker involvement in contact. Research is needed to understand what supports children's families to form positive relationships. Family syste...

Policy advocacy is an increasingly important function of many nonprofit organizations, as they seek broad social changes in their concerning issues. Their advocacy practices, however, have often been guided by their own past experiences, anecdotes from peer networks, and consultant advice. Most of their practices have largely escaped empirical and...

Supports and services for children with disabilities are not distributed equitably. There are disparities in access to and quality of services for children with disabilities from low-income and ethnic minority groups. There are likely many contributors to these disparities, but one factor may be barriers to access that require parents to advocate t...

Recent reforms in New South Wales (NSW), Australia, prioritise adoption over long-term foster care. While previous research has examined motivation to foster, less is known about the interest by the general public in adoption from out-of-home care. A general sample of the NSW public ( N = 1030) completed an online survey about adoption practices an...

In New South Wales (NSW), legislation prioritises open adoption over long-term foster care when restoration is not possible, and suitable kin or guardians cannot be found. The adoption application includes an adoption plan that outlines the nature of a child’s post-adoption contact with his or her birth family. There are efforts to include the view...

This chapter considers how the outcomes of alternative care and treatment in child protection can be assessed and the potential promise of public health approaches to child maltreatment. Despite decades of research in the field of child welfare, it is not possible to make causal claims about the outcomes of alternative care and treatment in child p...

Adoption is arguably the most powerful intervention available for children in foster care who are unable to be restored to their birth families. Adoption promises stability and a family for life, in contrast to foster care or guardianship, which are expected to end when the child reaches adulthood. In comparison to foster care, adoption is associat...

The supported playgroup model has widespread popularity in Australia, though its informality may work against building the evidence base needed to sustain governmental funding. The wide uptake of the supported playgroup service model among community organisations in Australia demonstrates its potential and popularity. This article discusses the Fam...

Semi-structured interviews were used to explore identity development for nine adoptees (aged 9–23 years) who were adopted by their foster carers in NSW, Australia. Adoptions were open, with court-ordered face-to-face contact with birth families. Findings suggest that participants had healthy adoptive identities, with coherent and meaningful narrati...

Recent shifts in disability policy in the United States and Australia offer both opportunities and challenges for people with disabilities and their families to participate in not-for-profit organisations, and to use their knowledge, skills and lived experiences to shape services. This paper draws on two studies to explore the role of not-for-profi...

Policy advocacy is an increasingly important function for many nonprofit organizations, yet their advocacy activities have largely escaped theoretical grounding. The literature on nonprofits has described how they engage in policy advocacy, without linking them to theories of policy change. The policy studies literature, on the other hand, has expl...

Policy capacity focuses on the managerial and organizational abilities to inform policy decisions with sound research and analysis, and facilitate policy implementation with operational efficiency. It stems from a view of the policy process that is rational and positivistic, in which optimal policy choices can be identified, selected, and implement...

Traditionally, the American child welfare system intervenes in cases of evident and severe maltreatment. Families in need of help, but who have not reached a crisis, are excluded from typical services. Some suggest that if these families were served, few would be rereferred to the child welfare system. California's Differential Response (DR) has th...

Developmental social work, which is also known as the social development approach to social work, emphasizes the role of social investment in professional practice. These investments meet the material needs of social work's clients and facilitate their full integration into the social and economic life of the community. Developmental social workers...

The American child welfare system has traditionally taken a residual approach to serving families, intervening only in the worst cases of child maltreatment. A number of scathing indictments have been leveled against the traditional American child welfare system, suggesting that new ideas are needed to better meet the needs of children and families...

This chapter draws the previous material together, recognizing that there are limitations to the developmental approach in social work but also that this approach has much future promise particularly in the context of economic challenges and resource constraints. It argues that social workers can use investment strategies in professional practice t...

Background and Purpose. In states across the country, child welfare systems are undergoing historic reform processes intended to promote safety and permanency through early intervention. In California alone, more than half a million reports of alleged child maltreatment are made to public child welfare agencies each year. But under the traditional...

Conley A. Childcare: welfare or investment? Int J Soc Welfare 2010: 19: 173–181 © 2009 The Author, Journal compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd and the International Journal of Social Welfare. Childcare (also called day care or preschool) has generally served three purposes: to care for children while parents are employed; to provide early c...

Whether and when to intervene and what services to offer families in crisis are critical questions in the field of child welfare. Policy makers and administrators struggle with how to target services appropriately to ensure provision to families at greatest risk while avoiding endangerment through miscalculation. This paper examines the differentia...

This article examines a peer support intervention with birth parents in the child welfare system. Literature on the emotional change process for child welfare-involved parents, peer-support intervention-outcome studies in child welfare, and findings on peer support in related fields is reviewed. The Mendocino County Family Services Center (MCFSC) m...

Romania has been notorious in the last decade of the 20 th century for problems in its child welfare system. Child welfare problems and other social problems were exacerbated by the difficulties encountered in the transition to a market economy, including increased levels of poverty, unemployment, and child abandonment. While there still remain man...