Chapin Hall

Chapin Hall Project Associate Bianca Burnside cradles her sleepy 5-month-old baby boy in her arms while simultaneously making sure her older kids are ready for sports and cheering practices. And, even though he’s teething, her baby boy is completely peaceful in her arms. Her genius “mom move” before meetings is to feed her son so he’s content and she can focus on work. Later, she will tend to her parents’ needs at their nearby home; both have significant health challenges.

To say she’s juggling a lot is an understatement but, as she said when introducing herself to her Chapin Hall colleagues, her heart is most full when caring for others. Burnside recently joined Chapin Hall as a lived expert, using her knowledge of and experience around the child welfare system to help improve services for families at risk of involvement with systems and those already involved.

During the Covid lockdown, Burnside was overseeing her three kids’ online schooling while expecting her fourth child and caring for her parents. When her son logged onto his Zoom class one morning with no shirt on, Burnside grabbed his shoulder and told him to get fully dressed immediately. Her son’s teacher interpreted the action as “aggressive,” and reported her to child protective services. When Burnside got the call from CPS, memories from her own childhood flooded back. Her children were about to experience something similar to her own childhood experience. National estimates show that 53% of Black children experience and child welfare maltreatment investigation by age 18, compared to 28% of White children. The disproportionality doesn’t end there. In 2023, Black children represented 22% of those entering care but only 14% of the total child population in the U.S.

“I was going through some things with my older kids’ dad at the time,” Burnside said. “I had to fight really hard to keep my kids. When I was in the situation I felt like they were going to take my kids. It was so disheartening. I felt like nobody was working for me. They never really offered real support and just assumed I was guilty of abuse. Also, it was during Covid. I was trying to be a teacher for all three kids at the same time, in the same room, trying to do three different school levels. I had never been in that situation before.” Burnside had also just lost her job as a hiring manager at a fast-food restaurant because she had no choice but to take her kids to work several times when she didn’t have child care.

Family separation—even the threat of it—is a unique and haunting kind of trauma. In a recent brief, David Sanders, Executive Vice President, Systems Improvement, Casey Family Programs, wrote, “We haven’t found a better substitute for families than families. Every time we try to come up with something else, it doesn’t work. Family is more important to children’s well-being and sense of belonging than anything else.” The stress of possibly losing her children took Burnside back to her early days in Champaign, Illinois, where she’s lived since she was 10. Her parents took her and her sister there suddenly when problems arose in their native Chicago.

“When I was younger, my dad dealt with some substance abuse issues. My parents moved us to Champaign instead of dealing with what was going on in Chicago. When we first came to Champaign, we were met by the police.” It was a difficult time for the family, she said, but her parents were dedicated to keeping their family together and went through all the steps required of them to keep Burnside and her sister at home. “Addiction is a fight—that’s a lifelong fight you have to go through,” she said. “It doesn’t leave you. That’s why the work here at Chapin Hall is so important to me.”

Burnside was hired specifically because she has lived experience navigating the child welfare system, so her knowledge can inform Chapin Hall’s work. Her supervisor Regina Crider’s own lived experience as a mom seeking behavioral health resources for her daughter is helping to guide and shape the Illinois Children’s Behavioral Health Transformation Initiative. Crider underscored how vital it is to have those with lived experience cosharing power and codesigning programs and policies.

“When a lived expert comes to the table, we bring our experience from the inside and we are sharing it strategically,” said Crider. “It’s a misstep when that doesn’t happen, because what you end up having are a lot of people at the table who are mostly talking from theory versus reality—and reality and theory can be two different experiences.”

Systems vary from state to state, so having a lived expert who knows the Illinois Child Welfare System is critical.

“What really stood out was Bianca’s story. For this role, it was a priority that the candidate have specific involvement and expertise with the Illinois system,” Crider said. “Her level of involvement and navigation of the system was essential for the Illinois-specific projects she’s working on.”

Families—particularly families of color—being surveilled and policed by child welfare agencies has long been part of a wider discussion in the field. The 2018 Family First Prevention Services Act—a bipartisan effort—has, in effect, enabled states to use federal money on evidence-based prevention initiatives meant to support and strengthen families so engagement with the child welfare system is less likely. A vital part of ensuring systems are truly serving families is getting real input from those who have been affected by systems and incorporating their knowledge and experiences into building more effective policies and initiatives.

“I love that I can be a part of being able to hear how people view their situations and the programs that they’re in,” Burnside said. “I’m really proud to know that I could be impacting the world, but even if it’s just one kid or one family, that’s important to me because I know it’s tough when you have somebody coming into your home telling you you aren’t doing things right and they don’t even know you; it’s really tough to navigate that.”

As Crider noted, many systems overlap, with some individuals and families having experience with child welfare, juvenile justice, behavioral health, and other entities. However, Burnside’s specific knowledge of the Illinois Child Welfare System gave Crider critical insight.

“I’ve learned a lot from Bianca. She brings a wealth of knowledge and experience,” Crider said. “For example, when she was reading the interview guides for the projects she’s working on, her perspective was very different from mine. She brought a level of intuition regarding how a person who had been in that system might respond to specific questions. Just watching her go through that process was powerful.”

While working for an after-school program as an achievement coach, Burnside’s boss alerted her to the opportunity at Chapin Hall, an organization she wasn’t familiar with. She’s experienced a lot of firsts throughout the hiring process and in her early days as a project associate. She wasn’t used to working from home, for example, as all her previous jobs were very hands-on. And she wasn’t used to such a long hiring process with multiple interviews, either; it made her nervous that she wasn’t saying the right things or she wasn’t what the interviewers were looking for.

“I was praying about this situation. I really wanted this job,” she said. “I told my friends, ‘Well, they keep interviewing me, so maybe it is going well.'”

It was, indeed, going well and now, having been on board for about 6 months, Burnside’s contributions have already made an impact. She’s working on several projects in which she will be interviewing participants about their specific needs, from housing to food assistance to therapy. Bianca’s role was designed as an “on-the-job-training” opportunity. Since starting, she has been learning about and building skills in both qualitative and quantitative data, while being trained by seasoned staff to conduct family interviews. Observing interviews and reviewing transcripts for accuracy helps her strengthen her attention to detail and develop her own interviewing style.

“I had imposter syndrome when I first started at Chapin Hall due to some of the things I didn’t understand, but I brought these things up and the project leaders were glad I did,” Burnside said. “I feel like I’m allowed to be myself. I can be flawed. I can show up as myself even if I’ve had a long night because my son has been up because he’s teething. I feel like it’s family already and I’ve only been here for a short time.”

And although it felt strange to her at first, remote work has been life-changing for Burnside, who cherishes the ability to be deeply involved with her children and parents and still be able to sustain her family financially. Both having lived experience, Crider and Burnside often discuss the transformative career trajectory Chapin Hall offers by embracing the value of people who have experienced systems firsthand.

“Chapin [Hall] is creating opportunities for people who maybe never would see this type of opportunity,” Burnside said. “It’s very important to me to do well in this role because I don’t think I would see an opportunity like this again, honestly, based on my background and coming from the things I’ve come from. I never actually imagined ever being in this kind of role or having this kind of opportunity, so it’s very important to me that I do well.”

But opportunity is something Burnside and her family have created for themselves and a trait she’s passed down to her kids. In their native Chicago, her grandparents bought an apartment building where all the tenants were family members who supported one another. Burnside’s mom wondered what she could do with her screened-in porch there and ultimately thought: Why not turn this into a neighborhood candy store where kids could get out of the hot summer sun and get a treat? Burnside carried the “Candy Lady” tradition to Champaign and now her 12-year-old daughter runs the candy store with the skills of someone much older.

“This is her way of earning money over the summer because she’s on the cheer team and needs extra money for travel and she’s a makeup girl, so she needs to earn for that,” Burnside said. “I wish you could see her working. She is a store manager already. The kids always come in groups, and she’ll be like, ‘One at a time, one at a time. Guys, step back.’ Because kids are grabbing and you have to be on your toes and pay attention to who’s getting what and how much everything costs.”

The financial and budgeting lessons come with family fun, too. Burnside’s kids often participate in research studies and earn stipends each time. Together, they plan trips to explore new places and new foods. The kids are “adventurous eaters,” Burnside said, a quality they share with their grandparents. On their last family adventure, they went to Chicago and tried mochi, specialty hot dogs, and macarons as the kids shared their foodie escapades on TikTok. Burnside considers herself the banker and the kids, with her help, need to work out how they want to spend their money.

Those same core leadership competencies of learning, growing, and getting out of one’s comfort zone she’s developing in her kids have been evident to Crider in Burnside’s everyday work at Chapin Hall.

“She has such a growth mindset; she wants to learn more and more and more and she wants to be challenged,” Crider said. “Her particular job was advertised as including ‘on-the-job training,’ so she’s learning as she goes. We were working on introducing qualitative and quantitative research to her and she asked me for as many resources as possible. She’s like a sponge; she just absorbs information and she wants to learn more. She’s extremely curious and I think that’s critical to this work.”

Ultimately, the many roles Burnside plays for family and friends are about caregiving, about service to others. Her Chapin Hall role is no different.

“If the data that I’m collecting can be used towards the bigger picture to keep children at home, then I’m really proud of that. I go to sleep every night really proud to know that.”