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In late February 2020, Madisen Janssen, MSW ’20, began her work for the city of St. Louis, just a few months shy of her graduation from the Brown School. Little did she know the transformative experience that awaited her.
Janssen works in the office of Mayor Lyda Krewson, as the mayor’s liaison to the Board of Aldermen. She had worked in the job before as a fill-in, part of her Gephardt Public Service Fellowship, and a good fit for her concentration at the Brown School: domestic social and economic development, with a policy specialization. But her experience and classroom work could not have prepared her for the pandemic explosion that would rock St. Louis and nation only two weeks after she was sworn in.

“Everything happened very quickly,” she said. The first case of COVID-19 in St. Louis was reported March 16, and Mayor Krewson issued executive orders banning gatherings, at first of more than 1,000 people, then 50, then 10 to halt the spread of the virus.
Now her role is permanent one, and her duties include tracking virus data, aldermanic committee hearings, following the legislative process, and communicating updates to the mayor and her chief of staff. Providing information to aldermen on best practices and virus numbers as new developments occurred during the first stages of the crisis was a challenge.
“The aldermen had a lot of questions from businesses and other constituents,” she said. “It was amazing how quickly the situation could change,” Janssen said. “Communication has really been key.”

Janssen also assisted with the city’s spring budgeting process. The pandemic and its economic consequences have had a big impact on that budget.
“It’s a very good learning experience, and there’s always something new.”

Janssen says the Brown School prepared her for many of the skills she would need in the dynamic world of city politics, from policy classes to state-level lobbying experience in the field.
Janssen was a special education teacher before resuming her education, and while she had always been interested in politics and policy, never imagined it as a career path. That has changed.
“Ours is a unique city-government structure, and I like working in the legislative world,” she explained. “One of biggest surprises for me has been how many services city government provides every day,” she said. “The scope of city government and how it impacts our daily lives is much bigger than I realized before I began working in the Mayor’s office.”

As the nation struggles with police violence, a new report from HomeGrown StL in the Race and Opportunity Lab at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis recommends reforms to build an equitable, transparent and accountable public safety approach that will include lawsuit liability, a police misconduct database and federal funding mandates.

“Accountable Policing: Policies to Advance the Personal Safety of Black Boys and Young Men” proposes five changes to federal policy:

The report is authored by Robert O. Motley Jr., the Race and Opportunity Lab manager and a doctoral student at the Brown School; Alyssa Finner, the lab’s community engagement manager; Marah Walker, a graduate research assistant at the lab; and Sean Joe, the Benjamin Youngdahl Professor of Social Development at the Brown School.

The report offers proposals for federal policy as well as new guidelines for statewide and local policy changes.

Specifically for Missouri, the report recommends banning the use of chokeholds and strangleholds; establishing a public database on police misconduct; mandating external, independent investigation and prosecution in cases involving excessive use of force by police; and requiring that police departments bear the costs of misconduct with no additional funding for the costs of legal judgments against officers.

The report identifies 10 reforms for the St. Louis region, including a policy requiring officers to intervene if they witness excessive use of force, a mandate to use body cameras, a public “Equity in Policing” analysis, a new prosecutorial standard for police misconduct and a new standard of liability for civil rights violations.

“It is time for policymakers to join together in actualizing legislation focused on police accountability and an end to police violence — the avoidable killing of Black Americans, particularly Black boys and young men, is not a partisan issue,” Motley said.

“HomeGrown StL calls upon all local, state and federal legislators to stand up for the country’s rule of law, and Black boys and young men, by implementing policies that bring accountability, transparency and ‘equitable justice’ to the justice system,” he said.

As a member of President Barack Obama’s My Brother’s Keeper Alliance, HomeGrown StL works on behalf of Black boys and young men ages 12 to 29 in St. Louis. The aim of its Healing Policy Initiative is to provide data and resources to inform local policy decisions, advocacy efforts and the development of collective impact strategies to improve outcomes for Black boys and young men.

“Progress is no longer sufficient — we need real change, and we need it now,” Joe said in the report.

​The Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis has been awarded 3-year, $457,000 Systems for Action grant, a national program of the Robert Woods Johnson Foundation (RWJF) for a parent empowerment initiative.

Investigating PACT-STL: Understanding System Alignment and Health Equity Outcomes of a Multi-sector Agency Alignment and Parent Empowerment provides support for a rigorous evaluation of the Parents and Children Together-St. Louis (PACT-STL) project program, which is funded through the Administration of Children and Families (ACYF-CA-1559).

PACT-STL, an initiative led by the Vision for Children at Risk, convenes medical, public health and social services organizations at the state and regional levels with a focus on reducing health and service disparities for children in families with lower risk referrals to Child Protective Services (CPS).  Over 6 million children are reported to CPS annually, but CPS lacks resources to serve lower risk referrals, which are the majority of reports. These children have much higher rates of costly negative health and behavioral outcomes than non-CPS involved children. PACT-STL aligns services and funding, and implements parent empowerment and public health strategies to prevent maltreatment and promote healthy development.

While collaboration among community stakeholders shows promise in addressing these service gaps, little is known about the effectiveness of such approaches. This project advances the Systems for Action initiative of the RWJF by investigating a recently funded multi-sector “outside-in” alignment and parent empowerment initiative.

Brown School Associate Professor Patricia Kohl is lead evaluator of PACT-STL and co-PI with Melissa Jonson-Reid, Ralph and Muriel Pumphrey Professor of Social Work and principal investigator. They are joined by investigators at Washington University School of Medicine including Drs. Adrienne Aztemis and John Constantino. At the Brown School, additional investigators include Derek Brown, associate professor; Barry Rosenberg, professor of practice; and Ellis Ballard, associate director of the Social System Design Lab. Consultants include Sanaria Sulaiman, CEO of Vision for Children at Risk, and Dr. Nancy Weaver of Saint Louis University. 

“This project in collaboration with the PACT-STL implementation team will advance our understanding of how community-based collaboratives realign services to meet the needs of families—as well as the impact of such realignment on child health and risk of maltreatment.,” said Kohl.

The study’s aims, using various data and analyses, include:

“Finding effective, feasible means of improving health equity outcomes for CPS-involved children has tremendous relevance to child welfare and health care policy,” said Jonson-Reid. “We want to produce impactful, evidence-based briefs and reports for organizations, policymakers, community stakeholder and funders so we can ultimately help more children thrive.”

Systems for Action is a national program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation that aims to discover and apply new evidence about ways of aligning the delivery and financing systems that support a “Culture of Health.”

​In May, the National Endowment for Financial Education honored CSD Research Associate Yingying Zeng with an award for “Workplace Financial Counseling: Credit Outcomes Among Lower-Paid, Entry-Level Workers,” a paper she wrote with Mathieu Despard and Sophia Fox-Dichter.

Zeng has been working on financial well-being issues since she came to the United States in 2015. As part of a practicum for her master of social policy degree in the Brown School, she worked with Assets for Life, a program by the International Institute of St. Louis that provides Individual Development Accounts with savings matches to refugees. Founding Director of the Center for Social Development (CSD) Michael Sherraden pioneered the accounts in 1991.

“We are very proud of Yingying Zeng, who has won a national award while still a doctoral student.” said Sherraden. “I want to thank the Social Policy Institute for giving her this research opportunity, and all of the support of academic colleagues.” Sherraden also is the George Warren Brown Distinguished University Professor at Washington University.

Zeng explained her commitment to this work: “People must be financially capable and able to accumulate assets to achieve long-term financial security. I hope that everyone can have sufficient knowledge and accessible opportunity to make informed financial decisions and achieve financial goals.”

The award-winning paper, which has been submitted for publication, reports findings from a study conducted by the Workforce Financial Stability Initiative in Washington University’s Social Policy Institute. Zeng and colleagues found that engagement in services varied little by demographic characteristics, except that older and non-English speaking workers had less digital engagement. Credit outcomes were modest but positive. Employees who received three or more counseling sessions experienced better credit outcomes compared to employees who received just one or two sessions, while employees with the lowest baseline credit scores experienced the largest increases in credit scores.

Given annually for a rigorous original study that advances knowledge on financial education, behavior or capability, the national award is presented during the conference of the American Council of Consumer Interests. The council held a virtual conference in late May.

In addition to her affiliation with CSD, Zeng, the study’s lead author, is a doctoral student in social work at Washington University’s Brown School and a doctoral research assistant with the Social Policy Institute. Co-author Despard is a faculty associate with the Social Policy Institute, as well as an associate professor with the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Fox-Dichter is a data analyst with the Social Policy Institute.

“Most of the 1.6 million frontline substance use disorder (SUD) therapists in this country do not provide clinical services guided by data gathered from technology tools. Instead, they rely on the same 1930’s skills—personal judgment and intuition,” said David Patterson Silver Wolf, director of the Community Academic Partnership on Addiction (CAPA) and chief research officer at the CAPA Clinic.

“Rather than incorporating tools that assist treatment decisions based on essential real-time quantitative data, patients must hope that their treatment team possess supernatural instincts or extraordinary practice wisdom tools. Unfortunately, most clinicians are just well-intentioned regular people who, without access to real-time data, make a lot of wrong guesses, bark up a lot of wrong trees, and obtain a too-large number of bad case outcomes.

“The scientific community’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic provides a powerful example of the importance of robust, real-time data.

“I’m hopeful the SUD field will rouse from its 90-year slumber and begin to appreciate the many benefits of having such data available when treating the cunning disease that is still currently claiming far more victims than the novel COVID-19 coronavirus.”

Read the full piece in Research on Social Work Practice.

In the wake of the deaths of George Floyd, Rayshard Brooks and many more, a new study from the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis finds that religion may offer a protective role for black adolescent boys who experience police abuse.

“Black adolescent experiences with police violence is nothing new,” said Ashley N. Jackson, a doctoral student and first author of the paper “‘Can I Live’: Black American Adolescent Boys’ Reports of Police Abuse and the Role of Religiosity on Mental Health,” published June 17 in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health.

“This is evident by the time frame when this data were collected (2001 to 2004) when juxtaposed with the experiences of black youth today,” Jackson said. “Black communities continue to experience police violence and its adverse effects at alarming rates. We continue to see the urgency of the issue as illustrated in the uprisings and protests seeking racial justice not only within the U.S. but also across the globe after the death of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and many others.”

Another key takeaway, she said, is the implication for self-esteem.

“We find that black male youth who have been abused by the police believe that society holds a negative perception of them,” Jackson said. “While much of the empirical work on police violence focuses on its effects, our study contributes by highlighting the role of religiosity in improving mental health outcomes for black male youth who have experienced police abuse.

“For black males, anticipating and preparing for involuntary police contact, unfortunately, is an inevitable part of life,” she added. “The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of reports of police abuse on mental health and perceived racial perceptions and the protective role of religiosity among a nationally representative sample of black American adolescent boys.”

Compared with other adolescents, African American adolescents are the most religious group in the United States, as indicated by prayer frequency and importance of religion, said co-author Sheretta T. Butler-Barnes, associate professor at the Brown School, who has done previous work on African American adolescents and religion.

One of her previous studies found that African American adolescents who reported a higher communication with God (e.g., I am receptive or open to God) were more likely to report a healthier psychological well-being.

“Ultimately, our findings in this study not only highlight the nuanced effects police abuse has on public regard, but also lay the groundwork for potential intervention points, such as the use of religiosity and approaches to enhancing racial identity, as ways to improve overall mental health for minority youth exposed to police abuse,” Jackson said.

Data for the analysis were from the National Survey of American Life – Adolescent Supplement, a nationally representative household survey estimating prevalence, frequency and comorbidity of mental health disorders among 1,170 African American and Caribbean adolescents ages 13-17 connected to adult households from the National Survey of American Life adult sample.

Approximately 71% of the sample was African American and 29% were Caribbean black adolescent boys.

“Our findings did reveal that, overall, subjective religiosity was associated with lower levels of depressive symptomatology,” Jackson said. “This particular finding highlights how the specific construct of religion may reduce negative mental health outcomes and aligns with prior work that finds associations between religiosity and healthy psychological well-being.”