Enough Hope to Spare:

Drawing on over sixteen years of experience consulting to child-/family-serving systems across the country and in-depth interviews with birth parent leaders in Washington state, Kansas, and Contra Costa county in California, Nicole Bossard presents new research on the transformative journey of birth parents who have traversed the broken terrain of hopelessness, shame, and stigma to emerge as powerful leaders in the child welfare systems that once marginalized their voice and agency. Bossard uses the lived experiences of birth parent leaders in the study to illuminate strategies used to move beyond personal despair to craft a better life for themselves and a better system for other parents struggling through. The experiences of the birth parent leaders in their own words help the reader understand the relational dynamics that hinder and help birth parents emerge as partners and leaders in their own lives and the child welfare organization as well. Research and scholarship on the emergent roles of birth parents as leaders in child welfare remains scant. Enough Hope to Spare contributes significantly to a growing body of literature that centralizes the voice and experiences of birth parents, and also makes recommendations to social work students and child welfare practitioners and administrators interested in creating connections that nurture collaborative partnership and shared leadership.