Enhanced-youth transition planning: An innovative practice change with transition-age youth involved with child welfare in a rural setting

This article presents Enhanced-Youth Transition Planning (E-YTP), an innovative child welfare workforce practice change for transition-age youth (TAY) involved with child welfare services from five rural jurisdictions in the State of Maryland. We describe the practice change from services as usual for TAY, including training and coaching needs for the child welfare workforce. This study presents quantitative and qualitative data assessing the impact of the E-YTP practice change on the workforce. A total of 36 supervisors and foster care workers participated in the study. The Professional Quality of Life and Maslach Burnout Inventory-Human Services Survey were given to the workforce at four time over a four year period. Findings suggest an increase in burnout and secondary traumatic stress (for the PQL) and an increase in emotional exhaustion and personal accomplishment (for the MBI-HS). Focus group and interview findings suggest that the workforce endorses E-YTP. The workforce felt that the practice change made their work with TAY feel more meaningful, was a necessary practice change for TAY, and that E-YTP worked well in preparing youth for a successful exit from child welfare. We discuss implications for workforce practice changes with TAY in a rural setting, adaptations for the COVID-19 pandemic, and the need for ongoing supervision and coaching for the workforce. © 2023

Internal crisis communication and the social construction of emotion: university leaders' sensegiving discourse during the COVID-19 pandemic

Purpose: The paper explores university leaders' employee-focused sensegiving discourse during the COVID-19 health crisis. The aim is to reveal how leadership sensegiving narratives construct emotion in the rhetor-audience relationship. Design/methodology/approach: A social constructionist, sensemaking approach centres on the meaning-making discourse of university leaders. Using rhetorical discourse analysis (RDA), the study analysed 67 emails sent to staff during a three-month period at the start of the global pandemic. RDA helps to reveal how university leaders help employees make sense of changing realities. Findings: Three core narratives: organisational competence and resilience;empathy, reassurance and recognition;and community and location reveal a multi-layered understanding of leadership sensegiving discourse in which emotion intersects with material and temporal sensemaking dimensions. In supporting a process of organisational identification and belonging, these core narratives help to mitigate audience dissonance driven by the antenarrative of uncertainty. Research limitations/implications: An interpretivist approach was used to analyse qualitative data from two UK universities. While focused on internal communication, the employee perspective was not examined. Nevertheless, this paper extends the human dimension of internal crisis communication, building on constructionist approaches that are concerned with emotion and sensegiving. Originality/value: This paper expands the domain of internal crisis communication. It integrates the social construction of emotion and sensemaking with the underexplored material and temporal dimensions in internal crisis communication and applies RDA. © 2021, Emerald Publishing Limited.