Hello from New York!

Hey friends!  I've made a big move to the University at Buffalo SUNY, where I have joined the faculty as a tenure-track Assistant Professor. I'm really excited to be here at this vibrant School of Social Work in this great community.

University of North Dakota (my colleagues, students, community partners) will always have a special place in my heart. And because I started so much work in North Dakota, I will hang on to some of it. I continue to lead the North Dakota Indian Child Welfare Act Partnership Grant as Principal Investigator, and will visit in person several times a year.

Here are other things I've got in store in Buffalo, NY:

• completing a book on use of technology in social work education with great colleagues Laurel Hitchcock and Nancy Smyth
• providing some peer support to my colleagues here around the role of tech in online teaching
• working on manuscripts related to all the research and data I've been doing for the last few years but have been too swamped to write up
• continuing ICWA, child welfare, and tech research
• and some teaching too!

Upcoming conferences (hope to see you somewhere!) on my radar are:

• APM in Dallas, TX in October
• SSWR in Washington DC in Jan
• NICWA in Alaska (!) in April
• SWDE in San Antonio, TX in April
• husITa in Dublin (!!) in July

And on the self-care front, I am really jazzed to hang out at some craft fairs, farmers markets, the WNY Book Arts Center, and at the dog park. Which I am sure I will have time to do after I unpack all the boxes covering my house. Moving is a lot of work!

Hope you're all off to a happy and productive Fall!

National Indian Child Welfare Association Conference: ICWA Compliance

I am near lovely San Diego in California, my home state, learning at the NICWA annual conference. If you know me, you know that I care deeply about child welfare issues, and especially that children stay connected to their families. The Indian Child Welfare Act is a federal law that requires child welfare systems to carry out special efforts to keep children connected to their families and tribes, and part of my work is about helping systems make improvements in this area.

At this conference we are sharing our work about ICWA compliance in North Dakota.  We've been working on assessing compliance for federal years now: first, in assessing what our courts are doing, and now focusing on interventions and intersystem collaboration to improve compliance.  This post is to share some resources that might help others think about how they assess their compliance.  Here are resources we are sharing or mentioning during our presentation (click on any link to download):

• PowerPoint Presentation
• Frey's Collaboration Scale
• ND Partnership Logic Model
• Year One of our grant timeline
• An article about Design Teams and how they work

If you have questions about any of our resources, please feel free to contact me: Melanie.Sage@und.edu or 701-777-1224.  Thanks!