A Dedication to Child and Family Well-Being (feat. Jesse Booher, DePelchin Children’s Center)
DePelchin Children’s Center has existed for over 130 years and has continued to evolve to meet the needs of the community. Their mission is to strengthen the lives of children by enhancing their mental health and physical well-being in Houston and central Texas.
Jesse Booher is the Senior Vice President and Chief Operations Officer of DePelchin Children’s Center, which provides foster care and adoption services in Texas communities. As COO, Jesse oversees a diverse array of programs ranging from child abuse prevention to foster care to residential services to adoption.
In this episode, Jesse shares how he started out working in child welfare, the differing perspectives that typically come with each role, and the value of community-based care. Listen in!
You can also find this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and more.
Key Takeaways
- It’s important to understand the why. It’s not enough to get children out of the River. We also need to understand the upstream reasons of how they end up in the River in the first place, and the circumstances and situations that cause families to be vulnerable. Once we have identified those reasons, we can begin to address them.
- Each community has its own unique challenges. The challenges that Houston faces will not be the same as what we face in Austin. Even when you look at the communities within Houston, there are different challenges and thus different needs for each community. We cannot assume a one-size-fits-all solution.
- We need both prevention and intervention. We need both of these in order to successfully transform the foster care system, not just one or the other. To do this, we need to embrace community-based efforts where we can collaborate to identify and implement effective solutions.
Resources
Meet the Guest
Jesse Booher is the Senior Vice President and Chief Operations Officer of DePelchin Children’s Center, which provides foster care and adoption services in Texas communities. As COO, Jesse oversees a diverse array of programs ranging from child abuse prevention to foster care to residential services to adoption. He serves and facilitates strategic planning efforts, coordinates administrative projects, and helps to support DePelchin’s community-building efforts. He has spent over 15 years in child welfare and in a wide range of roles.
