Canadian child welfare policies and practices have been central to maintaining a settler colonial nation by controlling and managing the childhoods and future lives of children. While ostensibly grounded in the “best interests of the child,” child welfare policies and practices far too often make the lives of young people more precarious because they are stratified along race and class lines rather than caring for their wellbeing. There have been dire consequences for Indigenous communities but also for Black, newcomer, non-citizen and poor people, who are also disproportionately the primary focus of child welfare. The contributors to this book reveal these unjust conditions so that workers can contribute to the ongoing transformation of child welfare to facilitate child wellbeing.

The third edition of Walking This Path Together continues the transformative vision of the first two editions and charts a new way forward. There are several new chapters and authors, who focus on Métis kinship protocols, family group conferencing, decolonizing child welfare, and the criminalization of newcomers, refugee children and Indigenous youth in care. They demonstrate how to bring forward transformative practices to moving child welfare into a truly new decolonial era. This transformative vision is the path that we are walking.