Those in the Field
For everyone who holds this work up, at every level. The support staff who answers the phone on someone's worst day and still finds a kind word. The caseworker who sits in a home most people would run from. The supervisor carrying a team's weight along with her own. The manager doing impossible math with too few resources and too much at stake. The leader who has to hold the whole system and still remember the one child at the center of it. This letter was written for every layer of you, because I have stood in more than one of these roles myself, for nearly thirty years, and I know none of them are small.