Circle of Love Podcast
Innovations Institute is launching our first podcast as we begin 2024. Join us each week as the story of Victoria Gray and her family unfolds. This intimate portrait of one “grand-led family” illustrates the systemic challenges, struggles, realities, and triumphs of providing care for its youngest members and their journey through the child welfare system.
More than 2.5 million grandparents in the U.S. undertake the primary responsibility for caring for their grandchildren and meeting their basic needs (data from the American Community Survey). Families headed by a custodial grandparent, often called grandfamilies, are among the most common form of kinship families with relatives taking responsibility for raising children born within the family.
The engaging story of Victoria Gray and her family follows their journey that started serving as a foster care and adoption placement for seven grandchildren as well as providing respite and emergency care to over 40 other children – and then evolved to the role of advocate to elevate the voice of grandparent families for equitable resources. Victoria Gray is the Founder and Executive Director of GreyNickel Inc. non-profit with a mission to support kinship families through programs and resources in collaboration with state, federal, and community leaders. She is also an active member of the Arizona Grandparent Ambassadors, a statewide support and legislative advocacy network creating positive change for and with grandparents raising grandchildren and non-parent caregivers in the state.
This podcast serves to highlight the often-unseen experiences of grand-led families and the deficits within the child welfare and other public systems to adequately support them. The Gray family story features the specific needs and priorities of grand-led families and offers innovative solutions for those working in public systems and with families to better support them.
Circle of Love Podcast is sponsored by Innovations Institute and hosted by Kate Sweeney, Co-Director of Innovation’s Parent, Infant, and Early Childhood team and Assistant Extension Professor at the UConn School of Social Work. Content produced by Kate Sweeney and Meredith Gunn of Innovations Institute, Angelique Kane, and Dennard Brown of Made to Move Productions.
We offer our gratitude and sincere appreciation to Victoria Gray and her family for sharing their story. Thank you for listening.