Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
- Martin Luther King, Jr.
Jen Agosti
Founder
Jen Agosti is the founder and president of JRA Consulting, Ltd., providing consultation and facilitation focused on the transformation of organizational cultures in child and family service organizations. She served as the Project Director at Casey Family Programs for the first two Breakthrough Series Collaboratives (BSC) conducted in child welfare and worked directly with the Institute for Healthcare Improvement to adapt the methodology from the health care arena to child welfare (2001-2003). She then worked closely with the National Child Traumatic Stress Network in 2005 to further adapt the model for the field of child trauma. Since she helped initially adapt the BSC methodology for application in child welfare in 2001, she has been involved in over 40 Breakthrough Series and Learning Collaboratives.
Jen serves as a consultant to and partner in Breakthrough Series Collaboratives, Learning Collaboratives, and organizationally-focused racial justice efforts being conducted by public and tribal child welfare agencies, child trauma agencies, health care organizations, and non-profits across the country.
In doing all work, Jen focuses on the need for anti-racist approaches, practices, and behaviors. She strongly believes that all systems serving children and families must explicitly and intentionally dismantle racism, White Supremacy Culture, and racial and social injustice as foundational to their work.
Prior to private consulting, Jen was the Senior Manager of Systems Improvement Measurement at Casey Family Programs. It was in this role that she learned the BSC methodology directly from the developers of the model, the Institute for Healthcare Improvement. Jen previously served as the Director of the Office of Management, Planning and Analysis for the Massachusetts Department of Social Services (now Massachusetts Department of Children and Families), where she facilitated the planning and implementation of new initiatives within the Department as well as the annual strategic planning effort. While there, Jen managed a staff of analysts who conducted all data analyses, research projects, program evaluations, and agency-wide management reports.
Jen received her Master’s Degree in Public Policy from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University with a focus on Health, Education, and Labor Policy. She received her Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science from Yale University.
Guiding Values and Beliefs
Jen has been infusing racial justice into all work she does in child and family-serving systems since 2004, beginning with a BSC sponsored by Casey Family Programs focused on increasing the use of kinship care in child welfare. Each of the roughly 40 Learning and Breakthrough Series Collaboratives in which Jen has been involved since that time has explicitly addressed racial justice as a core element of the system transformation process in child and family-serving systems, including safety and risk assessments in child welfare; trauma-informed services for youth in the youth legal (juvenile justice) system; trauma-informed practices in schools; trauma-informed pediatric integrated health care; creating an anti-racist, trauma-informed city (Baltimore); and promoting an anti-racist, trauma-informed organization (behavioral health center in CT).
In addition to serving as a consultant on system transformation-focused collaborative initiatives, Jen has served as a lead consultant for the racial justice work of the CT Department of Children and Families (CTDCF) since 2012. She also provides intensive long-term consultation to and partnership with other agencies, both public and private, on their efforts to achieve racial justice in all aspects of their work.
Jen is staunchly committed to bringing racial justice and the need for anti-racist approaches, practices, and behaviors to all work with individuals and organizations. She strongly believes that no system can improve unless it explicitly and intentionally dismantles racism, White Supremacy Culture, and racial and social injustice. True system transformation requires understanding and addressing the historical racism that built our systems, the structural and institutional racism that currently exists within our systems, and the conscious and unconscious biases that impact our daily decision-making and relationships.
I did then what I knew how to do. Now that I know better, I do better.
