Families in the foster care system are assigned case workers. These are social workers whose job it is to work closely with everyone involved. In Milwaukee, Lilia Figueroa is a mentor at Saint A, a group that oversees half of all of Milwaukee’s foster care cases. Lilia started as a bilingual case worker. She tells us about two of her hardest cases, and about what doing social work means to her.

Daisy Rosario’s reporting on toxic stress was undertaken as a National Health Journalism Fellow at the Center for Health Journalism at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School of Journalism.

Featured image: (Ermell/Wikimedia Commons)