In this compelling episode of The Pinnacle Pod, we sit down with 2025 Pinnacle Prize winner Merideth Rose, CEO of Cornerstones of Care, to explore what it truly means to support children and families in our community. Drawing from her own lived experience in foster care and early motherhood, Merideth challenges how poverty is often mislabeled as neglect and shares powerful data, personal stories, and prevention‑focused solutions reshaping child welfare in Kansas City. This conversation is both a call to action and a message of hope, reminding us that when communities lead with curiosity, compassion, and care, families can thrive. 

Transcript

Maurice Watson:

Good day to our audience and welcome back to The Pinnacle Pod, the voice of The Pinnacle Prize, an annual prize recognizing people making a significant impact on Kansas City through bold, selfless actions. I’m Maurice Watson, your host. As we spotlight change makers in our community, I’m excited to welcome today’s guest whose story truly embodies the spirit of rising above odds.

Her leadership isn’t just professional. She has herself lived experiences with all of the challenges that she now helps others work through. Foster care, early motherhood, and homelessness. She herself has experienced each of these. Merideth Rose, 2025 Pinnacle Prize winner, has spent two decades advocating for children and families who deserve safety, stability, and belonging. And more than just advocating, she has worked to address each of those challenges and improve the lives of many. After managing public affairs for FEMA on a national scale, Merideth has been back in Kansas City since 2015, working with the City of Independence, Community Services League, and now serves as CEO of Cornerstones of Care, an organization that supports children and families in crisis, helping them through the foster care process, and providing trauma-informed care and support services. As Kansas and Missouri continue to see high rates of children entering foster care, Merideth and her colleagues are pushing for a future where far fewer children need to enter the system at all.

Merideth, welcome to The Pinnacle Pod.

Merideth Rose:

Thank you so much. I’m so thrilled to be here today. I’m honored.

Maurice Watson:

We’re thrilled and honored to have you. Let’s get started. You believe that every person deserves the chance to heal, belong, and thrive. How has your own lived experience shaped the way you approach leadership and systemic change today?

Merideth Rose:

So, I love that question, Maurice, and I am a firm believer that every human is worthy of restoration. You know, if I think about what I have been able to leverage through my lived experience, my professional opportunities that today makes meaningful, impactful, and sustainable change, there’s one concept that I always like to center, and it really starts with a mindset shift. You cannot talk about wholesale change, whether it’s in communities and neighborhoods, individuals and families, unless you’re willing to challenge what the data says, and particularly when the data points to disparaging outcomes. So as an example, you might be familiar with the adverse childhood experiences or ACEs study, and what it shows is that children who are repeatedly exposed to complex significant trauma, they have a high probability of experiencing disparaging outcomes, not only in their youth and adolescence, but all throughout their adult life impacting everything from academic performance, graduation rates, socioeconomic status, housing stability, all the things, and of course your physical, mental, social, emotional health.

If I were to believe the data that says that those probabilities mean there’s no likelihood of success or prosperity or leadership, it would say that I would choose to believe that there’s no way a child like me, a foster care alum, a byproduct of adoption could be the leader of an organization. So what I like to say about how I’ve been able to translate that lived experience into my leadership is that by changing the narrative, I was surrounded by a community of village keepers, coaches, mentors, leaders who saw something in me that they could only translate as a spark, something that made them curious. And in that they leaned into curiosity, into leadership, and to love. And they leveraged everything from their position, their platform, even their privilege, to give me opportunities to walk into doors and spaces that otherwise, and that data says, I should have never been in.

So I think the, the single way that I can sum up that answer is that I’m a firm believer that curiosity says we ask a different question, not what’s wrong with that child or that population or that community, but what has happened to them, what is in their story? Where’s an opportunity for intersection for healing, for development and capacity building? And my gift has been to walk courageously aside communities, bodies, policymakers, and change that narrative, reframe that thinking, and ask a different question. And once you start to shift that mindset and belief, there’s so many possibilities in terms of how you can transform and make sustainable impact in the lives of children and families, communities, and again, in policy and practice.

Maurice Watson:

So, you are not saying that the research and the data is inaccurate or wrong, you are just questioning how that can be redirected or outcomes can be redirected and changed through intervention?

Merideth Rose:

Absolutely. There is no sentence that is firm and planted and glued and concrete, if you will, especially when you’re talking about human lives. We are a composite of experiences and chances and graces, and there is too many, I think, pieces of data, relevant pieces of research, especially in this idea and the science of community organizing that when intervention is wrapped in with strength-based approaches, human-centered, person-centered approaches, and as a practitioner, it’s less about what I want for you in your life, and it’s more about helping you unearth and uncover what’s already been there. It’s amazing what can happen as a result.

Maurice Watson:

But your work is grounded in research and data, is it not?

Merideth Rose:

Absolutely.

Maurice Watson:

So, will you give us a little bit, uh, more information and insights which you have about what the data says, especially in Kansas and Missouri, which continue to see high levels of children entering foster care each year?

Merideth Rose:

Yeah, so what’s really interesting is in 2023; the state of Missouri conducted a performance assessment of its own foster care outcomes. And what we found was pretty disparaging in itself. The data was disparaging. We as a state ranked last in the nation, or 50 out of 50 states.

Maurice Watson:

Wow.

Merideth Rose:

And at that time, at that point in time count, there was about 13,000 children in the foster care system being case managed by Missouri. Here’s where that data starts to get very interesting. About 60% of those children, of that 13,000 or 8,000, were removed for reasons that were labeled as neglect or abuse. But when you disaggregate and you unpack the data, what the state’s research found was that less than 20% of those 8,000 children were actually removed for reasons substantiated as abuse and neglect. So, what that means is that more than 7,000 children were removed from their homes for reasons other than neglect reasons that looked more like lack — a lack of basic needs, food insecurities, housing instability, eviction; it goes on and on and on.

So, what that tells us is that we have mislabeled poverty and called it neglect. And unfortunately, our children in Missouri, and across the country, they are caught in the crossfire, if you will. They are being punished for being poor. And so, as I think about my own life, that was my reality as a 19-year-old pregnant with twins, I was a college student at Mizzou who found out I was pregnant. I was entrapped in a domestically violent relationship without stable housing. And as a result, my children were temporarily removed from my care. I was one of the fortunate ones who had access to supports and tools and stair steps. But for so many families, that is not the case. And the data goes on and on, especially when you talk about inequities and disproportionalities for black and brown youth, for youth who identify as LGBTQIA+, the longer they are in the system, by and large, they experience more placements, much more disruption of those placements, their academic impact, their housing impacts, all of those social determinants of health, are negatively impacted when they’re entering the system.The system works when it works, but far greater times it doesn’t work, and it causes perpetual harm.

Maurice Watson:

So let, let me follow up on that question. So to the extent the system is over-functioning in that it is removing kids from an environment that for one reason or another has sent out some kind of signal that there needs to be some intervention, the kid needs to be removed from the family, or the only reason one or our system or government policy would be able to justify that is if that removal was taking the child from a bad situation into a better situation. And what do you know and what does the research tell us about what actually happens, in fact, when these kids are moved from their homes and their families and placed in the system or foster care context?

Merideth Rose:

Yes, that’s a really great question. I, I think as a baseline and the impetus for the system was exactly what you described. It was designed to create safety for those children who absolutely could not safely remain at home. I think what has happened; however, I go back to mindset and narrative, the story, I think that the referral system, the hotline system has told is that an indicator of a lack is also synonymous with an indicator of neglect. And that is simply untrue. I think what I have seen is those practitioners, those decision makers, those policy makers, especially at the state and local level, who are able to contextualize how to use the referral system, how to use the hotline system, you see in fact a shift in the number of referrals coming into the hotline system. But the truth is, to your original question, once a child enters into the system, they have a greater probability of experiencing so many other disparaging outcomes that were not originally forecasted before they entered the system.

So, the talking point is we are exponentially worsening the likelihood of their academic success, their mental health outcomes, their social determinants of health like housing and the ability to graduate and go on to higher education. And that follows every child type of every demographic. I think there’s this misnomer that the foster care system is necessary to ensure entire swaths and communities of children and families are safe. I say that’s only partially true. And the problem is we have exponentially increased that narrative as though it is a superhero saving system. And in fact, it is not. In fact, it’s doing the exact opposite. I would challenge our states, our funders, our legislators to say, where do we want to invest and spend the money? Because when you do the research and you do the math where you end up spending via a greater amount of money, the investment of public taxpayer dollars, it is always on the back end to fix what has become broken because of the system. You see that in the correction system. You see that in the juvenile justice system. You see that in social services and welfare and public housing, when in fact we could fast track, streamline, and move those resources and dollars further upstream to prevent harm from happening and at exponentially greater rates.

Maurice Watson:

So what do you believe are the barriers, systemic or any other kind of barrier that keeps Kansas City or other communities from shifting in the way that you think would be better for kids and families?

Merideth Rose:

That is another great question, and I don’t think the answer is just philosophical. You know, when we talk about prevention, it is often the hard sell compared to treatment because people can visualize institutions, they can visualize beds, they can visualize, you know, students in their caps and gowns. We like to know that we are dealing with consequence management, for lack of better words. And so if you think about the competing priorities across the city, across the county, there’s infrastructure, there’s tourism, there’s workforce development, there’s so many things, but all of those are responding to, treating, and creating something that you can see capacity that you can see, feel, and touch. Prevention is really hard to sell because it’s the one case manager that’s working diligently and intensively in a home for weeks and weeks and weeks at a time. And because it works, that child never enters a system.

They don’t become a census number in a school. So the challenge is we are creating a narrative and an incentive and an inspiration to say, this is where money goes because it works, but it’s hard to sell because people can’t see it. And I’ll just be plain speak. It’s not as sexy as responding to a crisis. And I’ve learned that in emergency management. What do you see in the imagery when you see FEMA going out on the ground? You see the jackets, you see the letters, you see the distribution pods. It’s really hard to conceptualize and storytell prevention in a way that generates funding, support, and resources.

Maurice Watson:

Some people describe it as it is impossible to prove the negative, which is to say, until you have a problem, it’s hard to establish that, you know, the reason you don’t have a problem is that you’ve acted proactively or preventively. And, and so that’s an important insight, and I think the argument you make is a very compelling one. So you’ve overseen disaster responses at FEMA, like the 2011 Joplin tornadoes and the Hurricane Sandy in New York City. What lessons about collaboration and crisis response do you bring from those experiences into the child welfare prevention system?

Merideth Rose:

You know, it’s so interesting. People often ask me the question, how in the world did you make the leap from emergency management to being a CEO? And I say, really, it is crisis prevention, response mitigation, and capacity building and recovery, after a crisis. I think what I was able to see firsthand, not only from an operational crisis response perspective, but a human-centered perspective, I saw firsthand what natural disasters did to families, and particularly families that were already disproportionately impacted negatively by having a lack, again, lack of food, lack of housing, unstable housing, unsafe housing. And so your heart cannot help but understand that because of the nature of their disposition and just the trauma and the lack that they already have, they now have compounding complexities and challenges in their recovery. And so as I was a part of teams and leading teams, when we would go out and do situational assessments, and we were the first on the ground just understanding the impact of the loss, the breadth and the depth of the loss, our teams and our units were able to come back and tell the stories of those exponential impacts of families in need and families in lack.

Merideth Rose:

And so my solutions in creating response strategies, it wasn’t just get them the water, get them the access to the FEMA assistance, it was how do we address this whole system and perhaps systemic challenges that they have had that are now exponentially greater than prior to the disaster. So I think where I was most effective is I didn’t just come into the system or come into the disaster as my fellow firefighters would say and put the wet stuff on the red stuff. I said, let’s think about long-term recovery differently. Sometimes the disaster is the best tension point to create a whole different reality for a family who started in lack and need. So I say I walk away with, or I walked away with an approach to healing, restoring, and supporting families. That was comprehensive, that was whole person centered, that was ecosystem centered. If I addressed one issue, that was just one issue. But true healing, true transformation, true systemic change was being thoughtful of the integration of all the other needs. And so that’s the approach that I always see, strategies, strategic development, and that I’ve applied to my organization. We can’t be all things to all people, but I guarantee you what we are going to be great at is that continuum of care.

Maurice Watson:

You’ve said you want to safely end the over utilization of foster care. What does a Kansas City that achieves that goal look like? And what would it take politically, or from the policy making perspective, financially and culturally to get us there?

Merideth Rose:

That’s a great question, and I think I, I love to uplift the story of the success that we have had in the state of Kansas through Cornerstones of Care and our foster care case management work. So we, we entered the state of Kansas in three counties in Wyandotte, Leavenworth, and Atchison Counties in 2019. And when we took over that contract for those three counties, there were about 825 youth in foster care in what the state calls area five across those three counties. Today, nearly seven years later, there’s just under 500 youth in foster care. So you do the math, we have safely reduced the number of youth in care by nearly 50%. And the approach and the strategies that we have taken have not said that foster care is unnecessary and totally needs to be eliminated. That’s not possible because we look at foster care like the emergency room, you want it to be available and there and working and trauma informed and responsive when you need it.

But you go back to that mindset, you go back to that shift in practice, you go back to that curiosity and that reframing a different question. We take that, we create a strategy, and within our teams we ask different questions. Instead of removing the child from the home, what are the other alternatives and options? And there’s a, a series, there’s a, a structured approach called the Four Questions Model based out of Iowa. And so we implemented that model. And what we saw is by placing emphasis on prevention on kinship and placement. So where families and caring communities can unwrap themselves around a youth so that that youth can stay safely at home to using prevention dollars further upstream or foster care dollars further upstream by giving resources to families so they can get the break, get the tools that they need. You start to see this comprehensive approach kind of on all fronts, a full court press that involves state partners, local communities, faith communities, health and human services.

And what you see is them working together, you start to see the trend line go down. So the answer is, we’ve got to do better about collaboration and collaborative strategies. It’s got to go beyond kind of the round table. It is sitting in a room and being very honest and open about who can do what. Not one agency trying to be all things to all people, but people doing really great work, impactful work, in their subject matter area, in their core competency and working hard intentionally and strategically with the partners who do the other things exceptionally well. And what you find is over time with consistency, with observation, with measurement, and understanding the data and pivoting is necessary, you will see true change. You will see true change.

Maurice Watson:

What’s the scale of the impact in terms of the numbers of children and families that the organization you lead Cornerstones of Care is having? I mean, how many, how many children and families are you currently serving? And I know beyond those that you’re directly serving, you’re having a much greater impact than that. But what are we talking about?

Merideth Rose:

Numbers? We love numbers. So we’ve been around more than 156 years today. Our point in time in 2025, we served more than 14,000 children and families across Missouri and Kansas. Today, our work most immediately is spread across Missouri and Kansas in about 116 counties. But we even have a professional development education program called BIST, Behavioral Intervention Support Teams. That’s us teaching teachers how to help regulate and support children who have challenges with trauma. That particular program is now in more than 300 schools and school districts across 11 states. Here’s the thing I say about all the big numbers, is we are Kansas City metro centered and true. You will not see us bidding on work or expanding foster care in other states outside of this area. Again, we find that as a necessity, we do it exceptionally well wrapped in a sanctuary certified trauma-informed model.

But our goal is to create impact in the system so that the systems we’re in, we see that shrinkage of the number of youth coming into care. One data point that I’m really proud of as well, that people generally and broadly do not know that we do. So historically, the children’s division, when a child or family comes on the radar of the children’s division through a hotline, historically a children’s division investigator would come in, investigate, remove the child temporarily to understand, assess, stabilize the threat and the safety issue, and then try to reunify the child in the family. But for more than 30 years, the state has contracted and partnered with Cornerstones of Care so that when that hotline comes, instead of an investigator coming in, Cornerstones of Care, a case manager, a sanctuary certified trauma response case manager, is coming into the home working with the child and the family, no fewer than eight weeks to turn down the temperature to stabilize the crisis.

Maurice Watson:

What does the term sanctuary certified mean?

Merideth Rose:

I’m so glad you asked that. So we are the only provider, mental behavioral health provider in this region that is sanctuary certified. The sanctuary model of Trauma-informed care is an evidence-based model out of New York. And what it does, it takes that research that I mentioned before through the ACEs study that creates common understanding and data around trauma is synonymous with loss. And what trauma does is it rewires the brain. And so the sanctuary model says, what do you do with this trauma? Before you can talk about healing pathways and resilience and strong communities, you have to first and foremost establish safety. And that’s in four realms of safety, psychological, moral, physical, and spiritual. And so once safety is established as the cornerstone, the pathways towards healing, therapeutic treatment, they’re vast and they’re varied. But what it tells you about our work and what we do is before we do anything else, before we stand up a program, before we treat a child or a family, we first have to help them establish safety. Safety is the door and the gateway to healthiness. And then you move on to stability, and then you move on to resilience, and then you move on to thriving. So it is a certification. We go through an audit, a field site review, and all 720 individuals that are team members of Cornerstones of Care embody and are certified in that sanctuary model of trauma responsive care. So the work that we do is credentialed, it’s evidence-based, and as you mentioned, it’s research-backed.

Maurice Watson:

Your life story, Merideth, is inspirational. And I know there have been many mentors and advocates along the way as part of your life story who have believed in you and have enabled you to achieve beyond what anyone would’ve imagined. When you, at earlier point in your life, what do you think about how you and we can invest in the next generation of leaders, especially young women and people of color redirect their lives in a way to enable them to achieve the heights that you’ve been blessed and fortunate to achieve?

Merideth Rose:

I love the way you reframed that language. How do you redirect towards impact? And I get emotional as I hear you reading the question because the first person, the most influential person that comes to mind, of course, is my mother. My mother was a transplant from poor impoverished southern Louisiana. She was one of eight children and picked cotton as a child and saw the trauma and the hardship of her own family, and realized that education, caring community workforce development would be her only pathway out of poverty. And she paid her way through school twice and ended up becoming a statistical engineer, a statistician, and was recruited in the late 1960s to come and work in Kansas City for Bendix, also known as Honeywell and Allied Signal. She worked in an aerospace plant and was one of less than five black females in the entire enterprise.

And as she’s building her own stair step out of poverty, she gets a phone call to take a child that she never asked for. And not only did she take that child, but she didn’t realize that child was going to come with a lot of trauma and broken. So what I watched in her is pursued a dream, a desire, a hunger, an advancement that she knows she could create for herself, and brought a child along the way that was never in her plan. And I know she suffered greatly. I was a hard child. I was a very hard child.

Maurice Watson:

Was that the child? Were you that child, by the way?

Merideth Rose:

That was me. That was, I was a hard child. I was kicked out of school many, many days and nights. She worried and prayed that I would be okay.

Maurice Watson:

So, this was not your biological mother? No, but this was your..

Merideth Rose:

This was my adopted mother, and today she is 84. And she would, she would say, and she still says, other than, Jesus, you are the greatest thing that has ever happened to me. And so to know that she was willing when she didn’t have to create space and capacity for a child who was destined by data to stay broken, my life is forever shifted because of her selflessness. So I have a moral, social, spiritual responsibility to do the same thing for as many as I can over and over.

Maurice Watson:

Merideth listen, <laugh>, what a story. I, you know, I think I’d love to do this, or spend hours with you, but we don’t have much more time. I do want our audience to hear from you about how they can support your work. So tell the audience, what are the ways in which they can support you and your work, because I think it’s critically important that through this exposure, through the Pinnacle Prize and through this podcast, your work can expand and grow. So tell us how we can support you.

Merideth Rose:

I’m going to probably give you the first answer that’s going to surprise you. You would think because of nonprofits being the status of our organization, it’s always financial resources. But use my story as an example. What we need is loving, safe, caring adults, period. And we are at such a pinnacle, if you will, opportunity within Cornerstones of Care that we’re making strategic decisions about where we do work, where we’re most effective, how do we advance the mission, how do we reach that aspirational goal to safely end foster care? So we need advisors, we need thought leaders, we need governing board members and council volunteers. More importantly than anything, we need foster care families, as much as we don’t want to perpetuate and continue to fill that pipeline, when you have loving safe adults to create foster care homes, you can work children towards permanency faster. So people, we, we love friends, we love volunteers, we love in-kind support, we love thought leaders.

Then second, I would say is come alongside us. I think it’s most important to me, whether your gift or your skillset is your time, your talent, your treasure, your testimony. It is welcome at Cornerstones of Care. Do we have financial gaps every single year? Yes. Do we have deficit that we sometimes are unsure how we’re going to fill? Yes, we always need more financial resources, but more important than ever, what sustains the work and what makes it possible and impactful is the people behind it. And I always have a seat at my Cornerstones of Care table.

Maurice Watson:

So, tell us specifically how can we connect with you or others on your team?

Merideth Rose:

Yeah, So the starting place would go to our website, cornerstonesofcare.org. There is a “I want to get involved” form. And we’ve got a team member that’s watching that 24/7. Honestly, reach out to me. I know people say, you know, as a president, you should never put your information out there. I love to just break bread with people. So if you’re interested in learning more about the organization, you want to go to coffee and connect, let’s talk about what makes your heartbeat, where do you want to plug into the organization? I will personally connect you to a staff member that can make that happen. But the best starting place, the first starting place is our website cornerstonesofcare.org.

Maurice Watson:

Merideth, this has been a joy. Thank you so much.

Merideth Rose:

You’re very welcome. Thank you for having me.

Maurice Watson:

And thank you for listening to The Pinnacle Pod. Merideth’s story is compelling and inspiring. Importantly, it challenges us to ask not only what needs to change, but what are we willing to do about it. Because change isn’t just about thinking, it’s about doing, and every action creates a ripple effect. The Pinnacle Prize celebrates and amplifies the voices of people like Merideth, Shaping Kansas City. Follow The Pinnacle Pod and The Ripple Effect and discover more stories of local change makers at the PinnaclePrizekc.com. Thank you.

Hosted By Maurice Watson

Maurice is a recognized community leader and has more than thirty years of experience working in law, social and public policy and board governance as a lawyer, advisor, and board member. He is the co-founder and principal of Credo Philanthropy Advisors.