“What do you want to be when you grow up?” It’s an age-old question that many of us are asked early in life. The answer is more apparent to some than to others. In Myla DeCourcy’s case, she knew she wanted to become a social worker.

“I’ve always been interested in social work,” DeCourcy says. “I would say child protection was always a goal to start my career.” 

This interest is personal. She had small interactions with the child protection system when she was younger as she watched her mother struggle with addiction and mental illness, and came to understand that social workers could be there to help her. “I saw it as them rescuing me, and I wanted to be that for someone,” she says.

DeCourcy chose UMD’s social work program and dug into the experiential learning aspect of the bachelor’s and master’s degrees through internships. She started when Amy Madsen, student support specialist, sent out an email about an opportunity to work with St. Louis County. It caught DeCourcy’s attention, and even though her major didn’t require her to intern at the time, she wanted to give it a try. 

At the County, she worked in multiple units throughout the summers of 2021 and 2022, each dealing with different aspects of child protection cases. The first internship for her Bachelor of Social Work was in the ongoing case management unit, followed by another internship in the family assessment and then in the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) unit.

Protecting ICWA 

After beginning her Master of Social Work program at UMD, she moved on to the Indian ChildWelfare unit at St. Louis County, and in September of 2023, she moved to Fond du Lac’s child welfare unit. ICWA was enacted in 1978 in response to the disproportionate number of American Indian children being removed from their families and placed in white homes. The goal was to preserve Native families and culture. The act’s legitimacy was being challenged in the Supreme Court when DeCourcy started her internship, which helped drive her decision to do her internship with a tribal agency. She also wanted to get an inside perspective to see what ICWA does for families.

“I feel really passionate about protecting the act,” she says. “Working at Fond du Lac has helped me learn the spirit of ICWA and how important it is to protect culture, which is something that drives me to keep advocating for it.”

Fond du Lac’s child welfare team works alongside the county by co-case managing to ensure they have a say in what happens with families affiliated with the tribe. They provide culturally specific resources and services that the county may not, such as preventive work to keep a child from being placed in foster care. 

DeCourcy’s experiences led to a graduate assistantship with UMD’s Center for Regional & Tribal Child Welfare Studies, which provides training for social workers surrounding ICWA laws and tribal sovereignty, among other things.

Part of the assistantship is to be a court monitor for Duluth and Carlton County’s ICWA courts, sitting in on hearings and making sure that ICWA procedures and guidelines are being followed in regard to the cases. 

Overall, the internships have been a great experience to apply what she learned in her classes, and they also changed her outlook on what child protection is. “It made me realize what kind of practice I want to have for the future, and kind of shaped me,” she says. 

Career goals

DeCourcy’s future plans include working at a child welfare agency. She hopes to work at Fond du Lac or St. Louis County. She stated that bonding with a family and helping them get the resources that they need is one of the most fulfilling parts of her job, so she would eventually like to provide family interventions and counseling.

Her larger goals are to help remedy the flaws in the child protection system and to assist with making family preservation resources more accessible in rural communities. 

“The child welfare system is very flawed, and more people learning about it will help drive change,” she comments. 

This story was written by UMD student Jax Wilder, who is majoring in psychology. Jax assists Lissa Maki with communications for the College of Education and Human Service Professions