Tasha Dunham: “If you change your beliefs, you can change your life.”

July 11, 2025, will mark Tasha Dunham’s 20th year helping struggling families through her work with Children’s Services, also known as Child Protective Services, or CPS, a bureau within the Human Services Agency of San Joaquin County. In 2005, Tasha began working for CPS as a social worker and she’s now the division chief overseeing nine supervisors and 60 social workers.

After two decades of bearing witness to human hardship and trauma, one might expect to develop a weary resignation to it all. But Tasha sees the positive impact made by a multitude of prevention and support programs and says we are surrounded by help and hope. So much help, in fact, that to navigate the more than 4,000 resources available in San Joaquin County, Family Resource Center developed the 211 phone number to connect callers with a live person who will direct them to the resources for their specific needs. There is also a phone app available for easy access and the corresponding website, 211SJ.org.

Self-Care, a Key Part of Prevention
A pastor and a Vietnam veteran, Tasha’s late father, Zacchaeus Dunham, always impressed upon her what a special privilege it is to serve your community. Tasha enthusiastically agrees and noted there are countless ways to show support, including volunteering to host foster children for a short period so that their foster parents can take regularly scheduled breaks.

Tasha describes herself as a helper, healer and problem solver. “I am a silver lining person, but I am also a realist.” That balanced outlook underscores her expectations of others and herself in the way she approaches motherhood and work. As someone who routinely receives urgent work calls in the middle of the night, Tasha has learned “the hard way” the value of napping and recharging when she can and urges others to be proactive about their own self-care.

“Building in self-care keeps up our emotional and physical wellbeing,” she shared. “If you wait until you’re in a crisis, it’s too late. Prevention is key. And nobody tells you, but it’s the same with preventing child abuse; it’s all about prevention. So, part of our recent efforts has been to educate parents on how to care for themselves in addition to their children. It’s one of the areas we have in common with the Child Abuse Prevention Council, or CAPC, Mary Magdalene, Prevail, El Concilio, Pacific Clinics and a host of other community-based organizations that serve our community.”

Regarding her own experience with motherhood, Tasha said with a broad grin, “Motherhood has been the craziest and most precious experience. It consumes you, shapes your identity, and as soon as you get adjusted to one phase you, move into another.” Her daughter, Monet Zacchea, named after Tasha’s father, is now 17 and exploring her college options. “Having her not need me as much is strange,” Tasha confided. “But we have such a good relationship and I’m extremely thankful for that.”

Respectful and Transparent Leadership
Acutely aware of the impact she has as a leader, Tasha practices what she calls the Parallel Process. “That means that the way I speak to the people who report to me is a model of how I want them to speak to their own teams and to the people they oversee. Maintaining respectful communication and a solution-oriented mentality is a way to help the community we serve,” she said. “I believe in including the people and families we serve in creating solutions and being transparent in that process.”

Other than weekly and monthly meetings, Tasha says there is no such thing as a typical day at work. “It’s just the nature of the business. We get a lot of emergency calls and you never know what the day will bring. If you come to work not expecting chaos and it throws you off when it happens, it means you need to adjust your expectations,” she said. “It’s very sad but I’ve seen people leave the industry because their book knowledge and training were so different from the reality of day-to-day work.” In response to that need, Tasha committed herself to preparing child welfare students for the industry by becoming a professor at CSU Stanislaus. There she taught the Child Abuse Neglect course in their Master of Social Work program for eight years in addition to her full-time work with CPS.

Based on the needs she saw at CPS, Tasha was responsible for the development of an entire curriculum of training for new social workers to ensure consistency in the way jobs were performed. “You can’t expect social workers to assess safety and abuse issues without consistent protocols guiding them. I saw that we really needed to have training and mentors who can guide each new social worker’s hands-on experience with the children and families,” she explained of the reasons she took this extensive action, and added, “I got so much joy from arranging the training and orienting new staff.”

In the Child Protective Services vernacular, front-end services include the 24-hour child abuse hotline through which reports are taken of concerns regarding child abuse or neglect. Five investigative units are in place to determine if actual abuse exists and to interact with law enforcement and medical professionals. Back-end services are focused on foster care, arranging parent/child visits and follow-ups, court processes and programs that are crucial to supporting reunification between parents and their children or finding forever families for children who do not reunify with their parents.

Correcting Misperceptions
After all the years Tasha has spent working both front end and case management programs, she longs to correct some of the myths and misunderstandings the public may have. “Sometimes the public assumes that CPS is just haphazardly making decisions about people’s children. But we have rules, guidelines, regulations, policies, procedures and laws that all govern us. The decisions we make in each case are far more thoughtful and intentional than the general public might realize. Plus, supervisors review every referral, recommendation and court report completed by the social workers.” CPS also has contracts with a wide variety of community resources to support households and families to reduce the likelihood they will come into contact with CPS.

Besides being able to find silver linings without losing her grip on reality, Tasha calls herself an encourager, cheerleader, vision enhancer and a go-getter, all qualities she inherited from her parents during her upbringing in Tracy, California. Her late father, founder of Agape Missionary Baptist Church, and her mother, Claudine Dunham, who recently retired after 41 years as the accounting manager at The Stockton Record, were powerful role models. “We always referred to Papa as the front man at church but Mama was behind the scenes making all the details come together. We called her the Quiet Storm for how she’s able to masterfully make things come together,” Tasha recalled warmly. She feels very blessed to have been raised the way she was and to have witnessed her parents’ strong marriage as an example. Although her father passed away in 2022, Tasha says of her energetic mother, “She really still is the strength and the rock of our family.”

An Aha Moment
After high school, Tasha attended UC Santa Barbara, initially studying to be a dermatologist. “But calculus stopped me,” she said, laughing. “It was too much and I loved the classes but they didn’t love me back so I switched to sociology.” She was a good student but during her senior year of college, she realized it was all she knew and began questioning what life would be like as a professional. “I’d been a student my whole life. I didn’t know how to be in the real world,” she recalled.

In the campus library, Tasha spotted a book titled “What to Do with Your Sociology Degree” and eagerly began reading. When she reached the chapter on social work, something clicked. “I recognized myself immediately and thought, ‘I could have written this!’ It was a real aha moment I remember like it was yesterday.” Tasha set out to earn her master’s degree to qualify for the social work she felt called to. Two years later she graduated from CSU Stanislaus and began her career with Child Protective Services as a social worker in their court program, where the legal processes of child welfare and their families begin.

“I enjoyed establishing plans for families who had lost care and control to get their kids back,” Tasha said. But she also acknowledged, “It’s a heavy decision having to recommend whether a parent receives reunification services or not and it’s heart wrenching.” She felt devastated the first time she had to recommend against a child being returned to parental custody. “I cried my eyes out over that decision. As a trainer and a leader, I talk to every team member about the impact they will have on people with the decisions they make. I never want to take that power lightly, to forget the weight of the role we have.”

In the early years of her career, Tasha sometimes heard coworkers say they didn’t want to tell a parent that reunification services would not be offered to them. “I didn’t like that,” she recalled. The truth can be hard to hear but Tasha is adamant about being transparent with her team and all parents throughout the process. “I don’t believe in surprising people,” she said. “When someone receives a court report I’ve written, I don’t want anything in there to be something we haven’t discussed at length together.”

“An initial case plan is offered to everybody,” Tasha explained. “The parents have to make sufficient progress in order to have a court-ordered case plan. The county pays for all the programs they recommend to help people reunify with their children. So, at every step, the parents already know what’s required of them because they were part of developing the plan. I want to break down the myth that we are doing anything less than supporting the parents in overcoming their problems and challenges.”
Tasha is optimistic about the future of children’s safety and welfare. From walk-in day centers providing food, showers and laundry to a safe house where youth can stay up to 21 days if needed, help is already available but, too often, kids, parents and schools are unaware that help exists. “We are uniting the efforts and connecting school districts and school counselors with all the community services to help kids and families in need.” she affirmed.

“The bright spot I see right now is the way we are connecting all the services and support resources. We want to support people’s needs before CPS intervention is needed. The majority of calls we get are a product of poverty, not abuse. So, seeing schools connected with all the resources these vulnerable kids need moves us from a state of mandated reporting to one of community supporting. Making these connections shines a bright light of hope on them and the community,” Tasha elaborated.

Building Internal Strength: Never Helpless or Hopeless
“Everybody has a story and got to where they are for a reason,” Tasha explained. “All behavior can be explained with enough information. Having that approach really helps me to see people differently. You are not the sum of your worst days. I believe in seeing the best in people. And ultimately, where I get my ongoing strength and inspiration is from my relationship with God. I too am a product of the village and I believe in the strength of that village. We have the power to call upon a family’s village and get people the help they need so they don’t have to do everything on their own.”

That’s not to say Tasha wants to see people of any age become helpless dependents. “I don’t believe we have a magic wand to empower people, but I do believe in training them to empower themselves. I believe in showing people they do have it within them to be who their children need them to be,” she affirmed. “I don’t believe we are ever stuck. We can find ways to overcome. We are never helpless or hopeless.”

Before her daughter started driving herself to school, Tasha would recite these affirmations with her: “I am smart. I am beautiful. I am God’s child. I have everything I need within me to succeed.” These are words Tasha still encourages others to say to themselves and their children every day to see how the power of these statements changes their lives. She concluded, “If you change your beliefs, you can change your life. Your situation may not change, but your perspective will change so that you can have peace in the midst of any difficult situation.”