About Me

My name is Tewabech Genet Stewart.

I was named after my grandmother and come from a long line of remarkable Ethiopian women whose faith, courage, and love of family continue to shape who I am today.

My journey began in Liberia, where I was born.

Years later, my family returned to Liberia, where my parents served as missionaries for thirty-eight years. Growing up in West Africa, living through civil war, and experiencing family separation gave me an early understanding of how profoundly systems and circumstances can shape people's lives.

Professionally, I spent more than twenty-two years inside Florida's child welfare system. I entered that work believing I was helping protect children. Over time, I began asking harder questions. Not only about the decisions we made, but about the assumptions on which those decisions were built.

I noticed something that troubled me. The system devoted tremendous attention to the trauma we believed parents had caused their children, yet gave far less attention to the trauma created by the system itself. Parents were expected to meet standards of accountability that the system often did not apply to itself.

Those questions led me to a deeper realization.

Many of the systems serving our communities today were built on stories about human worth that simply are not true. We know a different truth: every person is created with equal value and immeasurable worth in the eyes of God.

Child welfare is the system I know best, but it is only one example of a much larger pattern.

Different Language. Same Logic.

That phrase is the lens through which I examine history and humanity. Across continents and across generations, societies have used different words to tell the same false story about human worth. Those stories become beliefs. Beliefs shape systems. Systems shape lives. Until we replace those stories with truth, we will continue creating different versions of the same injustice.

Rather than asking how we could improve a system built on faulty assumptions, I began asking a different question:

What would we build if we started with the truth about human worth instead?

That question led me to develop a Seven-Step Framework for replacing the current child welfare system with one that protects every child's birthright to family while increasing accountability, transparency, and meaningful support for families.

Today, my work is centered on helping others think differently about the systems we have inherited and the future we have the opportunity to create. Through writing, speaking, podcasts, presentations, and workshops, I invite people to move beyond criticism and into the work of building something better.

The hardest part of this work is not changing policy. It is unlearning the stories we inherited about which families deserve support and which families deserve separation.

That work is deeply personal.

We inherited these systems. But inheritance is not obligation. Just because something was handed down to us does not mean we have to keep handing it down to our children and grandchildren.

We did not create these systems. But we are responsible for what we choose to do with them now.

Before we can change our institutions, we must first confront the stories we were taught about one another. That work begins within each of us.

My Christian faith is the foundation of everything I do. It reminds me that every person is created with inherent dignity, that truth is liberating, and that justice requires humility, courage, and a commitment to restoring what has been broken.

I don't expect everyone who visits this website to agree with my conclusions. My hope is simpler than that.

I hope you'll become curious enough to ask better questions, challenge long-held assumptions, and imagine what becomes possible when we begin with the truth about human worth.

I don't claim to have all the answers. But I do believe every generation has the opportunity to leave the next one something better than it inherited.

May we have the courage to question the stories we inherited, the wisdom to tell the truth, and the determination to build something better for the generations that follow.

Every generation inherits a story. Every generation also has the opportunity and the responsibility to write a better one.