Monday, December 21, 2009

Family Interaction

When you perform work under a contract, your client tells you what you need to do and, often, how to do it. When DHS decided Family Interaction was important to keep Iowa’s kids safe, it became something that agencies needed to do. But they asked the private side to help figure out how to do it. Not literally – not how you write a family interaction plan - but how we all implement a new practice as a standard.

This was one of our first projects to test the collaborative process. We assembled our best champions of the practice – from public and private agencies, from our families, and other advocates. We used phone calls, meetings, trial trainings and geographical considerations to adjust the curriculum to fit Iowa’s needs and customized the training to fit the needs of different service areas.

What we did was involve several stakeholders in the process. What we saw was the voices of many gives us a bigger picture and a better solution.

When we held regional trainings, you should have seen the trainers – they were excited to teach, and the attendees could feel it. Sometimes training can be a bit tiring, but you could feel the energy at these trainings. (Chris)

Wednesday, December 9, 2009

For example...

There is a practice called Family Interaction that helps parents whose children are in foster care learn from foster families. It’s proven effective and nationally recognized as something that helps birth parents create a safe home for the child(ren) to return to.

We knew it was something great, but we needed to figure out how to communicate how it works and why we believe in it. We needed to explain it to birth families, to foster families, to agency employees and to court officials. So in this new partnership approach, guess what we did?

We asked people that already recognized the value to help us spread the word to their peers. No preset ideas. No training as usual. We wanted out of the box. And guess what? When we asked, we got it!

Chris and I took on Family Interaction together, and we started with our agencies. What did our staff know? Who did our staff know that already practiced Family Interaction? What did families think of it? What was practical and what was not?

Wendy

Monday, November 30, 2009

Private Agencies

I’m up for talking – in human services, it’s what we do. What will be strange is talking in this format.

But I can do this, because I’ve been a part of the committee and it’s been great work. From a private agency viewpoint, this partnership gives us the opportunity to become part of an incredible journey that will create a new culture in child welfare. Public and private agencies have been working together for many years, but building a formal partnership that commits stakeholders to something that will benefit everyone in the end – that’s just good practice.

I’ll be talking about the work we’ve done and the work we’ll keep doing. And I can’t wait to see what turns we take along the way!

-Chris

Tuesday, November 24, 2009

From the public agency perspective...

The first thing I thought when I was asked to co-author this blog was, “Why? Who wants to read it?”

I have been assured that I have something to offer, and as I think about it, I guess I do talk about what we’re doing every day – I just don’t put a label on it.

At DHS, we’re used to talking a lot about compliance. The people I work with are genuinely concerned about the welfare of kids and families, and we need guidelines – formal and informal, that provide the best results for kids and families.

Since the creation of CWPC, there’s more conversation about how those guidelines help or hinder the shared goals of public and private agencies. There’s more conversation about how an agency could best work within overall expectations and how many options we can look at to meet everyone’s needs. There’s just more conversation. Conversations with more people. We have more ideas, more evaluation, more questions asked. More information to make better decisions.

I’ll be talking about those conversations, and about the experiences I have that lead me through this journey.

-Wendy

Monday, November 16, 2009

Introducing a blog about…a journey.

A journey can take you many places you never dreamed you’d go. You can start at Point A, expecting to end at Point B, but you eventually discover Points C, D, J, and L were the most important legs of your journey.

In Iowa, we’ve embarked on a journey of partnership. We left behind our historical culture of separate entities working independently and are finding our way down a path of collaboration. With a shared destination guiding us, we are discovering how we can help each other find the best way. We are evolving beyond our roles and focusing instead on our shared outcomes.

Simply put, the journey is collaboration, communication and problem solving. It’s partnering with people around you. But it’s not always so easy to put into practice.

That’s why the Child Welfare Partners Committee (CWPC) was created. We all know we need to collaborate, but the day-to-day realities of our jobs can make collaboration a luxury.

In Iowa, families and children are a priority, so the Iowa Department of Human Services (DHS) and private human services agencies committed to create a unified approach to delivering child welfare services – the CWPC.

Two representatives from this committee – one from DHS and one from a private agency, will share their experiences of shared accountability, a commitment to collaboration and how it translates into better results for Iowa’s kids and families. Wendy and Chris will share what this partnership looks like as it blossoms into a fruitful environment for child welfare services.