There must be mechanisms in place for Directors and other heads of systems to directly experience the circumstances and needs of the children and families served.

    The Administrators of Stark County define their development as really starting around two children. The first was a teenager involved with the Juvenile Court system, Child Welfare, Mental Health and the MR/DD system. No Mental Health or Juvenile Justice facility would take him because his I.Q. was too low. The MR/DD system couldn't place him because of his mental health issues. Child Welfare placements were concerned about his criminal history. The System Executives had to stay at the table until they figured out an option and also figured out how to pay for it. When they completed that, they came up with a target population of youth who looked like this first young man.

    Their next referral from the community was a newborn who had been born with physical and medical problems and had been given up by her family who couldn't meet her needs. That newborn was also multi-system from birth. They began to realize that they couldn't think about their work as a speciality service for one type of child only.

    Administrators are pretty clear, that there wouldn't be a Family Council today without those two children. The trick is creating opportunities for new faces to have those same types of defining moments around real children and their families as an ongoing part of doing business.

In the early days of the Stark County efforts, Executive Directors and heads of systems met to discuss individual children. When one visits Stark County, they will undoubtedly hear the stories of two children from those early days. These two children were challenging to existing system procedures. Executives met over time to create services and supports together which allowed those kids to have their needs met. In Stark County, they could have continued with this approach of Executives meeting to craft new services plans for those children who were seen as challenging. Instead they embarked upon a course where Executives dealt with changes in policy and administrative practices which would allow their staff to do this type of cross system crafting of plans with more and more families. The Executives took on the business of business in order to try to create a system which closed the gap between administrative technology and service compassion.

In moving to this systems approach, the Board of Trustees ran the risk of creating a system in which the gap actually widened. The early days of individual staffings was important to building a culture of cooperation. In many respects it is easier to "color outside of the lines" for an individual child rather than a whole system. In order to maintain that individual child/family focus the emerging infrastructure needed to build in the capacity for System Executives to learn the names and hear the stories of individual children and families. As they moved to the system approach they knew that Director level case staffings was no longer efficient. Nevertheless they needed a series of mechanisms designed to keep the Directors in touch with individual stories. The mechanisms they have for the accomplishment of this task include:

  1. Structures which supported parent participation in governance structures. This began with the Parent Advisory Council and quickly moved to six parent members on the Board of Trustees. While these parents are working board members they also serve to tell their stories in Board of Trustees gatherings including retreats and committee meetings.

  2. The presence of FACES which has a strong voice within Family Council activities. Professionals from within the system also serve on the Family Council Board.

  3. The ACCORD has always taken a single child focus and is a body which anyone from the community can access. This group, composed of second level managers, will often sit with the direct Family Teams to review service plans and make resources available which are necessary to implementing those service plans. The ACCORD, as a body, reports directly to the Board of Trustees on a quarterly basis. In addition, since each ACCORD member directly reports to a system executive in their home system, those stories are passed on informally.

  4. Family Council staff have the capacity to call System Executives and Family Council members around an individual child. This allows those heads of systems to become part of a solution finding process on an individual level while allowing families to short cut the bureaucracy in extreme situations.

An enduring infrastructure must be able to both look at the individual families as well as stay on track with the business of doing business. Mechanisms for Director-level experiences of family circumstances need to change over time as a broader system approach is taken.