Effective Services for Young Children Report of a Workshop (1991) / Chapter Skim
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Collaboration as a Means, Not an End: Serving Disadvantaged Families and Children
Collaboration as a Means, Not an End: Serving Disadvantaged Families and Children
Pages 84-104
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From page 84... ...
Discussions of collaboration often begin from an account of successful collaborations and the lessons they teach us. However, to start there begs three important questions: (1)
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From page 85... ...
For example, staff in a teenage parent program I visited for recent research on welfare and children's services were very nervous about the emphasis on rules that their (ultimately unsuccessful) collaboration with a local welfare agency was, they thought, imposing on their services.
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From page 86... ...
For example, a case manager in a program for low-income teenage parents reported on the difficulties that the teenagers' lack of education posed for their dealings with the health system, in the case (which she reported was not rare) of teenage parents of babies with chronic illness (Golden, 1990:48~: The one I have now without a bladder this baby will have multiple surgery, and the mother has been tested at third grade and she doesn't understand what is going on.
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From page 87... ...
Second is the family with many low-level needs that add up to serious risk for the child. Such a family may have limited contact with three or four service systems- the public schools, the unemployment office, the city hospital, and perhaps the welfare department but it probably won't meet anyone's criteria for intensive services.
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From page 88... ...
Therefore, I propose that we define collaboration as simply as possible and concentrate not on its boundaries but on the multiple ways of carrying it out. A simple definition might be that collaboration involves separate organizations working together.
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From page 89... ...
Thus, a collaboration might have the mission of reducing teenage pregnancy, be organized at the city level, and focus on achieving its mission through several functions: joint outreach by service deliverers who see out-of-school teenagers (public health nurses, community youth workers) , direct service delivery in the schools (life planning programs)
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From page 90... ...
Joint information collection about families and services, joint planning, joint development of priorities for resource allocation or for new programs. Technical assistance to communities, cities, programs, service delivery workers to carry out all the new collaborative activities.
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From page 91... ...
Federal and state funding sources tend to support programs defined in terms of substantive categoriesSecond, multiple governmental jurisdictions, and therefore multiple accountability relationsheriment with collaboration in child welfare, the state put together what had originally been 30 different funding streams. · Professional education and traditions.
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From page 92... ...
But what do you do when it is important for organizations that are legitimately very differentiated to work together in order to accomplish a crucial purpose? A famous study of private-sector corporations argues that this is precisely the situation in certain industries characterized by rapidly changing technologies, markets, and production and a need for constant and innovative response.
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From page 93... ...
For example, child protective agencies are expected by the public to prevent children from injury and death and to place children in safe foster homes that will not endanger them further. Public welfare agencies are expected to control the total amount of money they spend and spend it accurately.
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From page 94... ...
In one California county with an impressive record on collaboration, the collaborating agencies worked for four separate governmental jurisdictions: the city, the county, the unified school district, and the community college district. That list does not include the state and federal governments, which provided funds for major services such as welfare and child welfare and therefore demanded accountability to their own rules and purposes.
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From page 95... ...
In effective collaborations, people do not expect that conflict between the organizations will disappear or attribute such conflict solely to uncooperative personalities, power struggles, or turf battles. Instead, they develop ongoing mechanisms for conflict resolution.
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From page 96... ...
The agencies began the project because it seemed to meet both their needs: the family literacy program had difficulty recruiting families, and the welfare department was interested in training programs for mothers, particularly given the convenient pairing with child care. But the collaboration did not survive early difficulties, because the local welfare office saw its primary mission as following the rules on benefit checks and processing clients who were mandated to register for training programs.
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From page 97... ...
Perhaps because of an idealized view of collaboration, this aspect has not been much studied, although several reports emphasize the value of skilled facilitators to collaborations, and one report notes that a mechanism for "voicing concerns" is crucial to successful collaborations.4 This finding is similar to the Lawrence and Lorsch (1967) finding in the private sector that effective conflict resolution in highly differentiated 4The phrase "voicing concerns" is from Institute for Educational Leadership (no date: 4244.)
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From page 98... ...
Similarly, the program director of a teenage parent program in New York State describes her long-standing and constructive relationships with a wide variety of community service providers as key in getting services to clients, and she says that "We make it our business to know how to get in the back door." At the service delivery level as well, caseworkers in many of the programs report a great deal of time spent in contact with other providers, ranging from formalized roles as on-site liaison to other agencies and convener of "team stuffings" to less structured roles in other case management programs.
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From page 99... ...
Staff in the successful collaborations make a special effort to select strategies with a personal element: for example, face-to-face meetings instead of communications by phone or memo and coloration or outstationing of workers whenever possible so that people get to know each other. Among the examples of successful techniques using this approach: · In San Diego, the heads of the GAIN Teen Parent Program, the major health center for pregnant teens, and the major community case management program meet in person once a month for a formal meeting and see each other informally much more often.
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From page 100... ...
One school district may be eager to serve teenage parents and want to work with the welfare department around case management services and child care for them; another district may face resistance from citizens who view teenage pregnancy as someone else's problem and may therefore be more willing to work on reaching families whose children are in middle school. The structure of Oklahoma's IFS explicitly recognizes this multiplicity of needs in the agencies with which the welfare department needs to cooperate, by leaving great flexibility to the local IFS teams to identify needs and develop particular roles to meet those needs.
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From page 101... ...
If, as I have argued above, the whole reason for collaboration in programs to serve at-risk families and children is founded in the needs and characteristics of those families, then it makes sense that effective collaborations would have to go back over and over to those families to make sure they were in fact in line with real needs. NOTES TOWARD SOME RECOMMENDATIONS Having suggested that collaboration occurs in many different ways at many different levels, that it is extremely difficult, and that successful collaborations overcome those difficulties through ingenious local adaptations, I am not in a position to offer authoritative recommendations.
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From page 102... ...
For example, the implementation of the Family Support Act, the likely implementation of the Act for Better Child Care, and the likely consideration over the next few years of new child welfare legislation offer opportunities to think about how best to build in collaboration. CONCLUSION Collaboration is an appealing strategy for improving services to poor children and families, but it is clearly not an easy strategy.
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From page 103... ...
As Director Richard Jacobsen of the San Diego County Department of Social Services argues, there is a certain simple power to the common mission that agencies can arrive at when they realize they are serving the same clients: "to eliminate patients, clients, offenders and increase the number of leaders, parents, students." ACKNOWLEDGMENT This paper draws in part on research on welfare agencies and services to children funded by the Foundation for Child Development. It also draws heavily on the conversations and working papers of the Kennedy School of Government's Executive Session on Making the System Work for Poor Children, funded by the Carnegie Foundation.
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From page 104... ...
Unpublished paper prepared for the Executive Session on Making the System Work for Poor Children. October.
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