As a leader within a social service agency, what's the challenge you came into this work to help solve that still feels out of reach?
Hanover Township invited me to facilitate a session with their Human Services Coordinating Council, and that question went to the members anonymously beforehand. Every answer was read and tagged against a written codebook. The top five themes were:
- Quality services people can access
- Staying financially viable
- Affordable housing
- Finding the right help
- Improving family life
What connects most of these themes is the distance between people and help that already exists. Access is about how long someone waits for services, what it costs them, and which eligibility rules they must meet. Housing is about how much of it there is, what living in it is like for people with disabilities and mental illness, and how quickly someone can be placed. Finding the right help is about agencies and the people who need them finding each other. During the facilitation, people put it as making the path easy to navigate for somebody who is already overwhelmed, and knowing enough about each other's agencies to point the way.
One survey response put it most directly: "Building trust with other agencies and outside resources when our internal agency thinks they have all the answers and/or best way to do it."
The group's most repeated ask of the morning was a directory of who is in this network and what they do.
I'm grateful for this group of Hanover Township Mental Health Board-funded agencies willing to name what is hard. (https://www.hanover-township.org/departments/mental-health-board)
Same question to you. What's the challenge you came into this work to help solve that still feels out of reach?