This session will demonstrate how project management practices, principles, and tools can be adapted to organizations of various sizes, using the case study of Devereux’s successful project management office. A well-structured project management function can streamline processes, improve project delivery, and ensure that projects align with the organization’s strategic goals. Whether you have many or few resources at your disposal, scalable project management techniques can help you put your strategy into action.

Learning Objectives

• How to translate strategies into tactical success using project management, no matter the organization’s size or resource availability
• Train and develop new project managers who are skilled in the art and the science of managing projects
• Develop and refine traditional and agile project management approaches to support an organization-wide project management function
• Consider how the project management office will strategically fit within the organization and act as a thought partner to senior leadership

Presenters

Sarah Boone
National Project Manager
Devereux Advanced Behavioral Health

Creating a trauma-informed, healing-oriented organization is a complex process that requires more than just understanding trauma. Organizations must go beyond that and foster a culture of healing that enables communities to flourish. To create transformative, trauma-informed, and healing-oriented environments, organizations must not only train their workforce but also embed it into the culture, practices, and external partnerships. This is a challenging task, especially in the face of changes in the social sector, the aftermath of the pandemic, and the growing pressures on the workforce.

Successful organizations understand the importance of connecting trauma-informed transformation to equity, diversity, and inclusion initiatives. They foster values and competencies that empower leadership at all levels and facilitate the healing process within the communities they serve. Rather than settling for a trauma-informed culture, they strive to make healing the core of their trauma-informed culture within the organization.

Creating a healing-oriented culture has many benefits, such as increased employee satisfaction, improved client outcomes, and better community engagement. However, organizations might face challenges when trying to create such a culture, such as resistance to change, lack of resources, or difficulty measuring progress.

Empowering your staff to take the lead in driving and maintaining the trauma-informed movement and ensuring its long-term viability is crucial. We will share our experience of implementing and sustaining this change for over five years, and provide you with the best practices we learned for keeping this transformation alive and dynamic. Our experience has shown that it is essential to connect trauma-informed transformation to equity, diversity, and inclusion initiatives to create a healing-oriented culture.

Learning Objectives

Presenters

Corina Casco
Chief Program Officer
Children’s Bureau

In this intimate, informal workshop, panelists will work to initiate reflection and conversation among participants on how to create meaningful change in their organizations and communities. This session will focus on strategies for getting this work started, building champions and meaningful strategic partnerships, sustaining momentum, and navigating barriers given the current political landscape.

This will be a safe, welcoming space geared at those at the beginning of their EDI journey. Presenters and participants will work together to identify helpful resources, clear action steps, and networks to support forward progress.

Learning Objectives

Attendees will learn:

Panelists

Kelly Blackmon
Founder
B.E. Consulting

Lucia Garcia
Business Development Manager
Hillsides

Michelle Naples
Chief Integration Officer
Lutheran Social Services of WI and Upper MI

Sarah Hollstrom
Special Projects and Volunteer Manager
Family Forward

Facilitator

Emily Merritt
Senior Manager of Corporate Partnerships
Social Current

Do family support strategies make a difference? This workshop will begin with an update on Family Resource Centers (FRC) located across the U.S. and then highlight a wide range of FRC outcome and cost-benefit findings. Presenters will share the results of a new meta-analysis study that examined the impact of FRCs across key child welfare outcomes, including the rates of accepted child protective services referrals, substantiated child protective services referrals, and child placements in out-of-home care. After reviewing what we know about the cost-benefit of FRCs, presenters will close with information about the most promising funding streams to consider to pay for FRCs.

Learning Objectives

Presenters

Peter Pecora
Managing Director of Research Services
Casey Family Programs

Brenda McChesney
Co-Founder & Associate Director
National Family Support Network

Janica Lockhart
Chief Impact Officer
AKIN Family Services

Congreso de Latinos Unidos, a multi-service organization in Philadelphia, is using human-centered design (HCD) to engage funders and policymakers in the service design process—reimagining human services for its largely Latino population. Specializing in “last mile innovation,” Congreso uses its homegrown design toolkit to empower staff at the end-user client level to redesign their programs to generate data-rich insights leading to:

Congreso’s incorporation of design has created a powerful “feedback loop” between policymakers, funders and Congreso’s clients, ensuring the design of services is equitable and human centered. In taking ownership of the full feedback circuit, Congreso has positioned itself as a key link between policymakers and the end-user experience, ensuring future policies, funding, and service contracts account for the nuanced needs of its target population and greatly enhancing the impact and value that government funding seeks to provide.

As a recipient of multiple government funding streams, Congreso recognizes the disconnect between how services are conceived at the policy level and the actual experience of staff and clients in those programs. Often, services conceived of at the policy level don’t fully account for the nuanced experiences of the end-users, causing attrition, low utilization, and inefficient outcomes. Congreso uses HCD tools to shift this paradigm by bringing the two together, leading to improved client experience and outcomes, increased staff empowerment to influence change and the ability to perform data-driven funder advocacy to influence how policies and RFPs are crafted and implemented. 

This session will cover how Congreso utilizes HCD techniques to understand and improve upon the client experience in its programs, including investigating pain points, inefficiencies, and inequities, and how staff leverage those insights to influence change at the funding/policy level.

This session will cover: 

Learning Objectives

Presenters

Brendan Conlin
Chief Program Officer
Congreso de Latinos Unidos

Jamie Hughes
Vice President of Programmatic Development
Congreso de Latinos Unidos

In an ever-changing political climate, what is the role and responsibility of the social sector? Does the sector’s definition and practice of “health” adequately respond to the political agendas that shape the lives of the communities we serve? Are we aligned and united as a sector to address the politics affecting us all? Can we advance equity, diversity, inclusion, and justice without consideration of the political climate?

Ibram X. Kendi said, “Americans have long been trained to see deficiencies of people rather than policy. It’s a pretty easy mistake to make. People are in our faces. Policies are distant. We are particularly poor at seeing the policies lurking behind the struggles of people.”

This workshop seeks to create a candid conversation with a panel of experts. Does the mission and work of today’s human services sector encompass policy changes that address or remove root causes of poverty, mental and behavioral health issues, child maltreatment, and financial instability? Does it include responding to crises beyond offering thoughts, prayers and press releases? This session will explore ways to remain in a state of readiness for emerging crises as well as how to navigate the intersection of social justice issues and politics within your organization.

Learning Objectives

Presenters

Kim Peterson
Vice President of Change Management
Aviva Family and Children’s Services

Marlo Nash
Managing Director
Children’s Home Society of America

Undraye Howard
Vice President, Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Engagement
Social Current

From board members to managers to direct service staff, the experiences individuals have aren’t left at the workplace door (or now the Zoom waiting room). Brain science informs us that life experiences hardwire into the brain. Some experiences are psychologically and physically threatening and create a toxic stress response. Further, the person and the job are not separate. An individual’s personal life impacts their work performance. Further, an individual’s stress response and personal well-being show up in meetings or when addressing performance concerns whether they are conscious of it or not.

Trauma-informed management necessary for creating equitable practices in the workplace that recognize each employee is a unique individual with different perspectives that inform their decision making, performance, and perception of their work. Managers and supervisors have a duty to address self-care and be equipped with skills to address vicarious trauma and well-being in the workplace. Done well, trauma-informed supervision creates a culture of resilience.

In this session, we will take a deep dive into the basics of trauma and how trauma-informed principles can be adapted into supervisory principles to create relational safety and growth in the workplace.

Learning Objectives

Presenters

Kiera McGillivray
Chief Program Officer of School Based Initiatives
Children & Families First

Shannon Fisch
Compliance & Accreditation Manager
Children & Families First

In this session, we will share equitable solutions that shift power to communities and better support families. These strategies were identified through Child Safety Forward, a four-year federal demonstration initiative to develop multidisciplinary strategies and responses to address serious or near-death injuries as a result of child abuse or neglect and to reduce the number of child fatalities. The initiative is funded by the Department of Justice, Office for Victims of Crime. Social Current serves as the national technical assistance provider to sites in California, Connecticut, Illinois, Indiana, and Michigan.

The public health approach to this work rebalances power, credits multiple types of data, and centers learning. The evaluation has identified three core conditions necessary to building a reimagined child and family well-being system:

Although the U.S. child mortality rate has improved over time, the number of child deaths due to abuse and neglect has remained steady or even increased. Like other causes of childhood illness and death, child maltreatment can be prevented. This message was delivered in a report from the Commission to Eliminate Child Abuse and Neglect Fatalities, titled Within Our Reach. The report provided a blueprint for a public health approach that addresses the root causes of child maltreatment, engages with multiple stakeholders, and is a shared responsibility between families and communities. Based on this vision, the initiative strives to build a child and family well-being system where child protection agencies, community partners, neighbors, and families share a responsibility to ensure children thrive.

This workshop will take the very difficult problem of child abuse prevention and break it down into concrete, community-based strategies. We will engage participants in a conversation about equitable solutions to child safety and family well-being. We will also ask participants to share assets in their own communities, systems, and organizations that contribute to a transformed child and family well-being system.

Learning Objectives

Presenters

Jasmine Brosnan
Evaluation Senior Project Manager
Sacramento Child Abuse Prevention Center

Nicole DeWitt-Blumhardt
Project Specialist
Michigan Public Health Institute

Amy Templeman
Senior Director of Child & Family Well-Being
Social Current
@templedame

The topic of equity is one that is central to many systems of practice. This session will examine the root threads of equity in community and society from a health and economic lens and follow through to the significant health and economic outcomes of inequity. Buzzwords are incredibly powerful indicators within our fields of practice, including, most recently upstream approaches.

In this interactive session, we will take a closer look upstream by examining equity from its true health and economic lenses and imagine together how this deep understanding can inform addressing these concepts in practice. This will include a discussion of the ways in which addressing equity can lead to a more equitable distribution of resources and opportunities, as well as the ways in which addressing equity can lead to more effective and efficient use of resources.

This session will also explore specific real-world examples and case studies of how addressing equity has led to improved health outcomes, including examples of policy changes and community-based initiatives that have worked to address issues of equity and promote health.

Finally, we will discuss the importance of ongoing efforts to address equity and the role that individuals, organizations, and communities can play in this work. This will include a discussion of the ways in which individuals and organizations can work to promote equity and the ways in which communities can work together to address structural issues and promote health.

The overall goal of the session is to raise awareness of the importance of equity in relation to health and to provide attendees with a deeper understanding of the ways in which equity and health are interconnected, and how addressing equity can lead to improved health outcomes for all.

Learning Objectives

Presenters

Elizabeth Wendel
President and Co-Founder
Pale Blue.

What does it look like to align brain science and race equity and embed both into programming, organizational culture, and systems change efforts? Come learn from the experiences of the Texas Change in Mind Learning Collaborative. This two-year project brought together ten diverse human service organizations in Texas from 2021-2023 to provide foundational content, peer-to-peer learning, implementation supports, and sustainability planning focused on these critical and connected topics.
In this session, participants will learn about the theory of change that guides the work of Social Current’s Change in Mind Institute, and hear directly from participants in the Texas Change in Mind cohort about their experiences in this learning community. Specifically, the presenters will analyze the themes and strategies that emerged across the cohort related to transformational change at multiple levels—programmatic, organizational culture, and community/systems change.

Learning Objectives

Presenters

Ashley Tate
Impact & Data Quality Manager
Boys & Girls Clubs of Greater Houston

Vaughan Gilmore
Chief Clinical Officer
Santa Maria Hostel

Santiago Cirnigliaro
Director of Community Development
Texas Alliance of Child and Family Services

Kelly Martin
Director, Practice Excellence
Social Current

Karen Johnson
Senior Director of Change in Mind
Social Current