APHSA Annual Report 2018

Peer-to-Peer Integration Institute through APHSA, with sponsorship from the Kresge Foundation, CYFC has taken the initial steps toward realizing this vision. Through the Integration Institute, the department has utilized APHSA’s Organizational Effectiveness’ DAPIM change management framework to define the desired future state of the community with community input and feedback, and then assessed its current status. As a result, it has learned that its citizens do not view the purpose of the human services system truly as a service of the community. APHSA’s facilitation process has helped the department to define its collective vision of Hope, Healing, and Health; understand where it currently is about its vision; and identify a plan moving forward informed by the causes that have been barriers to moving the community toward hope, healing and health. In addition to utilizing the maturity model self-assessment to evaluate the state of system integration for Chippewa County DHS and its human serving partners, Chippewa focused a qualitative portion of its assessment on understanding the perspective of the people and communities that it serves. Two-hour, in-home interviews were designed to understand the life goals of the community members as well as gaps and causes related to the services and

programs provided by DHS and its human serving partners. These interviews were conducted by CYFC members external to DHS and revealed that for the people of Chippewa County, hope was commonly regarded as a positive attitude toward the future, and centered around good health, education and employment, leading to family economic self-sufficiency, owning a house and raising healthy and prosperous children. The community interviews identified primary gaps of a general lack of coordination throughout the system and lack of connection and inability to access relevant information through the system. As a result of the assessment and roadmap planning efforts, Chippewa County’s strategy focuses on developing its services integration and alignment with social sector partners, shared community metrics around community identified outcomes, developing of community social capital, multisector work groups for collective impact and influencing the community toward solutions, policies and methods that address root causes of poverty. Another critical impact was the strengthening of the capacity of the Chippewa CYFC through a partnership with the University of WI extension, identification of community leaders dedicated to advancing hope, health and healing and a feeling of goodwill generated from the interviewees who had an opportunity to share their story and feel heard.

“Through the Peer to Peer Institute, we have engaged an APHSA Organizational Effectiveness (OE) Facilitator and learned to utilize APHSA’s OE unit’s change management framework called DAPIM (Define, Assess, Plan, Implement and Monitor). Through this process of defining our desired future state of our community, with our community, and then assessing our current status, we’ve learned that our citizens don’t view the purpose of our human service system as truly in service of the community: “The system serves the system.” Although the ‘system’ espouses that it serves individuals and families based on their hopes and dreams, little evidence supports this belief in practice from the citizen’s perspective. The facilitation process thus far has helped us define our collective vision of Hope, Healing and Health, understand where we currently are about our vision and identify a plan moving forward informed by the causes that have been barriers to moving our community toward hope, healing and health.”

– Larry Winter, Director, Chippewa County Department of Human Services

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