Agenda - 09-03-1996 - X-A - Laserfiche WebLink

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5 PREFACE On January 16, 1996, the Orange County Board of Commissioners appointed a Human Services Reform Task Force with a charge to: "Convene public and private sector stakeholders for 90 days and present recommendations to the Board on: measurable outcomes in human services, human service priorities, an acceptable safety-net for adults and families with children, current resources available to meet the needs, and gaps in the resources to support the needs." More than 40 citizens, including human service professionals, citizen activists, and human services users, worked on the Task Force; many others provided valuable information and advice. A listing of the Task Force membership appears in Appendix I. We accomplished our work through four subcommittees or work groups (Adults, Children and Families, Outcomes, and Outreach) and a series of whole-group meetings. This report reflects the consensus of the full Task Force. It is organized around the various elements in the charge with several exceptions that are described below. We added vision and mission statements to guide our work, developed guidelines to help achieve the vision and mission, identified criteria to help frame outcomes, and decided to use the term "essential elements of well-being' instead of "acceptable safety net." Lacking the data needed to establish measurable outcomes, we asked the Outreach Work Group to design an instrument that can be used to collect information, through surveys or focus groups, from system users, human service professionals, and the public-at-large. (See Outreach Work Group report in Appendix VI).