Agenda - 06-05-1995 - X-A - Laserfiche WebLink

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a 8 ESTABLISHING A COMMUNITY ACCOUNTABILITY SYSTEM FOR HUMAN SERVICES COLLABORATION All communities struggle with issues of human services fragmentation, duplication, gaps, and inefficiency. Ways to coordinate human servi;es has been as a public concern since the origins of formal human services programs. HumAn services sponsors, professionals, and volunteers spend a considerable amount of their time attempting to make services more efficient, effective, and relevant. Although consensus in public policy is rare, there is a widely held view that coordination and collaboration among human service providers are essential to efficient and effective delivery systems. There have been no easy or simple solutions to the issues surrounding agencies and/or programs working together as a "system." In fact, there is considerable evidence-- both from history and research--to suggest that coordination is a "manageable" but not "solvable" condition. Each human service agency and/or program operates from a distinct and separate mandate or special interest, has its own reporting and accountability system, and was generally created at a specific time historically to deal with a specific political and social priority. Most programs have their own eligibility criteria, administrative structure, and criteria for success, To further complicate the issue, public human service programs are administered in bureaucracies such as Health, Social Services, etc. which have their own culture, ideology, professional technology, and political economy. Efforts to "solve" the issues of human services coordination on a permanent basis have largely been unsuccessful. Each era appears to invent new ways to promote coordination. During the early part of this century communities cfeated mechanisms such as "Health and Welfare Councils" or "community registries" to d�il.with service coordination. In the 1970s and early 1980s there was a strong movement to deal with the issue through reorganization States and some counties created umbrella agencies in an effort to realign and integrate service programs and resources. This effort generally resulted in adding an additional level of bureaucracy. Even occasional mandates by parent organizations to coordinate local programs failed to provide the necessary waivers of individual agency requirements for local initiatives to be successful. Along with the single agency strategy came efforts to create common user information systems that could serve all programs. Currently there is considerable experimentation taking place with new "collaboratives"--structures and processes for pooling, sharing, and locating professional resources from different programs or agencies in high-risk neighborhoods, school systems, housing developments, etc. Also renewed emphasis is being given to creating and managing public-private "networks" of service programs and/or agencies. Communities which have experimented with one-stop service centers or single portals of entry models of structuring services are finding that they continue to have problems with coordination.. Although agency and/or program coordination cannot be completely solved short of creating a new political and economic system, the issue can be managed at the community level. In fact each community is confronted with the task of developing its own