| ORIENTATION TO FAITH-BASED SOCIAL SERVICES RESOURCE | | |  | |
Wrap-around Services: Serving Holistically
(Rachel Ver Wys, Center for Religion and Civic Culture, University of Southern California, 2004)
[They] come to our program homeless, destitute, broke, and hungry, as well as needing a job, needing training, needing clothing, needing resources….We have to provide [them] with other resources, such as housing subsidy, food subsidy, clothing subsidy. [We have to be] the program that refers them to other agencies to get more intense services that will carry them for the long haul.
-Program director from an urban homeless shelter
The quote above highlights a reality witnessed daily by many faith-based practitioners. The individuals they serve lead complicated lives. They face intense challenges and often have multiple needs. In response, many FBOs provide a “wrap-around” service strategy that embraces a systems model. In this approach, FBOs—either alone or collaboratively—offer services related to multiple life issues, e.g. transportation, child care, housing, and education. Advocates argue that this approach is designed to empower individuals, in other words, to encourage individuals to build on assets that they already possess.
A faith-based job development program in California has put this approach into practice. According to the program’s director, all staff activities are expressions of a single goal: “[To] economically empower citizens, not necessarily within [our part of the city], but anyone needing assistance, throughout their daily lives….”
This wrap-around approach—sometimes described by program directors as serving participants “holistically”–is characterized by:
* Relating Outcomes to Knowledge of Community: “Whenever we start a project,” the director reported, “we must know, first of all, our target area.” Program goals and objectives are shaped by knowledge of the community. Program staff pay attention to the community’s demographics, including its ethnic/language profile, unemployment rate, commercial profile, transportation services, and the profile of social services that are locally available. Projected program outcomes relate directly to what is known concerning the community’s assets and liabilities.
* Interagency Collaboration: Wrap-around services require that a program effectively collaborate and network with multiple agencies and institutions that provide services to low income individuals. Potential collaborative partners include churches, counseling agencies, Goodwill Industries, the Salvation Army, banks, schools, the department of social services, the American Cancer Society, community colleges, and hospitals. (To learn more about principles of effective collaboration, check out the resources available on FASTEN under the General Collaboration subtopic.)
* Participant Advocacy: Staff members stand ready to serve as advocates. For example, staff members in the job-training program aggressively attempt to work with potential employers to create positions in which participants can flourish. They assist employers in identifying the kinds of employee relations that are needed to help welfare-to-work participants along in their “often-stressful journeys.”
* Participant Feedback: Interviewing participants about their experience and listening to their ideas and suggestions helps an organization remain aware of perceptions, victories, and areas for improvement. A suggestion box gives participants the opportunity to offer insights confidentially. Service evaluation surveys help staff members to see which program elements are most helpful, which may be counter-productive, and which may be entirely missing. “We get lots of feedback from the people we serve,” the program director reported.
* Inclusive Learning and Growth: Through weekly meetings, staff members at the job training program are able to speak about what is going well and about what may need to be changed. There is opportunity for dialogue around new ideas and challenges. Dialogue creates an open atmosphere for learning and growth.
The wrap-around-service model does not start with a participant’s weaknesses. It is not preoccupied with a participant’s pathologies. Instead, it builds on the participant’s own assets. In the intake process of the job-training program, for example, participants are asked to describe their strengths. When participants are referred to jobs, both the participants and staff members together create opportunities to interpret these strengths to potential employers. Participants are invited to help each other out—invitations that reinforce the idea that participants possess strengths that are valuable enough to share with others.
For some program administrators, the wrap-around service delivery model may be new. It may also be unfamiliar to public social service agencies and to nonprofit human service programs. To learn more about wrap-around service the following internet resources provide a good start: http://www.npi.ucla.edu/mhdd/INFO/modules/wraparoundservices.htm> and
http://www.dpw.state.pa.us/Omhsas/Guidelines/Ch_Ad_EXPECT2.asp
Program directors who wish to adopt a wrap-around approach can take several steps:
* First, survey your community to discover what resources can be used to empower your program’s participants in their efforts to deal with situations that have been disabling. Learn what other public and private organizations are doing and don’t view them as competitors. Consider them allies in meeting the needs of particular participants. Bringing together non-profits, religious institutions, schools and city services can create an avenue for holistic dissemination of services to families. It also may prevent unnecessary service duplication because information is shared among all organizations at the table. Collaboration may prove to be a powerful vehicle for individual and community transformation.
* Second, identify with the perspectives of participants. Become advocates for their interests. View services that your program offers through their eyes. Do your services empower participants? Take an inventory of ways in which your programs build participants’ skills and talents. Also ask yourself: How are you helping participants to access other community resources in building their strengths?
* Third, learn from other community-based organizations about how the health of neighborhoods affects the well-being of participants. Become advocates of the neighborhood’s interests by representing community concerns to political figures and to other public and private agencies. For example, if inferior transportation opportunities hamper the ability of participants to access services, organize the community to work with public officials to find ways to expand these services.
[1] This is part of a series of Thumbnail Case Studies authored by the FASTEN research team and released by Baylor University School of Social Work as part of a 30-month research project funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts. This project is designed to identify the factors that contribute to the effectiveness of faith-based organizations (FBOs) in addressing challenges of urban poverty. The Baylor School of Social Work is leading this research team with members from BaylorUniversity’s business school, the schools of social work at the University of Pittsburgh and VirginiaCommonwealthUniversity, and the Center for Religion and Civic Culture at the University of Southern California.
This essay represents some of the findings from the FASTEN research project that are relevant to the planning and delivery of services by faith-based organizations. The piece was authored by Rachel Ver Wys (with the Center for Religion and Civic Culture at the University of Southern California) with the FASTEN Research Team. She can be reached at Rachel [dot] verwys [at] verizon [dot] net.
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