Connecting and Integrating
- community engagement, community relations, human services, integrative partnerships, inter-agency, non-profit, non-profit communications, non-profit operations, partnerships
Think of your organization as a puzzle. You open it up and start assembling the pieces only to realize many pieces are missing. What do you do? You can’t finish it so you leave it half finished?
Except that too often we don’t realize the other pieces of the puzzle are not really missing at all.
You can use other agencies to provide the other five pieces of the puzzle and not do it by yourself. For Human Services, it is NOT about creating new services and/or programs to complete the process BUT about using other, existing agencies first.
A single organization rarely has the full expertise to complete the process and do it in a timely manner.
One Stop Centres are ideal, but it does not mean that one organization provides all of the services at the One-Stop. At Beatrice House, we integrated outside agencies into our process because it was cheaper and in a later homeless organization, we integrated five of the nine programs from outside for our comprehensive employment program. By integrating, instead of re-inventing, we are able to create complete client processes – all at one site. The agencies came to the clients.
Connecting with other agencies is critical for client success but we do not do it nearly enough. In fact, various levels of government do not connect with one another. At one time, we had federal and provincial housing programs that were almost identical and competed for the same client.
Communities can no longer afford to fund stand-alone programming.
The cost per patient for one night in a hospital ranges from $800 to $1200. Hospitals should not be involved in chronic care. It means the community is not doing its job effectively and yet emergency departments are overwhelmed with chronic issues.
We can share resources. When I created a committee of outside expertise in York Region, we helped each other. One of the agencies provided us all with free training. This benefitted the police, veteran affairs, employment agencies and other organizations learning about new topics of interest at no cost to us.
Adam Grant in his book, “Give and Take” found that those who were the most successful in business were people who were Givers who were also great connectors. They shared information, and they helped others with no expectation of a return. This is what we need to do more of.
It seems that issues in our system only get fixed when the system fails enough that there is a costly lawsuit pending. “Leading by Liability”. We try to manage risk, but we can’t manage risk if we do not manage beyond our own department.
Encouraging connections amongst agencies and integrating resources is the best prevention to lawsuits because you are sharing resources and responsibility amongst the community. Creating and measuring processes that have end goals and integrating community agencies within the process is the best way to prevent frustrated clients and costly lawsuits.