A big hello to staff across our agency! I’m new to the Senior Leadership Team and hope to meet as many FCC staff as possible in 2016. The staff of the Senior Leadership Team (Tita Yutuc, Diane Weigel, Rich Petro, Jamie Schloegel, Marci Hitz, Vanessa Southworth and myself) are putting together a schedule for each person to visit all of our locations. I look forward to meeting you!
I’ve been with the Family & Children’s Center for 21 years. Most of those years were spent working at our Viroqua office in the Community Support Program (CSP), helping adults with mental illness live successfully in the community. Currently, I oversee our Community Support Programs, our IPS (Individual Placement and Support) Employment Program, and the Other Door Drop In Center. I’m most involved in the agency-wide initiatives of New Revenue and Workplace Culture.
Today, I’d like to share with you what I’m working on in the area of New Revenue. I’ve talked with a series of staff and gone through a number of recommendations about types of housing and housing-related services Family & Children’s Center could pursue. There is clearly a need for safe, affordable housing for our clients. In addition, there also appears to be strong need for an additional corporate Adult Family Home in our area. However, due to the significant cost involved in purchasing real estate, these options are being tabled for the time being.
On the other hand, I’ve met with one of our largest purchasers and they’ve requested a very particular kind of service which is related to but does not include providing housing itself. These services are called LIVE-BY SERVICES. Live-By Services involve having professionals provide services that assist persons with mental health or AODA issues to complete tasks needed to live successfully in the community and maintain their housing. These tasks include medication monitoring, support and skills training, and assistance to complete house hold tasks such as cleaning and laundry. This sounds familiar because we provide similar services in our CSP programs. Thus, this would be a good fit for us to pursue. Two down sides are that services can only be provided within 10 minutes driving distance of the office and we have no guarantee of the number of clients who would be referred. The up sides include our experience providing services like these and the very little risk in giving this a try- we would have little investment needed to start the program. We are still working through the financial and operational details to see if this is truly a fit for FCC so stay tuned for updates!