Archives for December 2018

By Renee Summers, Telegram Newspaper, Published Dec. 27, 2018

Being a parent is a full-time job. It’s not an easy one, and these days there are many who simply walk away from the responsibility. But take heart; there are those who are up to the challenge. Just ask Starfish Family Service’s Susan Powers.

Starfish Family Services is a non-profit agency which has been helping parents and families since 1963. Its mission states, “Strengthening families to create brighter futures for children.” Powers works out of the agency’s Dearborn Offices and manages and organizes The Parenthood Program, aimed at pregnant and parenting teenagers. Powers admits that she herself was a teen mom years ago and that it wasn’t easy. “I talk from experience, you know, I’ve been there, I know the challenges that you face,” she says. Powers uses her experience to reach other young girls (and yes, a few boys), enabling them to see that parenthood can be very fulfilling. “I felt like I could have an impact,” she adds.

Starfish Family Services works with the Michigan Adolescent Pregnancy and Parenting Program (MI-APP), a program funded by the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (MDHHS). Through their partnership, Starfish and MI-APP seek to teach teen parents basic child care and development and how to interact with their baby. Numerous methods and paths are used to achieve this goal, including utilizing resources already available within the community.

The Parenting Program is voluntary, open to anyone 20 years and younger, and free of cost. Powers performs engagement and outreach with high schools, teen clinics, libraries and community centers. Some pregnant teens and teen parents are referred to Starfish via other social agencies or case workers with state aid agencies.

Each case is different and the program is personalized to suit what each participant needs. “We try to help them finish growing up,” Powers says. “These are still kids. They’re teenagers-but they’re parents. ”

A case manager meets with each client a minimum of twice a month, either at home or at school. They help teen parents identify basic short-term goals, such as passing a math test in school, and attain them. This provides confidence to keep striving. The focus can also be on finishing high school, applying for community college, obtaining a driver’s license or state ID, finding employment, or managing a weekly budget. These are skills most people learn as young adults. But for a teen parent, the skills become a life necessity and acquiring them becomes urgent.

The Parenthood Program also assists with transportation issues, which can be a barrier to anyone striving for a better life. “We want to get them from where they are to where they need to be in order to be productive adults,” says Powers. Many of the teen parents lack any sort of support system. The program aims to fill that void through group meetings that engage young girls with other teen parents while focusing on a particular topic such as financial organization, job hunting and resume writing, and relationships. Sometimes, they just need to talk, and talking and listening can help teen parents realize they are not alone.

But it’s not all seriousness and work. Powers often takes a small group of teens and their babies to local libraries to participate in story hours. Sometimes they visit a local park, and this past summer, a group went to the Detroit Zoo. The goal is to get the teens to realize the resources available to them in their communities, and take the initiative to access those resources. Powers says she finds it extremely rewarding to see teen parents interact with their babies in positive ways, trying to be the best parents they can. The biggest challenge, she says, is getting teen dads involved in their babies’ lives.

Four key areas Powers says the program focuses on are education and career success, adult relationship support, teen parent and child health, and family stability. The program is working; in 2017, they celebrated seven high school graduates, four of whom are still clients of The Parenthood Program. Some have found employment while others have gone on to higher education.

For more information on Starfish Family Services and The Parenthood Program, visit http://www.starfishfamilyservices.org. or call 734-756-1860. Susan Powers can be reached at spowers@sfish.org.

About the program

Data is key to helping nonprofits measure and communicate their impact and to making strategic decisions about where best to invest scarce resources. But it’s not always easy to figure out how to measure intangible things like a child’s well-being, overall development and likelihood of succeeding in college. The co-winners of the 2018 Best-Managed Nonprofit contest are doing exactly that.

This year, judges chose to lift up both a larger-budget nonprofit and a smaller nonprofit for the steps they are taking to get their arms around their data and use it in meaningful ways to better meet their missions.

Midnight Golf has launched two new data systems over the past year. One is aimed at keeping track of the growing number of high school seniors and college students it’s supporting. The other helps track its donors and their interests, while also providing a source of internship possibilities for the students it serves. Starfish Family Services is bringing data from over 20 disparate systems into a single system that will provide a more complete view of all of the programs a child or family it serves is receiving, along with indicators of how those clients are doing overall.

Starfish Family Services building master record system to consolidate client data

• It’s committed $2 million, 3-5 years to develop and roll out the new system
• Will eliminate duplication, provide holistic view of children and family success
• Expected to produce $2.5 million in cost savings, new revenue

One of Starfish Family Services’ core strengths is its ability to serve children and families through a variety of early childhood, children’s mental health and family support programs.

But that same breadth of service has also been its Achilles’ heel.

Information on the clients in each of its programs lives in different, siloed systems. That creates stress and frustration for parents who are asked to provide the same information over and over again. And it prevents Starfish staff from linking things like a young child’s behavioral issues in the classroom with stress happening at home due to a pending foreclosure, something communicated to the agency by the child’s mom through a separate Starfish program.

“We end up with 20 different data systems we’re putting information in” on who’s served and their outcomes, President and CEO Ann Kalass said.

“If we’re looking at the whole child … we want to be able to see everything (they) are getting from us in early childhood, in Head Start and mental health services,” she said. “We may have a hypothesis that a combination of programs creates better outcomes … but we can’t prove it until the data is linked.”

Starfish has set out to tackle the complex issue by bringing data from all of the disparate systems into a single, master record system that will enable it to see all of the programs a child or family is receiving through the agency, success indicators across them and family relationships. That, in turn, will enable it to better identify causative factors and gaps in service.

It’s committed $2 million and three to five years to develop and roll out the new, child and family master record system, a data warehouse that will enable it to report out data to funders and dashboards to track sets of data.

Starfish, which is operating on a $46 million budget for fiscal 2019, is funding the costs of the new system from its reserves and unrestricted operating funds.

It expects to more than recoup its investment by the time it’s fully rolled out the new system in 2022.

“We see this as an investment in something we have to do in order to achieve our mission and our family-centric view,” Kalass said.

“As a sector, to have the impact we want, we need capacity investments that make our programs work.”

Getting data in line

First and foremost, the goal with the new, master record system is to improve services to families and to make it easier for staff to provide those services, said Kirsten Mack, director of value acceleration.

Starfish has contracted with Boulder, Colorado-based Global Data Strategy Ltd. to develop the new child master record system.

It’s spent the past year and a half establishing data governance to ensure all data entered across the nonprofit and its programs will be consistent. That includes everything from who will enter data and be able to access data to how it will be structured, Mack said. For example, it might mean designating someone’s race as “white,” for example, vs. “Caucasian,” or using numerical birthdates rather than spelling out months so that the system can read all data.

Starfish is also working to establish an organizationwide data warehouse where it can report out on all of the data from the disparate systems. All of the data from the master record system gets put into the warehouse. “That’s how we can see holistic data … and report out on it,” Mack said.

The agency has entered its first set of data, behavioral health information, into the data warehouse and is producing weekly updates that track completion of required documentation for clients or progress toward targets for clients through “dashboards” or visual representations of data that Mack and her team liken to a car’s instrument panel.

The gas gauge, for example, might show progress toward an enrollment target for the number of children in an early childhood education program on a dashboard, she said. Staff are notified of weekly dashboard updates by email and can log into the system to access the latest progress reports.

Data governance and the data warehouse will form the foundation for establishing the child and family master record.

“Our plan is by this time next year to have the master record system launched,” Mack said.

From that point, it’s expected to take another one to three years to be fully implemented where data is entered into the master system and pushed out to the other funder systems for reporting purposes.

Return on investment

Just a year and a half in to development of the new system, Starfish is already seeing cost savings as it changes how it manages data. The automation of some data management led to the elimination of one full-time position that’s expected to save about $100,000 a year, Kalass said.

More efficient data entry is also freeing staff up to spend more time working with clients, and that’s increased billable revenue, Mack said. And the weekly dashboard updates on required behavioral health documentation has increased the number of claims paid, which is starting to produce more revenue on that front.

By the time the new system is fully online in 2022, cost savings and increased revenue from the more efficient system are projected to add up to $2.5 million, Mack said.