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.

Rochelle Riley, Detroit Free Press Published 6:00 a.m. ET Oct. 14, 2018

Dr. Maria Muzik, an Associate Professor in the University of Michigan’s Department of Psychiatry, left, chats with Mary Ludtke from the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services Wednesday, Oct. 10, 2018 at the opening of the new Starfish Partnering with Parents Center in Dearborn. (Photo: Rochelle Riley, Detroit Free Press)

Imagine being the parent of a child whose needs are many and may include physical therapy, occupational therapy, speech therapy and psychological counseling to deal with trauma.

Now imagine that you, the parent of that child, must take your child to different places all over the county for each of those services, whether you have the transportation, time off work — or money to make it happen.

Now imagine that you are that child. And you’re 5 years old. And you to go to all of those places while also going to school.

If you can’t feel the sheer frustration and pain of that or are unmoved by any child or family having to endure that, then you should skip this column. You should just keep ignoring that, by ignoring the plight of children in need, we are ignoring the potential of children who could be future leaders of industry, politics, health or community.

Instead, we make them future burdens.

But if you understand that Michigan’s future depends on how well we empower and prepare all of our children, then we have something to celebrate: that a community agency that serves hundreds of children is trying something different.

Starfish Family Services, which announced last year its intent to focus more on helping children through trauma, has created that rare center that allows families to get all their services in one place. Starfish isn’t the first, but it is helping to lead the way in changing how family service agencies work. Starfish, which works with hundreds of families and children a year, has consolidated the services they offered in four different places all in one space for children up to age 6 at the new Partnering with Parents Center in Dearborn.

The 12,500-square-foot space has applied behavior analysis rooms for children who have autism, group therapy rooms, sensory rooms for occupational and physical therapy, a speech therapy room and a couple of outpatient therapy rooms.

The center, a one-stop shop for families, is creating a neighborhood of services and making a family of those who need help and those who give it.

“We had a lot of focus groups with families and a lot of what we were hearing was that they were tired of having to go four, five sometimes six, locations to get the services they needed for their children, Gillian Ogilvie, manager of maternal and early childhood services at Starfish, said in an interview. She will manage day-to-day operations at the center.

“We had kids who had such diverse needs, and they had providers all over the county, in multiple buildings. And our families were saying how challenging that was, traveling and building relationships with different centers. So we wondered how we could we pull all the services we provide into one location, a professional home for parents to go to. This was a huge wake-up call for us.”

It should be a huge wake-up call for all agencies working with children and families. We have to stop making it so hard for children and families to get help.

We have to stop pretending that trauma doesn’t affect how children feel in a classroom, at a camp, on a stage.

What Starfish is doing is creating a family of care to improve the lives of families. And they are doing it at a time when the tensions and rancor and trauma of the times, whether it is kids experiencing or seeing violence to a general increase in anger across our communities.

The reason I’m learning so much about Starfish is because the organization is my partner on a months-long project looking at how trauma and toxic environments affect how children learn.

That means spending time with the 75 staff members in their new Dearborn space in The Atrium, a mirrored building that, ironically, allows those entering to see themselves coming and going.

The goal is to make sure those going see themselves more clearly and feel more prepared to do great things.

“… We see kids who are living with toxic stress,” Ogilvie said. “That is not an anomaly among people. We don’t make assumptions that families are living in trauma, but typically they experience trauma whether it’s the parent or child. We make sure families have access to relationship-based services. Every service we provide has some kind of parent component or building better relationships between parent and child to boost resilience from any kind of traumatic event.

“We want to make sure each child as a secure attachment relationship in their lives,” she said. “And parents are more likely to accept help if all the help is in one place and they’re familiar with the staff. They don’t want to hear, ‘We want to refer you to this establishment down the road. We don’t know how you’ll get there and don’t know where you’ll park and you won’t know the staff, but….’”

The center, which will serve 750 children and families, had its open house on Wednesday, on World Mental Health Day, which since 1992, has existed to help remove the stigma of mental illness.

If the world can do it, then individual communities must remove the stigma, work together to give children what they need to all start on a level playing field and start building leaders rather than lingerers, bright stars rather than those to whom we point and wonder what might have been.

Contact Rochelle Riley at rriley99@freepress.com. Follow her on Twitter @rochelleriley. 

Did you catch us on WDIV Local 4: Live in the D? Starfish media stars Kecia Rorie (Deputy Director, Thrive by Five), Sherry Rowe (Head Start teacher, Covenant House), and Lance Reed (Education, Curriculum and Disability Manager Birth to Five Program) made an appearance to talk more about Thrive by Five. They even showed host Tati Amare how parents can make Play-Doh at home and how they can help their children develop fine motor skills. Our community kids are definitely getting a head start on life at Thrive by Five Detroit!