The FAMCare Blog

How we care for the most vulnerable among us is one of the great challenges of our time. As Mahatma Ghandi once said, “A nation’s greatness is measured by how it treats its weakest members.” And social workers are hard-pressed to find one group in more dire need of urgent attention than children at risk of neglect or abuse.

Children deprived of a safe, nurturing family environment are entitled to special protection, assistance and alternative care. And today’s caseworkers can most effectively address this with the right social services software.

While doing some spring cleaning on the FAMCare Blog, I stumbled across this brief but excellent blog article from our very own Danielle Ritacco from March 2017.

Dr. Anna Scheyett, PhD, is the speaker, and this is her TED Talk about social workers. Dr. Scheyett's research, which she conducts as a professor at The University of Georgia, has focused on the needs of vulnerable populations. In this Ted Talk, she gives a succinct 7-minute summary of why social workers are superhumans. It's reassuring to know that some people recognized social workers as superheroes even before the pandemic that rocked social services to its core.

So Happy Social Worker Month.  Please enjoy this reposted TED Talk! 

It can certainly be frustrating to submit a helpdesk ticket and wait, for what feels like an eternity, for a resolution.  You may wonder, “Why am I not getting a response?  What is taking so long?”  You may also be asking yourself, “Did I provide enough information?”

Struggling with staying on top of all of your cases?  Worried that someone may fall through the cracks?  Not sure how you can possibly help all of your clients achieve their best outcome?

As a former caseworker for DFCS, I've been there.  I also know the transformation I had to go through to take control of my workday and case load.

Ready to start your FAMCare journey? 

While each implementation can be different and have their own nuances, we have a template we follow for each of our implementations regardless of the size of the organization or the type of services they offer to their clients.

Refugees create unique issues for human services organizations, especially when it comes to creating and maintaining an accurate database to manage the care they need. One of the main things you find with onboarding the refugees into your database is the difficult nature of getting accurate data. It is hard to track that information and store that information and then to get your database to talk to other databases that data.

Government agencies in general tend to stay in their own siloes and be reluctant to share information. Some of it is agency caseworkers being too busy. Some of it is concerns about being HIPAA compliant. And some of it is a healthy paranoia about data security. The right government software solutions can alleviate much of those concerns.

I recently read an article in Forbes about how Electronic Health Records (EHRs) are broken. And while some of the points they made were appalling, they weren’t surprising – at least, not to me. We’ve known about the limitations of the government approved EHRs for some time now.

I have seen first hand how having the right human services software can really make a difference in kids’ lives. How kids that are in the system, for whatever reason, can get better treatment, better understanding and a chance to just be kids.

For a nonprofit organization, gaining a better understanding of the data in their system can go a long way towards helping them achieve their mission. Why is data so important for nonprofit organizations? Ultimately, it all comes down to accountability.

The right nonprofit software solution can help you understand your data and find that accountability. It should be one that is user-friendly, effective and thorough. When buying software, you may think the technology aspect is the most important, but it is truly about having the right attitude and change management in place. If you have the right attitude and right people to involve in that change management, there will be success.