Despite low unemployment rates and a fairly strong economy, the number of homeless and food insecure continue to rise. According to the recently released State of the Homeless 2019 report, as of January, in New York City alone, an all-time record number (63,839) of men, women and children slept in shelters each night. And, according to Feeding America, 40-million people struggle with hunger in the U.S., including more than 12-million children.

If you run a shelter or food bank, chances are you have more to do and more to process every day. That’s where having the right social services software can help you focus more on providing food and shelter and less on paperwork and processes.

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.

In recent years, funders are demanding that social service organizations analyze their program activities and outputs in a more meaningful way. For agencies to just say they are “doing good” is no longer enough. Organizations now need to justify costs by demonstrating program value. They must be able to justify their programs and funding by illustrating the quality of their services and show that their programs are producing meaningful outcomes that are aligned with larger policy priorities.

Let’s begin 2019 with some good news…

This Christmas Brian Breach got into the spirit of giving, but with a twist; he decided to give to givers. He dressed down as if he were homeless, printed a sign that asked for donations to feed his family at Christmas, and stood in front of a mall with a tin cup. When anyone approached and dropped coins into his cup, he would give them a crisp new $100 bill. “I wanted to recognize the good giving people who would willingly share the little they have to help a stranger in need.” 

Tesla - “Oh…and it’s all electric”

A recent encounter with an eager, young representative (don’t call them salesman) in a Tesla store (not a showroom) first amused me, but then alerted me to the fact that I was guilty of a similar oversight in my own business.  

The United States Department of Health and Human Services budget for 2018 is a healthy $1,131 Billion. To keep this astounding number in perspective, a trillion dollar plus budget for HHS is nothing new. In 2016 the total outlay for HHS was $1,103 Billion and in 2017 the number will come in close to $1,130 Billion.

The Health and Human Services budget is the backbone of our entire social services system. Here’s how this enormous amount of money will be spent:

The universe of social services is populated with heroes.

That’s the theme that emerged from our year-end review of blogs we posted in 2017. Every story we attempted to tell contained an individual or an organization that went above and beyond the norm in service to their constituents. 

Looking for the right case management software can be a challenge for anyone in the nonprofit sector. After all, there are so many choices and few that actually address the needs of a human services agency at a price that is affordable. When looking, it is tempting to simply look at the price tag first and then see what the software can accomplish. "What can I get for the money...?" while an important question is probably not the most important... at least when starting off.

Since the 1870s, social service agencies have been working diligently to find housing for the homeless, yet on a single night in January 2015, 564,708 people were considered homeless in America.

This blog has been sending up an alert about our country’s looming long-term care crisis for the past two years. In our book, The Aging Tidal Wave, we warned that the country’s finances, facilities, and aged care personnel were about to be overwhelmed by the rapidly aging baby boomer generation.