Safe Havens: How Community Centers Change Children's Trajectories

In every corner of the world, communities hold the power to usher in transformative changes, especially for their youngest and most vulnerable members. Often seen as mere byproducts of their circumstances, children can rewrite their destinies when local communities step forward as catalysts of support and growth. By nurturing these young lives through education, mentorship, and care, a community can alter individual destinies while charting the course for its collective future prosperity.

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.

Government social service agencies are transitioning from being providers of services to entities that predominantly commission, facilitate, or broker services. This transition requires new skills in government – such as agility, innovation, transparency and connectedness – and new capabilities for facilitating relationships with external partners – such as flexibility, co-venturing, co-creation.

Social workers across the country often ask us how we create the software products that have become the standard for the industry. The answer is…collaboration. Global Vision Technology designers and engineers are constantly collaborating with social work professionals to design and redesign the FAMCare suite of products now used by thousands of social workers in hundreds of diverse agencies. We are conducting an ongoing social work hackathon.

The things you do as a caseworker can have a great impact on the lives of those in your care. You are both the lead investigator and client advocate. You recommend what social services would best fit their needs. You give support and referrals, then follow up on each client’s progress. It is a demanding, but rewarding job. You're helping people improve their situations and create a better life in the long run.

We are in an unprecedented stretch of strong economic conditions where there are more jobs than job applicants. Yet, there are still many children and families who are suffering and in need of government agency help. So many, in fact, that human services caseworkers often still feel overwhelmed by heavy caseloads and the accompanying paperwork.

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.

At a recent college career day, this troubling question was asked repeatedly; “What do social workers do?” The question was troubling because it came with the realization that most college age students have no clear idea what social workers do. They are, therefore, less inclined to pick social work as a career choice.

Our recent blog on the true cost of healthcare ignited a robust response from social workers who specialize in public health. This relatively new but growing social work specialty stresses a socio-epidemiological approach to the prevention and management of the chronic diseases that plague our society.

About a year ago, President Trump signed the Family First Prevention Service Act into law. Social workers engaged in child and family care praised the legislation as the first “prevention” measure to help keep children safely with their families and avoid the traumatic experience of entering foster care. The act emphasized the importance of children growing up in families and helps ensure children are placed in the least restrictive, most family-like setting appropriate to their special needs when foster care is needed.