HIGHLIGHTS “MAKING THE FAMILY JUSTICE CENTER WORK” PRESENTATION

HIGHLIGHTS “MAKING THE FAMILY JUSTICE CENTER WORK” PRESENTATION

CEO Gael Strack and Dr. Denise McCain shared their lessons learned in Making a Family Justice Center Work. A copy of the entire power point presentation is available as an appendix. A few key highlights are shared here:

First, they explained how a Family Justice Center conducts centralized intake and outlined the key steps:

- Warm welcome

- Verify the client is at the right location - Short intake form is completed - Verify information and conduct a basic conflict check

- Check the client into the FJC

- Hospitality Volunteer greets the Clients, provides overview of the Center and offer refreshments

- The clinical screener is contacted and conducts an intake

During the screening, the clinical screener:

- Provides an overview of the services

- Discusses the intake process - Discusses mandatory reporting, consent, confidentiality, information-sharing and services requested - Creates a service plan - Conducts risk assessment, safety planning and follow-up - Ensures services are prioritized and provided with other partners - Conducts an Exit Interview to verify services were provided, answer any questions, provide additional information, verify parking and safety leaving the center and receive feedback from the client

The participants asked a lot of questions concerning confidentiality, training of partners, collaboration, partnership agreements, meetings and how decisions were made. Gael and Denise each shared their own secrets of success which included open communication, including others in decision making, developing a communication plan, working on relationship building every day, creating a culture of shared ownership and culture of hope. They also shared resources from the Alliance such as Dream Big (the Why), Dream Big, Start Small (the How), webinars and sample partnership agreements, operations manual and sample scenarios the Operations and Service Delivery Work Group could go through, all available in the resource library.