Family-Driven Care

The stakeholders of our initiative are in agreement that:

• Family-professional collaboration actively involves family members in ongoing dialogue and decisions at all levels of the service system, including governance, evaluation, training, program design and implementation, and delivery of services.
• Families help improve services by holding the service system accountable and ensure that the focus of collaboration with multiple agencies remains targeted to children, youth, and their families. They provide constancy and consistency in collaborative efforts despite changes in administrative staff and funding over time.

A key purpose of the Rural Children's initiative is to build on our collaborative current partnerships with families.  The initiative will allocate funds from the budget to financially support the activities of families.  Using the guidelines provided by SAMHSA, funds will be used for family incentives and support for a variety of activities of this initiative (i.e., evaluation, child care, transportation stipends, training).  We will work with our current collaborative partner, Uniting Parents, and a chapter of Federation of Families to help develop stable family-run organizations and support groups.

Building on our current family partners, other Year 1 action steps to help us establish family-driven care include, but are not limited to:

• Agency stakeholders will hold monthly education and support sessions;
• A principal parent partner from the Children's Partnership (or other SOC site) will be brought in to mentor and lead local parents at least 2 times during funding cycle.
• Agency stakeholders will engage at least 5 family partners to participate in focus groups for developing the strategic plan;
• Parent/family partners from each county will complete training on the SOC and wraparound process.
• LEAF family members will recruit and mentor at least 1 apprentice family member.

To promote the understanding that full family partnership is the key ingredient in moving from a conventional to a comprehensive service system, providers, stakeholders, and governing entities will continue to be educated and encouraged to use resources, guides, and toolkits oriented to ensuring family-driven care (Duchnowski & Kutash, 2007; Osher, Osher, & Blau, 2006).

We server 11 West Texas counties: Bailey, Briscoe, Castro, Crosby, Dickens, Floyd, Hale, Lamb, Motley, Parmer, and Swisher Submenu button for each county under Family Driven