Top Accomplishments FY17

The Home has made identifying permanent and healthy relationships a priority as soon as children enter our care. In FY17, we fully implemented the Permanency Initiative. All staff in our placement and aging out programs have been trained in principals and practice elements of permanency in FY17. Staff at all levels in our group homes, residential facilities and aging out programs work with youth and their identified permanency resources to ensure that each young person leaves our care with at least one permanent caring adult in their life.

In FY17, The Home expanded its Young Men of Color Conference (YMOC). We had 33% more participants than the prior year and we expect this growth to continue annually. In addition, the one day conference grew into a year-long series of activities for staff and young men of color to touch base, discuss current and past issues, and participate in shared activities and learning experiences. Students and faculty from Brandeis University pair up with HFLW staff to facilitate these activities. These activities are less formal and include barbecues and team-building recreational activities, but are just as valuable for the youth to remain connected to each other and to the HFLW and Brandeis staff that have formed relationships with them. YMOC was originally created in 2015 in response to the nation's struggles with issues of race and the relationship between police and communities of color.

Goals for FY18

· Deliver five expert testimonies at State or Federal level

· 100% of students receiving services through the reading specialist program will meet or exceed their ELA IEP goal(s)

· 65% of school-age children and youth demonstrate improvement in their mental health functioning (by exit) as measured by the Child and Adolescent Functional Assessment Scale - CAFAS

· 100% of youth in placement will make progress on their permanency plans while in care.

General Operating funds to support our programs serving over 12,000 children and families living in at-risk circumstances

Financial support for our new Permanency Initiative which focuses on the early creation and continued implementation of permanency placement plans for every child in our care.

Support for our education vision: to ensure that all youth we serve will be able to perform academically at grade-level and above while prepared with the vocational and interpersonal skills need for the workforce.

Expansion of the direct care services and training programs our Center for Early Childhood provides to caregivers and educators regarding Social Emotional Learning.

Continue to strengthen our advocacy work to help shape public policy and funding at the State level that affects youth and at-risk families.

Continue to grow our community-based and residential services for young adults who are ‘aging out’ of state systems of care.

• Boston
• Bridgewater
• Cambridge
• Norwood
• Plymouth
• Walpole
• Waltham
  

Other Documents

The Home is committed to creating access to services to ensure at-risk children and families throughout Massachusetts sustain positive mental and physical health while living safely and stably within their community. The Home aims to prepare youth to have the skills they need to successfully transition to adulthood which includes educational and vocational preparedness. We work to ensure every child has a caring adult present to provide lifelong support.

Over the next three years, The Home will work towards making these impacts as outlined in our strategic plan, which is built on a foundation of intensive research, data gathering and analysis that informs a holistic and objective perspective of the organization. This data-driven approach and data-based decision making will allow The Home to maximize its impact on the children, families, and communities we serve.

The Home will work toward the impact we want to make in four ways:

1. We will deliver services which impact more than 7,000 lives each year. The services include: adoption and foster care; care coordination; mental health services; special education; therapeutic residences; and transition to adulthood.
2. As a way to improve our service delivery, The Home is focused on additional, quality staff training. Our training focuses are cognitive behavioral therapy, high fidelity wraparound, integrative treatment of complex trauma, motivational interviewing, restorative practices, and therapeutic crisis intervention.
3. We will continue to work as a leader in advocacy, helping shape public policy that affects children and families in the Commonwealth. Our advocacy work is done through coalitions groups, government relations, and education to the public regarding the population we serve.
4. We are only able to work towards making these impacts if we are operating; which is why sustainability is the fourth prong to our strategy. The Home will work towards its sustainability through enhancing access to data, fiscal planning and management, fund development, program evaluation, retention of diverse staff, risk management, and technology support.

The Home will be able to make these impacts because of internal and external strengths. Our dedicated Risk Management, Evaluation, & Outcomes (RMEO) department is focused around evaluation and research; organizational performance, risk management, corporate compliance; and health information management. This department analyzes data by program and in aggregate across the agency quarterly. This allows our organization to assess what approaches and services are working and quickly adjust and adapt to new procedures to better serve our clients. RMEO drives agency-wide and program-specific goal setting, the agency’s strategic plan, and logic model. This department is in charge of our agency-wide follow-up initiative which tracks discharged children through phone interviews. Information collected through this initiative is used to help determine whether to continue, enhance, or replace treatment interventions and components in programs. It also helps us find unmet needs that could contribute to the development of new services.

The Home belongs to many coalitions, organizations, and associations such as The Massachusetts Council of Human Service Providers and The Children’s League of Massachusetts. Our partnerships with these groups and others like them allow us to make a greater impact on our target population.

The Home will know if it is making progress towards our intended impact by using the Providers’ Council of Massachusetts Benchmarking system and by achieving the short-term goals laid out in our agency logic model. The benchmarking program enables The Home to measure its performance by providing our quantitative data into the system. It allows us to make data-drive decisions to improve the agency and the services we deliver. The system also allows us to measure ourselves against similar agencies providing like services.

1. Our organization will also know it is making progress as we meet our short–term goals which are broken into three categories: Children & Youth; Families; and Staff.
2. For children & youth, we seek to increase skills for executive functioning and self regulation; increase knowledge of wellness and life skills; increase interpersonal skills; decrease hospitalizations and psychiatric emergencies; decrease disruptive behavior at school and in the community; reduce trauma symptoms; increase time on academic task; increase reading skills of students that are below grade level.
3. Our short-term goals for families are to increase engagement in their child’s treatment and education; enhance use of social networks and supports; decrease drop-out and early termination from services.
4. For our staff, we will increase knowledge and skills of evidence-based practices; increase data-based decision making; enhance capacity to meet the needs of diverse client populations.

The Home has made strides towards our long term goals. In Fiscal Year 2015, The Home was in its implementation phase of the grant it received as part of the Success for Transition Age Youth (STAY) Program. During this phase The Home introduced a new position, Peer Mentors, to work with young adults and teach them how to advocate and help themselves. The organization created the Youth Advisory Group which is made up of young adults who want to make an impact in their communities and educate others regarding mental health. This shows progress towards our long-term goals of giving youth the skills they need to transition to adulthood, sustaining positive mental and physical health in children, and children and youth maintaining nurturing relationships with adults and positive relationships with their peers. We opened a new program, the Boston-Suffolk County Family Resource center which is a step in helping families live safely and stably within their community. Our Special Education schools expanded their vocational curriculum to include equine science, graphic design, culinary arts, and carpentry which will help lead the youth in these programs closer to our goal of educational and vocational preparedness. Working towards our long-term goal of caring adults providing lifelong support to children and youth, The Home established its Connections Program. The Connections Program connects a caring adult with an older youth to create a support system for the young adult and a lifelong connection to help them as they buy their first car, apply to college, find their own apartment, and make their way in the world

The Home has made great strides towards its long term goals but it has further to go. As outlined in the 2015-2018 Strategic Plan, The Home needs to collect and use its data more effectively. The organization will engage in more data-driven decision making as it develops more programs and adjusts its service delivery.