Making the Shift happen

Hi there, I'm in Lithonia a suburb of Atlanta. Monday and Tuesday of this week we started an exciting one year project with the Department of Human Resources Office of Developmental Disabilities. The project contract calls for us to mentor 6 DD Agencies.

We will do this by providing four days of pretty intense in house training to each organization. The training is a lot to digest so we are doing it two days at a time over the next two months. Monday and Tuesday in agency # 1; Thursday and Friday in agency #2. Then back home for a week. Then back to do agencies 3 and 4, etc. When we are done with the first round of training we will start the second round on the same schedule.

Each agency will develop 4 Action Teams that will be charged with helping exisitng agency resources so that moving forward will be more manageable and so that the Shift will begin immediately. The four Action Teams are:

1 Assessment. This team will support the assessment of all staff members in 6 basic Shift Happens Competencies.

2 Training.

3 Culture Building.

4 Performance improvement.

One of our big concerns as we developed the contract was, what will happen after the first year?

This project is the beginning of a quality improvement effort that will take 3 to 5 years. What happens after we're gone. Yes we will provide each agency with 2 days of follow up visits during the year and yes we will also provide them with one hour telephone support in each of the next 12 months and yes the contract will fund 2 staff members from each agency to visit our organization for 2 days of high impact individualized attention, but what happens after the year is up? This was a big concern.

We hope collaboration will be the answer. The Champions of each Action Team will meet every six weeks to compare notes, share common experiences, brainstorm solutions to common problems, identify follow up training resources and, very importantly, share a common proactive, positive language.

In addition, quarterly the CEO's from each agency will meet with the Champions to hear about progress and address concerns of mutual importance. We hope by the end of the year these six agencies, some small, some quite large, some in urban settings and others quite rural will develop positive relations and be resourceful to each other.

If the rest of the project goes as well as the first two days, the results will be remarkable. The Office of Developmental Disabilities has impressed us with their selection process. We have conducted pre training conference calls with each agency and each was as impressive as the next. All different in size and location but all eager to participate in this very sinificant undertaking.

It confirms my belief that many of the people working in this field are desperate for a better way of doing things. They are talented and committed. They work hard for very modest pay and they are frustrated by the overly beaurocratic systems which control them and which seem to offer more obstacles than solutions; yet they won't give up and they still want to do more and better for the people they support. Yet, they often just don't know where to turn for guidance and direction.

Our proactive philosophy and positive approach offers many of them the kind of comprehensive, consumer centered, innovative solution they have been longing for.

I'm encouraged and excited.

More later.


George