RECRUITMENT AND RETENTION

Hillary Winn: For the Oklahoma Department of Human Services, it’s really important to us to make the best placement for the children in the foster care system, and in order to do that we need to recruit and retain resource families that are able to meet the needs of the children we have in care, and to keep them connected to their kin, culture, and community.  As a way to do that, we applied for a five year grant funded through the Children’s Bureau, The Bridge to the Future Diligent Recruitment and Retention Grant.  Recruitment and retention are tied hand-in-hand, and we know that in order to recruit new Bridge Resource Families, we need to retain the ones we have.  The current Bridge Resource Families are often our best recruiters and so we have developed a lot of initiatives around providing excellent customer service to those current families.

Shannon Rios:  One of the goals of the process improvement projects is to make the process more user-friendly for families, to allow them an easier path through becoming a resource parent, which we hope will also in turn increase recruitment and retention of families to make it easier to bring a family on-board as an approved Bridge Resource Family.

Vincent Deberry: The OK Bridge Families website, which is okbridgefamilies.com, is something that is intended to provide customer service, information, etc. There’s a lot of information about adoption and foster care all over the internet and it takes people a lot of time to find that.  What we wanted to do was provide a one-stop source that they can go in and find information whether they’re inquiring for the first time, they’re a pre-resource family, a resource family, etc.  And they can go in and find this and they are able to access this 24-7, so on their time, go in and find any piece of information that they want to find.

Hillary Winn:  The great thing about a demonstration grant is that we can make changes to the processes as we go along.  We can survey families and ensure that what we are doing is really meeting their needs and if it’s not, we can amend those processes.  We are providing customer service training to staff and, on top of that, making sure that we survey families about the process if they’ve withdrawn, trying to get feedback about how they feel the process has gone for them. In addition to that, we have the support center that’s been up and running for just shy of a year.  They have taken over 2,000 phone calls from families that are inquiring about the process and would like to become a Bridge Resource Family.  And then they have had over 7,000 contacts with current families just about miscellaneous questions. We’ve gotten great feedback from the Children’s Bureau and we’ve been asked to share what we’re doing here in Oklahoma.