- Welcome to he groundbreaking ceremony of the Family Tree. For those of you that work with DHS and family services, understand what this was and it went away, and you know, there were some ideas about how we could actually do something different to address some of the challenges that we had in the community. It took each and every one of you guys to make this happen.

- So the Family Tree model is to provide, basically under one roof, a one stop shop of sorts for our families. For example, allowing them to be able to access a number of quality services with different providers to improve their skills, a place for meaningful visits with their children, and a more inviting space to do those things. This is an innovative model. It doesn't exist anywhere else in the state. And so, you know, this is a new frontier for us to improve child welfare practice.

- And at that time, I was presiding judge at juvenile, and I'm not a very good athlete, but I could have thrown a stone out my window and hit the shelter. And DHS made this decision to close it, which... None of us liked it when we had kids in the shelter. Shelter was not a good place for kids. We don't want, nobody wants children in a shelter. So I supported the decision to close the shelter, but it was, one, what are you going to do with those children, and then two, we have a huge empty building. It's a stone's throw from the courthouse. What can we do that's gonna make a difference?

- At that time, when we were working on this, if you, as a child, came in the foster care system, you are more likely to be adopted out than go home with your birth parents. And we really something to build strong families and reunify families.

- The whole idea of this is that to frontload. Let's get the families in, figure out what the obstacles are, get the quality visitation going, get all the services up front, and give them their best shot at getting their kiddos back quickly.

- So the Family Tree is truly based upon partnership, community partnership and collaboration across the board. It was, from the moment it was conceptualized, the idea was that we do better together. That we serve our families better, that we develop professionally better, that we have an opportunity to shift culture around how we serve if we do it together. Certainly, DHS child welfare is that cornerstone partner. And so around that, we have our permanency teams, those workers that work specifically with families to support them along their journey of being reunified. What that is is it's really robust support around developing parent-child relationship, strengthening those parenting skills, providing in real time parent coaching during visitation.

- Our goal for the cases coming to the Family Tree is reunification. We want to see kids successfully reunified with their parents. We try to set up a written visitation plan so that the parents will know when to expect to see their kids, and so that we can let the kids know when to expect to see their parents. And so it's clear to everyone when those visits can occur, because visits are so important for the children and for the families. A typical day around here will have parent coaching sessions with our CHBS providers. We'll have our family resiliency team meetings here that we do weekly, where our multidisciplinary team of professionals, so counselors, medical professionals, discuss what things need to be done to get kids home, and to get kids and parents services that they may need, or even foster parents services that they need.

- So it's a traumatic experience to be involved with child welfare, and certainly, we want to do what we can to shift that a little bit. And so this parent partner is an opportunity for support for that family to kind of navigate the process. We also have Family Kinnections through Northcare, which is a unique support for our kinship resource families. Our families who are provided an opportunity for more frequent and quality visitation, the more likely they are to reunify with their children. So we actually kind of lay out, here's what we can do for you, right? Here's how we can support you, and here's what we need from you. We have some really clear expectations around that. We've found that having those expectations for both our team and our families we serve is really helpful too.

- So Family Kinnections is a free program for foster kinship, foster families in Oklahoma County. We provide support services and education services. Our two main goals of Family Kinnections is to help DHS reduce maltreatment in care and prevent placement disruptions, and so we feel like our job is to really go in and to befriend the kinship families and really say, what do you need? And depending on what they need is how we direct services.

- A lot of the families that we're working with, we have a lot of grandparents, or older aunts and uncles, great aunts and uncles who, it's been many many years since they've gone through parenting, so they are usually very eager to learn kind of new skills that are around now regarding parenting. So they're usually really receptive to that, and kind of just feeling like somebody's on their team. Somebody is there to support them through this and help them and advocate for them.

- If I'm a grandparent taking care of my grandchildren, the perpetrator, or the person who had allegations put against them might be my own child. And so the family dynamic of taking care of somebody else's child who you're related to is very different.

- I'm able to advocate for the foster parents. You know, if they're having troubles with the kids, or if they're just having troubles, or if they have concerns regarding the bio parents that they let me know about, Then, as a team, we can all kind of discuss, because even though I'm working with the foster parents, it's the whole family aspect that is going through this, and so the whole team needs to kind of be on together, just like the family is together.

- Which is just the whole beauty of the Family Tree, is that everybody has a voice, and so we can kind of be that voice for the kinship foster families.

- Another big partner is OU, their department of pediatrics. So we have OU Fostering Hope Clinic. One of the things that we want to do is really assess the medical needs of our kids quickly to get that baseline. What is their history? What might be some special needs around anything, really. Asthma or diabetes or navigating just medications that they're on, so we try to get them connected with Fostering Hope Clinic really quickly.

- The purpose having a clinic located within the Family Tree is that we would be able to assess children at the beginning of their foster care journey, understand their needs, and also ensure that we are bridging the health knowledge that their parents have with that of the foster parents who are now providing the direct care for the children. We're looking for growth and development. Is the child nutritionally sound? Do they seem to be on their growth curve? How are they developing? What are their behavioral needs that their family may be able to identify? As well as, do they have any urgent issues that need to be addressed? So it's very important that, on entry to foster care, that we are assessing children for health needs. So I think the Family Tree is important because it represents a method for integrating care around a complex group of families and children who are likely to have not very good outcomes in the absence of that kind of integrated care.

- When a family gets involved with DHS, they kind of get caught up in a machine, and this aspect, they're more part of a partnership. That's what our hope is, is that they're gonna be part of a partnership, and all these partnering agencies, of course, are pioneering together to provide that. The whole purpose of everyone being housed under one roof is really to best support and serve the families. My role is basically... The clinical visitation coordinator, which basically just means I assist with the visits when the families come, but I also assist with the child or the foster family and the biological family. So I'm kind of the bridge between all the different members of the family. Now, you know, literally, I can go to the office next to me and talk with a DHS worker, and we can have information so much quicker, and I think that's the piece of it that is so important and valuable. CHBS is assigned as early on as possible, because we want to begin working with the family and supporting them from day one. We're there at that initial meeting they may have here at the Family Tree and get to know their team and all the partners here that will be supporting them. We want them to feel and know that they have a team here that's supporting them, and CHBS is just a small piece of that. I think it's life-changing for families to have all of their service providers and supports in one place. If we can create a safe place where they can come and have the majority of their services in one place, a team that's standing behind them, it makes a huge difference in the outcomes that we're seeing for these families. They feel supported, they feel valued, they feel heard, and they feel like we care about them and their children. And we really do, and we want them to know that.

- We know child welfare and abuse and neglect is a very ugly part of the world, and it's not fun to read about, and it's not fun to see thesekids and what they're going through, but this is a place where you can really make an impact and you can get involved and you can help change lives.

- CASA stands for court appointed special advocates, and our organization recruits, trains, and supports community volunteers who work with abused neglected children that unfortunately are placed in the child welfare system and foster care due to the fact that their parents are not able to be a safe and permanent home for them at that time.

- We participate in the weekly staffings over at the Family Tree, so we have a seat at the table and that's our chance to really interact with everyone that's working with that family, which is incredibly helpful when you're looking at what's in the best interest of the child, and then also the family as a whole.

- These are our kids in this community that unfortunately are experiencing this abuse and neglect, resulting in them being placed into foster care, and just, you know, the pure trauma and uncertainty that they face, and how scary that can be, and the fact that it is a community-based response. This is why we need to expedite through programs like Family Tree. We need to expedite services for the family and the kids, because this is not a long-term solution. Graduating and moving out of foster care from the state. Oklahoma's not meant to be someone's parent long-term, and that's where the value of the program is, is you have such wonderful community members who are getting engaged in purely serving our community's most vulnerable, I think.

- I believe with all my heart that the solutions to any problem that we look out and see in our state, it resides within the people of our state, and especially around children, foster care, and child abuse, and this issue of child maltreatment. I believe the solutions are within our staff, and they're within our partners, and what we have to do, really, is try to find and release those solutions to be realized, and the Family Tree is the realization of one of those.

- The work is a rewarding thing. The reason why I do this, and why I think all of us at Family Tree do this, is because every parent, every family has value. And we want them to know that from the beginning, that they can have hope for their future, that they deserve a chance at recovery, that they can have their children back in their home. And we want families to be safe, we want them to be together.

- DHS can't do it alone.

- No one can do it alone.

- DHS shouldn't have to do it alone, and the court system can't do it alone. And so we need to have everybody involved.

- You need to have your people.

- You do, you do.

- We can't ever predict what the outcome's gonna be for a child or a family that we serve. But I can tell you that our hope and our daily purposeful intention is, will a family be better off when they leave our services than when they came to us? Will that child be better off when they leave? And it's as a great... Privilege to be able to work with people who daily come and say, that's what I want to do.