Among the Departments of Child Welfare and Behavioral Health Services Of
MEMORANDUM OF AGREEMENT
Among the Departments of Child Welfare and Behavioral Health Services of
Contra Costa, San Francisco, San Mateo, and Santa Clara Counties
and
Edgewood Center for Children and Families, Rebekah Children’s Services, Seneca Center, and St. Vincent’s School for Boys and the San Francisco Boy’s and Girls Homes
to form
The Bay Area RBS Consortium
This Memorandum of Agreement, hereinafter referred to as the MOA, is entered into by and between the child welfare and behavioral health services departments of Santa Clara, San Francisco, San Mateo and Santa Clara Counties (hereinafter referred to as the county agencies, and 4 private non-profit agencies, Edgewood Center for Children and Families, Rebekah Children’s Services, Seneca Center, and St. Vincent’s School for Boys and the San Francisco Boy’s and Girls Homes, hereinafter referred to as the providers, to express the commitment of the participants to join together in a consortium to develop and implement a pilot demonstration project under the Residentially Based Services (RBS) Reform Project, and through this shared effort to bring about a fundamental transformation in the way we respond to our communities’ children and youth with high-levels of needs and their families. This consortium will be called the Bay Area RBS Consortium, hereinafter referred to as the BAC.
A. Background
The RBS Reform Project is established pursuant to Assembly Bill (AB) 1453, Chapter 12.87 (commencing with Section 18987.7) Part 6 of Division 9 of the Welfare and Institutions Code (W&IC), relating to foster care. This legislation allows for a pilot demonstration project aimed at transforming the current system of group care, currently providing long-term congregate care and treatment, to an RBS approach that combines short-term residential stabilization and treatment with parallel and follow along community-based services to reconnect youth to their families, schools and communities.
The legislation permits a consortium of counties to jointly establish a demonstration site, but does not define the nature, expectations, powers, or obligations of such a consortium.
B. Purpose
The BAC will be a voluntary organization designed to maintain consistency in the program model, the assessment, referral, enrollment supervision, and utilization management processes, the funding model, and program evaluation across the 4 county agencies and 4 providers.
The participating agencies and providers are joining together to form a consortium to support the development of a new RBS program model that will be implemented in 4 sites throughout the Bay Area. The goal of the new programs, which will be called RBS Family Connection Programs, will be to help the families of children and youth who in the past may have spent many years in group homes placements reconnect with their children and achieve and sustain permanency, safety and well-being. RBS Family Connection Programs will integrate 6 critical service elements in a coordinated approach that provides consistency and continuity of care across multiple service environments. These elements are:
1. Family-Based Residential Support Services – A highly staffed residential setting that will offer brief intensive and intermittent 24 hour behavioral stabilization, assessment and intervention for children and youth over the course of a family’s enrollment, with parents and family members as active partners in the process of care.
2. Intensive Treatment Services – Empirically-validated emotional and behavioral treatment services for enrolled children and youth and their families provided as appropriate based upon each child or youth’s individualized assessment and treatment plan and delivered consistently in both residential and community-based settings.
3. Family Connection Services – Family-centered care and support to heal disrupted relationships between children and youth and their families and to help all family members acquire the skills, confidence and resiliency needed to achieve and sustain permanency, safety and well-being.
4. Specialized Foster Care – Specialized foster care services such as multidisciplinary treatment foster care or intensive treatment foster care will be available when needed to help children and youth transition back into their homes and communities.
5. Community Support Services – Parallel community support services to help those in the child or youth’s home, school, kinship network and community prepare for and successfully accomplish reintegration while children and youth are placed away from their families, schools and communities, either in the Family Connection Program’s residential unit or in a specialized foster care home.
6. Follow-up and Aftercare Services – Services to sustain the child or youth in their home, school and community following the reintegration of a child or youth in her or his permanent family setting until the child or youth and family can safely and successfully transition to more natural formal and informal sources of ongoing support.
The reason for forming a consortium to accomplish this purpose is that bringing a program model of this complexity and novelty into being during these times of deep fiscal challenge is difficult. Providers need sufficient demand to justify the cost of preparing the needed staff and facilities. County agencies need to adjust their service utilization systems to accommodate a non-traditional option. In addition, Bay Area families and children are often mobile within the 4-county area, so that a purely county-specific service will have difficulty matching well with their needs. By working together the county agencies can in aggregate offer a sufficient number of referrals to support the development of the new program by the providers. Through their collaboration, the providers can share learning and perhaps some start up and operational costs and insure consistent service delivery throughout the Bay Area. By establishing a common utilization protocol, and by working together on resource management, the county agencies can more effectively and efficiently shape the developing resource to meet the needs of the population of concern.
C. Limits of the consortium
The BAC is a structured, voluntary arrangement to guide shared efforts around program development, management and delivery by its autonomous members, and does not constitute a contract for services or any abridgement or modification of any existing contracts. Neither does it establish any legal or fiscal relationship or obligation between or among any of the members, nor does it impact in any way upon the orders and powers of the juvenile courts in any of the participating counties or upon the rights or responsibilities of any child or family member receiving services through any of the participating county departments or private providers. All formal arrangements for placement, funding, services and the execution and satisfaction of court orders will remain within the existing purview of the participating counties and agencies and are not and cannot be abridged by this MOA.
D. Functions
1. The BAC will develop a common Scope of Services template that each of the participating counties will use for defining and contracting for the family and children’s services provided through RBS Family Connection Programs. The members of the Consortium will also coordinate to the extent appropriate and feasible the development of contracts for the behavioral health service component of the program to insure consistency of resources among the 4 providers.
2. The members will share information about program development, utilization, and outcomes to insure to the degree possible that the new RBS Family Connection Programs are implemented in a balanced, consistent and effective manner by the 4 provider agencies. Through the BAC the providers will explore options for sharing resources whenever possible to reduce costs and to insure that enrolled children and families are able to access the help they need as close at hand as possible.
E. Structure and operations
1. The BAC will operate through a three level governance structure consisting of an Executive Committee, a Coordinating Committee and the operational supports for the consortium’s activities.
2. Overall authority and direction for each county department and private provider’s participation in the BAC and in the RBS project will be exercised through the BAC Executive Committee, consisting of the directors of the 4 child welfare departments and the directors of the 4 children’s behavioral or mental health departments of the participating counties and the executive directors of the 4 participating providers.
3. The Executive Committee will select three of its members as co-chairs – one each from the child welfare and behavioral or mental health directors, and one from the providers, to manage the group’s actions.
4. The Coordinating Committee will include leads from each of the consortium members who will be named by the members of the Executive Committee, along with a family advocacy representative, a youth advocacy representative, liaisons from the 4 counties’ juvenile probation departments, liaisons from educational systems serving significant numbers of RBS enrolled youth, and liaisons from community based organizations who provide services under subcontract with the RBS providers. The Coordinating Committee will monitor referrals, utilization, outcomes and the fiscal elements of the service system, share information and planning, prepare products and resources to assist in the development, implementation and operation of the new service, gather, aggregate and present all needed reports to the Executive Committee for approval submission to CDSS and the evaluation team for the RBS Demonstration Project, and will facilitate ongoing communication among the members to insure that the right help is getting to the right children or youth and families at the right time.
a. Process: The Coordinating Committee will meet monthly, although subcommittees may meet more often if they are working on new issues or products that require a more advanced timeline. The Coordinating Committee will operate by consensus, since it is a voluntary assembly. However, all of the members are committed to helping enrolled children and youth and their families achieve permanency, safety and well-being and agree to do everything possible to make this forum responsive and effective.
b. Governance: The Coordinating Committee will annually nominate three co-chairs from among its members, one from child welfare, one from mental health and one from the providers. They will be responsible for leading the Committee’s efforts, setting the agendas for meetings, identifying and nominating subcommittee members and chair persons, facilitating informal communication among the members and maintaining liaison with the California Department of Social Services and the other RBS demonstration sites.
c. Funding: At present the Coordinating Committee and the BAC have no independent funding for their activities, except for the coordination and technical assistance support provided by Casey Family Programs. The members will continue to seek out options for sustaining support for the Consortium through other benefactors, such as local foundations. Funding for the operation of the RBS Family Connection Programs by the provider members of the consortium in response to referrals made by the county agency members will take place through the implementation of a Funding Model created by the Consortium and approved by CDSS. The funding streams for the delivery of these services will continue to be implemented on a county by county basis pursuant to local and independent contracts or placement agreements between each county agency and the provider or providers that each county chooses to use.
d. Host: The BAC will initially be hosted by the ______County Department of ______. The duties of the host county are limited to assisting in finding and securing convenient locations for the Coordinating Committee to meet, and maintaining the records, documents and any other tangible resources of the Consortium.
e. Management: The Coordinating Committee will be lead by the Co-Chairs, and be staffed by the BAC Coordinator, a full time position jointly funded and supported by the BAC and reporting to the BAC Executive Committee.
f. Additional membership: In addition to representatives from the county agencies and the providers, the Coordinating Committee will include youth and family advocates as well as invited representatives from the county juvenile probation departments, the schools, the court systems, other community stakeholders and representatives from other community based organizations who may also be providing services for members of the target population.
5. Operational support for the Coordinating Committee and the Consortium will be provided by the BAC Coordinator, who will work in combination with the Interagency Placing Committees of each of the participating counties to facilitate coordination, communication and problem solving in implementing and operating the RBS system.
F. Guiding principles
The counties participating in the BAC are committed to better lives for children and families and will make decisions concerning RBS reform based on the following set of core principles that will guide our process, planning and implementation:
· The BAC RBS Family Connection Programs will be designed to help families that have experienced significant and sustained disruptions in the relationships between parents or other primary caregivers and their children achieve and sustain permanency, safety and well-being.
· For this reason, the BAC RBS system will use an approach that encompasses a continuum of care. Rather than being placed in a group home, children or youth and their families will be enrolled in one of 4 RBS Family Connection Programs operated by the providers and will continue to be served and supported by that program during any changes in the location of service throughout the course of care.
· Families will be part of the team and the decision making process from the outset through closure, and will be provided the support and encouragement needed to be active and invested members of the process.
· Families and children who are enrolled in a one of the 4 RBS Family Connection Programs will have locally provided continuity of care and services provided either directly by that program or through arrangements with other local community-based service organizations.
· Agency and community services will be culturally competent and strength-based.
· The program model will emphasize continuity in service relationships for the children or youth and families served, even as changes in placement location occur during the reunification process.
· The focus of service planning and delivery will be on establishing a safe, stable, positive and permanent living arrangement for children and youth that maintain their connections with family and community.
· Service delivery will recognize the phases that families who are recovering from significant disruptions will go through as they gain the resiliency needed to restore or achieve permanency, safety and well-being, and therefore the intermittent use of the brief intensive intervention and support offered through the residential component of the Family Connection Programs during the course of care will not be considered a failure, but rather a step on the path toward healing.