A National Imperative: Joining Forces to Strengthen Human Services in America (Jan 2018)

Research also suggests that the public has a negative perception of CBOs’ basic management competence, relative to for-profit corporations. 23  The complexities and costs of running a CBO are often sorely underappreciated. While these beliefs are not universally held, we feel they are common. In aggregate, they contribute to a lack of trust between government agencies, philanthropic funders, human services CBOs, and the American public. When CBOs are viewed as inefficient pass-throughs, rather than valuable economic entities and contributors to a healthy and productive society, funding tends to be highly restricted in nature. A human services CBOCEO in Illinois noted that “funders are more worried about what money is being spent on than what results the money is producing. They don’t place much trust in us to run our own operations.”

ROADBLOCK: OPERATIONAL SHORTCOMINGS OF THE HUMAN SERVICES ECOSYSTEM

CHALLENGE #6 Organizational “siloes”

People requiring human services assistance often have multiple related challenges and needs: behavioral health needs can contribute to housing needs, housing challenges contribute to health and nutritional challenges, all of these in turn lead to challenges in education and needs for employment readiness and placement assistance, and so on. Given the web of interconnected needs and challenges, the optimal treatment often isn’t a single service but a coordinated and integrated response designed to address both immediate needs and longer-term root causes. Organizational siloes, among both human services government agencies and CBOs, are a major impediment to the required degree of integration. In many counties and states, the public departments of health, mental health, human services, and family services function with separate leadership and funding, and often with limited interaction and information sharing. These siloes perpetuate challenges in data integration and sharing. They also impede collaboration between government agencies and with CBOs due to differences “We see a client from point A to point B in their treatment and hand them off to another CBO for treatment between points B and C. Apart from sending some paperwork, we don’t collaborate and share information to improve the probability of effective treatment and the client’s ultimate success”

– Human Services CBO CEO, Illinois

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