Bridging national standards and serving local needs

A NEW WAY FORWARD: Child & Family CEO and President Marty Sinnott sees the need for disruptive innovation in Rhode Island's social-service sector, with the lack of foster homes only one issue that demands coordinated statewide efforts. / PBN PHOTO/MICHAEL SALERNO
A NEW WAY FORWARD: Child & Family CEO and President Marty Sinnott sees the need for disruptive innovation in Rhode Island's social-service sector, with the lack of foster homes only one issue that demands coordinated statewide efforts. / PBN PHOTO/MICHAEL SALERNO

Child & Family, with offices in Middletown and Providence, offers services such as family counseling, early-learning and parent supports. Its CEO and president, Marty Sinnott, has been in the nonprofit sector in various states for the past four decades.

Like many other nonprofits, the organization looks to national best practices – years-long studies on what works – at the same time it focuses on the needs of individual communities. It’s a one-two punch that is a sure way to produce effective results, Sinnott says, this combination of local service and big-thinking perspective.

But in his experience, too few Rhode Island nonprofits and social-service agencies are implementing these tested best practices, or joining forces in ways that are mutually beneficial.

“It’s such a small state; but it is amazing how siloed the different parts of the state are,” Sinnott said. “It’s very parochial,” in terms of unifying resources, and more of a challenge than he thought it would be when he took the helm at Child & Family three years ago.

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That being said, implementing programs around evidence-based practices also poses a logistical challenge here in the Ocean State, said Sinnott.

Needs analysis

In the first step, evaluating needs, he says, it’s crucial to know where a nonprofit can strategically create real change, and focus there. “We can’t effectively be everything to everyone,” Sinnott said.

Child & Family issues surveys via email, hires consultants to do phone interviews, asks former clients what is working in the agency and what areas need improvement. It’s an effort to find out what is working and what is needed, said Sinnott.

Each area is different – said Sinnott, from Central Falls to Providence to Newport, for example. For a Rhode Island town that borders a community in another state that is facing the same need, it can be even worse, said Sinnott, such as the shortage of home health supports for elders discharged from hospitals. Massachusetts and Connecticut have the same shortage of these kinds of workers, so border towns are at more of a disadvantage, he said.

Once needs are assessed, adopting national standards is good business, Sinnott said.

National standards allow agencies to be more transparent, better able to say what they do and communicate effectively how they do it. Training procedures are more streamlined. Though at first national best practices may appear expensive, the investment ultimately produces better results. Better results produce better staff retention for nonprofits and social-service organizations.

“Staff in evidence-based programs feel most accomplished,” Sinnott said, and stick around.

But what poses another challenge in Rhode Island – beyond the siloed landscape – is the fact that the numbers aren’t there. The numbers of people, that is, to qualify for grants. The only area that has an “urban core” is Providence, said Sinnott.

This kind of population density is needed to get grants and structure programs around a particular need and have real impact. Grants can pay for a master’s degree-level supervisor, for instance, said Sinnott, to help build programs around substance abuse, behavioral health issues, or domestic violence. “So how do you implement best practices on that scale? How do you collaborate over that broader geographic area?”

Collaboration is key

Newport Partnership for Families is an example of a group that straddles the line well between responding to local needs and incorporating national best practices via collaboration, Sinnott said. The group is a collective of more than 35 member agencies, a one-stop shop for services in Newport County, joining forces over common issues. The collective is made up of businesses, nonprofits and community groups. Its initiatives include an early absenteeism and truancy-reduction effort.

A need crying out for a statewide collaboration, said Sinnott, is the recruiting and training of more foster parents. “Neither government nor communities, agencies, nonprofits … none [has] come to collaborate,” though Rhode Island only has about half the foster homes it needs, he said, noting that outcomes of the system are “not good,” with far more kids in group care than almost any other state.

“If we leave it to those communities to figure this out on their own, they’re not going to move the dial,” he said.

Sinnott sees the next few years as “tumultuous” in Rhode Island’s nonprofit sector.

Much of his concern focuses on the fast pace of health care reform and the state’s growing aging population. The number of those over 65 is climbing quickly, he said, with many false starts and stops in terms of health care changes. All of this impacts funding, said Sinnott.

“We need to create some innovation, but also disruption,” he said. More collaboration just might be the way forward. •

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