Project Leader:  Nicole Camp, MT Government

Abstract:

The Vision 21: Linking Systems of Care for Children and Youth in Montana project is a cooperative agreement between the Montana Board of Crime Control and the Office for Victims of Crime. The LSOC project aims to improve responses to child and youth victims and their families. The team is investigating gaps in services and barriers to consistent, coordinated responses that address the full range of victim needs. Researchers are developing community level strategies to address identified gaps and barriers in services.

The team held 20 focus groups with direct services providers in 19 different communities across the state, six of which were held in Tribal communities. Consistently, the focus group discussions in Tribal communities suggested providers were unaware of the resources available in their community. As one attendee said, “Yes, I refer, but I don’t know who to refer to.” This same sentiment can be heard in the following comment from another attendee, “I don’t know who and where to refer to. I need a resource list.” We also heard this need at other community meetings. For example, a service provider confided, “I came [to this meeting] so I would know who to contact.” 

Statement of Need

In many Tribal communities the lack of accessible, complete, up to date resource guides has contributed to the persistence of service provider silos and is a barrier to delivering comprehensive and collaborative care that meets the identified needs of child and youth victims and their caregivers. 

Project Plan and Activities

The LSOC team is collaborating with a Confederated Salish Kootenai Tribe project- Linking Actions for Unmet Needs in Children’s Health (LAUNCH) to create the data base necessary for a Flathead Reservation electronic resource guide and to develop a plan for sustaining it. The LSOC team is seeking funding to support this collaborative effort. The funds will be used for resource mapping on the Flathead Reservation. The LSOC project coordinator will follow best practices (e.g., Crane and Mooney 2005, Griffin and Farris 2010) to map the resources available within the Flathead Reservation borders. The coordinator will travel to Pablo and the surrounding communities to establish relationships through LAUNCH’s stakeholders group. These relationships will form the basis of the resource mapping stakeholder group. The coordinator, in partnership with the stakeholder group, will gather existing resource guides, meet with providers in small groups and in their offices, and attend appropriate meetings to identify community resources. 

Following Crane and Mooney (2005), the coordinator will collect the following information about each resource: (a) the organization/project name, (b) purpose, (c) service delivery methods, (d) population served, (e) activities/services, (f) partnering organizations/projects, (g) expected outcome and (h) funding source. Funding source information is particularly important because many of CSKT’s services are grant funded. Grant funding, according to some focus group attendees, contributes to problems of program sustainability and inhibits the cooperation and collaboration between programs. Including funding 2 Montana Board of Crime Control information in the resource guide will support collaboration among the systems of care and encourage alliances between projects and providers resulting in improved and sustainable services. As one project director noted, “If I am applying for a grant [and I have funding information] I can align my goals and work plan with other projects.”

Community resource mapping will provide many positive outcomes to CSKT and communities on the Flathead Reservation. Mapping provides strategies for identifying overlapping, duplicated, and missing services, in addition to data needed for the electronic resource guide resource. Furthermore, the mapping process will reveal information about the distribution of resources between communities.

The coordinator will work closely with Salish Kootenai College (SKC) during the mapping process. The college has proposed that faculty and students work with LAUNCH to create and maintain a user friendly reference guide that is accessible to the public and to service providers. Additionally, SKC will provide students with the opportunity, through classes, to conduct annual maintenance on the data base and guide to ensure it is regularly updated and sustained after creation. 

Goals

The goal of this AI-AN CTRP proposal is to map the systems of care resources on the Flathead reservation. The resulting product will inform an accessible, complete, up-to-date resource guide available to CSKT members, Flathead Reservation communities, and service providers. The resource guide will be created in partnership with LAUNCH and community service providers. It is expected the resource map and resource guide will link the systems of care by encouraging collaboration efforts and thus improve providers’ abilities to create complete care plans that address the full range of the child, youth, and family’s identified needs. Additionally, it is expected that the resource guide will improve community members’ access to and knowledge of available resources. Throughout the mapping process, the community, LAUNCH, and the LSOC team will also identify gaps and duplication in services and provide support for adding services or improving those that already exist.

Measures of Success

While resource guides do exist for the Flathead Reservation, they are incomplete and not easily accessible. Additionally, they are only available in paper form, preventing timely and cost effective updates. There is no baseline measure to quantitatively determine the usefulness of these guides; however, our research suggests many providers are unaware of their existence. Further, the resource guides lack some essential information such as population served and funding source. The resource list created through the efforts detailed here will form the basis of a more extensive and informative online guide. To help us interpret the guide’s usefulness, the LSOC team, with LAUNCH and SKC, will monitor the number of times the new resource site is visited. The impact the site has on practice and referrals will be qualitatively evaluated through conversation with providers during site visits and continued collaboration with LAUNCH, SKC, and various coalitions.