Overview

National Center Projects and Programs

National Technical Assistance Center for Statewide Family Networks

The National Center at UACF currently operates the National Statewide Family Networks Technical Assistance Center through a contract with the Center for Mental Health Services at SAMHSA. The program is designed to provide individualized, developmentally sensitive, strength-based training and technical assistance in the context of peer-to-peer learning environments to promote the development of autonomous Statewide Family Networks. The National Center focuses on the 42 SAMHSA funded Statewide Family Networks within five categories of training and technical assistance activities, which include

1. Production and dissemination of education and resource materials
2. Technical assistance
3. Training
4. Development teams
5. Statewide Family Network Annual Meetings

Educational and resource materials and training include topics related to the needs of the SFN as determined through a three Phase Organizational Assessment process. The National Center also collects data for the GPRA reporting and develops an annual report, outlining the accomplishments and impact of the grantee effort.

All training and technical assistance activities are driven by a set of operating principles designed to increase organizational capacity of Networks, so that they can sponsor and sustain a continuum of activities that transform their state mental health service systems, which in turn will improve outcomes for children with mental health conditions and their families.

Linkages

The National Center at UACF worked in collaboration with funds authorized for the Children’s System of Care Program through the Center for Mental Health Services to assist and support Statewide Family Network Grantees efforts to build structural linkages with Children’s System of Care Grantees. There are two phases to this project.

• Phase I:Statewide Family Network Grantees accessing Linkage funding established a contract (Linkages Contract) with the United Advocates for Children and Families (UACF) and submitted semi-annual reports documenting completion of contract deliverables. Contract deliverables were to include the structural linkages that the Statewide Family Network Grantees intended to create, the incremental changes made within the organization and state to produce the structural linkage, and the activities implemented to achieve the objectives and create the structure linkage.
• Phase II: Building on Phase I and capitalizing on the 2008 Georgetown Children’s Mental Health Institutes , the National Center at UACF will bring Linkage leaders from across the country together with the nations experts in children’s mental health, system of care projects, community and state leaders in the field, and other family and youth movement leaders.The project, a joint venture with other partners, will increase the capacity of participants to serve as a systems transformation partners, increase their knowledge of state of the art approaches in children’s mental health, facilitate opportunities to network and problem solve as a movement, build better relationships with other leaders in the state, and increase family movement roles in systems transformation.

Sustainability Toolkit

The National Center is currently developing a tool kit: Staying Alive During Tough Times: Organizational Financial Sustainability for the 42 current Statewide Family Network SAMHSA grantees. The tools in the kit will be the result of an in depth research of existing resources for nonprofit sustainability, input and feedback from family organizational leaders in the field of sustainability, guidance from an organizational and business consultant, and formatting for ease of use and application for organizational sustainability efforts. Once finalized, phone trainings with SFN’s according to current organizational developmental level and need would be conducted to enhance application. It is expected that the potential outcomes would include; enhanced capacity of SFN to recognize and act upon opportunities of sustainability, organizations with diversified funding, organizations with financial security beyond their current government dollars, and the a tool kit that can be used by other organizations for strengthening the financial infrastructure of nonprofit organizations.

Family and Youth Council (FYC) at Georgetown University Children’s Mental Health Technical Assistance Center (NTAC)

Partnerships with families and youth are central to the Georgetown National Technical Assistance Center (NTAC) approach, and to promoting family-driven/youth-guided systems of care. NTAC is committed to increasing the involvement of families and youth in: planning, implementing, and evaluating all of our TA strategies; infusing a focus on families in all of our work; and promoting partnerships for family-driven, youth-guided systems and services with TA recipients in every training or TA activity that we undertake. The National Center at UACF contracts with the NTAC to provide oversight, guidance, organization, and support to the Family Youth Council and its activities. The Family and Youth Council (FYC) is comprised of directors of state family organizations and youth who will assist in planning and refining NTAC’s TA strategies, provide input and feedback, provides expert consultation on family and youth issues to support NTAC’s transformation coaching, is linked to the Advisory Committee by including several members to serve as advisors in order to incorporate family and youth voice from a larger network of individuals into the Advisory Committee’s deliberations, and facilitates the inclusion of all members of the Council to also serve as Expert Consultants.