For that, I want to bring in another conversation with two leaders in District 16 that you may recall.

Hi, my name is Maya Cipriano, and I am the resource developer for child welfare in Washington County, District 16.

didn't follow

that.

Yeah.

Wow.

Oh, well, it's a four-hour wait, but my kids are done with school in two hours.

Yep.

I can start by sharing that every family is unique, right? So every family is going to have different obstacles, but we have identified working in collaboration with partners and even between departments.

Yeah, I think that just on the child welfare side, obviously it's a little bit different because self-sufficiency, there's something that self-sufficiency has to give, you know, benefits or there's people are coming there because they need something and they're looking for assistance, whereas child welfare is not so voluntary in its involvement with families, but I think that the vision for transformation and what I know we've been trying to do in District 16 is really kind of change how that interaction looks and be more focused on prevention and engagement rather than looking at child welfare as like a punitive system or Oh, well, you're here.

So now you just have to follow our rules.

We want to work collaboratively.

And one thing that, as Ana mentioned, we've been doing is providing diapers, but also like looking even on assessments, just like how can we help people so that they're not coming back into our system or they're not getting further into our system with things like we have a preventative staffing committee where we can meet with community partners and we bring community partners in.

I think that one place where ODHS and our community partners have a lot of room to grow is just in our collaboration and how well agencies can work together and systems can work together to make it easier for families to navigate.

Oh, God, oh.

But I think that kind of finding ways to change from the top down how we work together and how.