Lightbulb’s Stuart J. Robinson will be in Washington next week on behalf of the Arizona Department of Economic Security, reporting daily as agency officials pitch a new approach to delivering Social Services.

State officials will be in Washington next week seeking support to test a new vision for delivering social services.

The Arizona Department of Economic Security (DES) would like to take a more holistic approach, Director Clarence H. Carter said at a May 10 news conference in Phoenix. The goal is to transform Arizona’s safety net from a system that focuses solely on delivering benefits to one that emphasizes meeting consumers’ needs and reducing their dependencies.

“We should focus on whether the individual gets better through our efforts,” Carter said.

He decried the lack of shared vision among the many single-service programs – food, housing and employment, for example – that the department administers on behalf of the federal government. Each program lies within its own silo, with its own rules and objectives, and is evaluated on how well it delivers its own service.

“Conflicting rules don’t let us work together to help that consumer move forward,” Carter said. In fact, the system places little-to-no emphasis on helping clients move beyond the condition or inter-related circumstances that qualified them for aid.

The department would like to test a holistic, consumer-centered approach in which a single “case coordinator” would get to know a client, make a comprehensive needs assessment and tailor a personalized approach to the person’s circumstances that would include all the necessary services. This approach – “Growing Arizona by Growing Arizonans” – would focus on enabling clients to emerge from the system prepared to stand on their own two feet. Or, as Carter quoted an Arizona preacher: “Grow ’em out, not throw ’em out.”

“The safety net should be a trampoline,” Carter said. “It should be able to launch the consumer.”

The initiative isn’t limited to DES, he said. “It’s about making the whole system greater than the sum of its parts. This can’t happen unless the rest of Arizona joins us.”

Federal Cooperation

It’s because many components of the safety net are federal programs that Carter is leading an Arizona delegation to Washington this week.

“We have a model of how this could work, but we have to demonstrate and test it,” he said. “We are going to need waivers and other workarounds to showcase the type of system we want.”

In the nation’s capital, DES officials will meet with:

• A new Federal Policy Team comprising senior policy leaders from relevant federal agencies.
• A seven-member Academic Advisory Board that will serve as a “think tank” studying the safety net.
• A National Stakeholders Group representing clients, the business community, faith and community organizations, educators and philanthropists, as well as policymakers and staff from federal, state and local government.

All of those parties will play a role in transforming Arizona’s safety net and, perhaps, providing a template for other states.

“The path to this is not clear,” Carter said. “We are going to be cutting down brush at every turn because we are going to be creating a new path.”

He said getting the transformation right is imperative because 20 percent of Arizonans depend upon some aspect of the safety net.

“We have a concept that looks wonderful from 30,000 feet,” Carter said. “The challenge is to bring that smoothly to the ground level.”

Ground-Level Test

The department is in the process of defining a new way of engaging Arizonans in need of support. The process would start with a comprehensive assessment that explores the person’s immediate needs and long-term barriers to self-sufficiency – as well as the individual’s resources, priorities and readiness for change. With that data, the case coordinator would craft an individual strategy to mobilize the resources of the consumer, the community and the safety net.

DES officials hope to start testing the new approach with some actual consumers by September. They will monitor procedural issues and client outcomes during the demonstration period for guidance in improving and expanding of the process.

The demonstration’s ultimate goals include learning how to scale the model to serve consumers most efficiently, developing new ways to measure clients’ individual development and identifying performance measures for the new, consumer-centered delivery model.

For more information, visit www.azdes.gov/transformation or contact DES Public Information Officer Nicole Moon at 602-319-5265 or nmoon@azdes.gov. To follow the events in Washington on Twitter, use hashtag #DEStransformation.

Tags: #DESTransformation, Arizona Department of Economic Security, Clarence H. Carter, DES, Growing Arizona by Growing Arizonans, Nicole Moon