Sponsored by the local Job Training Partnership Act (JTPA) and implemented by the county, Project Reclaim is designed to assist at-risk youth in becoming productive citizens of their school, community and work force. The project serves disadvantaged, youthful offenders and at-risk participants ages 16 to 21 through public sector employment, basic skills enhancement and case management services.
The program includes a Prescription for Success plan for each participant, credit for out-of-school experience, two intensive three-day camps, basic skills enhancement classes, academic and vocational counseling, work placements, and other support services.
The camps are designed to take the participant away from their present environment and possible negative involvement and distractions, and into a setting conducive to acceptable social behavior, academic enrichment and positive work ethics.
The Adopt-A-Child-Abuse-Caseworker Program is a collaborative community effort that matches religious congregations with a child’s social worker in order to meet the needs of families served by that worker. The networking component of the program helps to educate the community regarding the dynamics of child abuse and its effects, and provides families with anonymous assistance from their own community.
The program addresses the problems of limited community awareness of the existence and dynamics of child abuse, limited support for the public child welfare social workers, limited tangible resources/goods for the family served, and limited community and public agency collaboration.
Targeting suspended students in grades six through eight, grades where the highest external suspensions occur, a portable (trailer) was set up in the rear of the school grounds as an alternative to suspending students off-campus. Parents are called at the time of an incident and are given a choice of selecting the “on-campus” program for their child or an external suspension.
In the on-campus program, a sheriff’s department deputy facilitates a daily curriculum including conflict resolution and individual and class discussions of personal and behavioral problems.
The program gives students an opportunity to keep current on school work and provides children of working parents with appropriate supervision. School support, through teachers and counselors, is available for intervention when needed.
Through the Working-Poor Child Care Empowerment Initiative, the Orange County Citizens’ Commission for Children and Community Coordinated Care for Children, Inc. entered into a public/private partnership for the delivery of child care services to working poor families.
Scholarships are provided to the county’s working poor families, enabling them to gain better access to dependable child care. In providing child care through a local agency, the county avoided duplicating services for this population by creating in-house services that were similar.
Through this initiative, the county helps families meet their child care needs and ensures high-quality, affordable and accessible services.
Through the Adolescent Parent Program, traditional individual case management services have been diversified to include significantly more outreach and service delivery capabilities.
The program has two social workers dedicated to outreach, brief services and group case management in six schools and the main public assistance office.
Case management emphasizes involvement with adolescent parents, especially fathers, to support their involvement with their children and to support their growth toward self-sufficiency. The program helps minor parents connect with community-based resources and maintain themselves without having an assigned case manager.
This life skills training program, titled “10 Rules to Live By,” encompasses most approaches to parenting, communication skills, theories and models of therapy, as well as most of the world’s major systems of ethics and values.
The basic model for the delivery of this training consists of three components, including an initial didactic training, whereby the 10 rules are explained and demonstrated; an ongoing practice group where group members struggle to practice and improve their use of the skills; and a maintenance phase in which members may receive support when needed to refresh their skills.
A unique feature of the program is that it is designed so that county residents may enter at any time or return at any time because each session is not dependent upon the previous activity in the curriculum.
The Adoption Assistance Supplement Program is a financial assistance program to enable foster parents to adopt children in their care who have bonded to them and whose special needs are barriers to adoption.
In response, the county developed a plan to offer a county supplement to the state adoption subsidy which makes the total subsidy for a special needs child, after adoption, equal to the foster care board payment.
The Family Enrichment Parent Aide Program is designed as a preventive program to eliminate many factors which lead to child abuse, and to reinforce those positive attributes of a parent which lead to healthy nuturance of children.
Volunteers are recruited from the community, trained and paired with individual families to provide ongoing supervision, and act as liaison with child welfare caseworkers. Volunteers help connect families to support services and provide personal assistance to their parent matches when needed.
(Compiled by Kelly Schulman, research assistant.)
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