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Director's Message
April 23, 2004
To: DHS Employees
From: Gary Weeks, Director
In this week's message:
1. Central City Concern
2. Governor's Hunger Drive
3. Food for thought
4. Staff news
1. Central City Concern
On Tuesday, I visited an exceptional human services agency in Portland, the Central City Concern (CCC). The organization is celebrating its 25th year of serving the community, using innovative approaches to help people become self-sufficient and independent.
CCC works in three broad areas: health and recovery, housing and employment. Each of these is divided into programs that meet the needs of special populations. They include people with substance abuse and mental health issues, displaced workers lacking education and/or job skills, people with disabilities, single parent families and those living on low fixed incomes.
A variety of health treatments. Among the CCC sites I visited was the Portland Alternative Health Center, recognized as one of the top substance abuse treatment programs in the United States for people experiencing homelessness, and the David P. Hooper Detoxification Center, providing short-term outreach, sobering and medical detoxification services.
In the detoxification centers, clients are first given a health screening and then offered an acupuncture treatment, which is designed to settle them down and make transition into the program easier. CCC employs a wide variety of health treatments including many practices of Eastern medicine.
It has been found that people receiving treatment are much more responsive to others who have gone through similar circumstances, and CCC takes complete advantage of this. A full 75 percent of their employees are currently in some form of treatment, and about half of the staff are previous CCC clients.
I also saw the work done by CCC's Community Engagement Program, serving people with both mental illness and substance abuse issues. This is an intensive, team approach to helping those with severe and recurring problems. It combines supportive housing and a team of professionals and peer mentors being available to clients 24 hours a day.
Communication, commitment, collaboration. As I talked to the employees, their level of commitment to the program and to each other was obvious. There also seemed to be very open lines of communication between management and staff, resulting in a clear feeling of collaboration at its highest level.
No wrong door. A truly remarkable aspect of CCC is the way they seamlessly integrate their services. They provide a setting where treatment providers from many agencies collaborate on individual clients' cases, share progress and coordinate assistance across many areas.
You might recognize this concept as "no wrong door." At CCC, they like to say that they can piece together the services each person needs, no matter which door that person first used to seek help.
Achieving such integration across the entire human services system is difficult. The changes you have made at DHS in the past few years, particularly in bringing together our child welfare and self-sufficiency work, have helped move us toward that goal.
A final point regarding CCC is the strong connection they have recognized between successful treatment outcomes and safe, drug- and alcohol-free housing. In partnership with the Portland Development Commission, Oregon Housing and Community Services and others, CCC continues to develop more and more capacity for housing the homeless who are dealing with chemical addiction and mental illness. These efforts are wonderful examples for other communities throughout the country.
2. Governor's Hunger Drive
In declaring this past week "Oregon Hunger Awareness Week 2004," Governor Kulongoski called on all Oregonians to join him in the fight to end hunger in Oregon. At this year's Hunger Summit, "Working Together to End Hunger," he released the state's five-year strategic plan to accomplish that.
Of course, DHS does much to help in this effort with many programs including Food Stamps and our Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC). But the connection we have with hunger issues in Oregon goes even deeper than those programs.
Chronic, persistent hunger is not caused merely by the lack of food. It occurs when people lack opportunity to earn enough money, to be educated and gain skills and to meet their basic health needs. As you know, our agency is in the forefront of addressing many of these issues for the more than one million Oregonians we serve every year.
Unfortunately, the work we do, as well as that of educators, faith groups, the private sector and other non-profits is still not enough. The State of Oregon still ranks as one of the highest in the country in terms of its hunger problem. It is increasingly clear that achieving an end to hunger in our state will not just happen. It must be made to happen, and this will require extraordinary commitment by each one of us.
I am pleased to report that, for the Governor's Food Drive this year, DHS contributed an average of just under 50 pounds of food per employee. That put us third in our classification of agencies with 1,000+ employees, up from 5th place last year.
Overall, we collected 14,894 lbs of food collected and logged $16,091 in payroll deductions. Both were the highest totals of any agency in the state. We also were first in poundage equivalent from all donations with 436,349 pounds of food.
As you know, the food barrels are still in the hallways, and I'm sure our food drive coordinators will soon begin to plan for next year's drive. I want to thank you all once again for your efforts in working to solve this serious problem. It is work that we must continue not only during the food drives, but every day.
3. Food for thought
"To accomplish great things, we must not only act, but also dream; not only plan, but also believe."
— Anatole France
4. Staff news
View the current issue of DHS Staff news on the Web.
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This message is intended for all Department employees. Please read it electronically, if possible. Managers and supervisors are asked to share the message each week with employees who do not have email access.
If you have a disability and need a document on this Web site to be provided to you in another format, please send an email to dhs.forms@state.or.us or call (503) 945-7021, fax (503) 373-7690 or TTY (503) 947-5080. If you know of others who need this accommodation, please let them know it is available.
Oregon Department of Human Services
Director's Office
500 Summer St. NE E15, Salem, OR 97301-1097
Phone: (503) 945-5944
Fax: (503) 378-2897
TTY: (503) 947-6214
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