We seek to provide action-oriented tools and guidance for our members, practitioners, and policymakers alike to promote and encourage best practices in our field. If you are looking for additional support, please contact
Jennifer Kerr, our Organizational Effectiveness (OE) Director.
Featured Resources
Human services agencies have been facing unprecedented shifts in practice as a result of the public health emergency and are balancing staff health and safety, implementation of new technology to facilitate virtual service delivery, and overall staff well-being. APHSA has worked through its full membership and with national experts to advance policy and practice that recognizes and supports the role of human services professionals as a part of the nation’s critical health and safety infrastructure. Here you will find a 5-part video compilation of on addressing workforce wellbeing during emergency response, into recovery, and beyond.
NEW! December 2020 - Toolkit for Supporting Young Families Through Human Services: Millions of children across America live with young parents ages 18-24. While maneuvering the joint responsibilities of early adulthood and parenthood, these young parents face an array of obstacles such as access to childcare, comprehensive health care, and quality housing options. Despite these challenges, young parents are uniquely motivated by their children, can be exceptionally resilient, and have the capability to navigate systems often designed without their experiences in mind.
APHSA is pleased to announce the newly released Toolkit for Supporting Young Families Through Human Services. This toolkit links to a multitude of resources to help health and human services leaders critically evaluate their programs to ensure young families’ success. Additionally, the toolkit includes two brand new resources:
Designing Better Programs for Young Parents & Families: Insights from The Southeastern Cohort on Young Parents & Families – This report, coauthor by Third Sector and APHSA, highlights lessons learned from phase one of the Southeastern Cohort on Young Parents and Families, focused on interagency collaboration and community engagement. For questions on the cohort or this report, please contact Joel Straker.
Funding Programs for Young Parents & Families – This APHSA brief provides a summary of potential federal funding sources and programs that can be used to support programs specifically targeted towards young families. While this list is not exhaustive, it highlights major sources that can serve as a starting point for braiding and blending of funding to create comprehensive programming to serve young families.
Should you have any question regarding the toolkit or APHSA’s work in this area, please contact
Mary Nelson.
Benefits of Interoperability in the Health and Human Services System: APHSA has collected the success stories of states who implemented integrated eligibility services. Featured in this report are several of our member states’ stories, highlighting how they leveraged an integrated funding mechanism (the A-87 Exception) which allows good business design to apply across a broad range of programs and services. It provides benefits to states, customers, and federal partners, ranging from cost containment to improved customer service, enhanced security and privacy, program integrity, and better outcomes for children and families. Although the case studies speak to the A-87 Exception funding, the benefits and lessons learned go beyond that Exception to integrated funding in general.
Human Services Value Curve: Human services is experiencing many of the same challenges that all modern systems face, including rapidly changing economic forces, social structure, demographics, communications, and technology. A key framework developed by Harvard’s Technology and Entrepreneurship Center’s Leadership for a Networked World is the Human Services Value Curve. This model, along with related tools APHSA has developed, is designed to provide a roadmap for improving human services outcomes. Read about our toolkit and access the various tools and templates we have successfully tested in helping systems advance through the Value Curve stages.