SOCIALWORX INSTITUTE INC

Our goal is to end violence, abuse and mass incarceration by helping communities create collaborative coordinated community plans which address assets, barriers and gaps, to improve their response to solving their community issues.

We identify and convene stakeholders, facilitate community planning, provide training and technical assistance, and bring resources to allow participants to identify community goals and achieve them.

Organizational expertise includes service as a generalist program officer for a large family foundation, during which convening and providing technical assistance to nonprofits and cohorts of nonprofits were daily responsibilities. We initiated community collaboratives to address HIV, mental health, disaster and many others. This skill set of drawing stakeholders together, using the Collective Impact Framework to identify a shared agenda and plan for mutually reinforcing activities is embedded in our DNA and the key to our success. Organizational expertise as a nonprofit consultant supporting individual nonprofits in achieving their goals led to realizing that supporting cohorts of nonprofits focused on the same goal would have greater impact and sustainability. Finally, serving as a trauma counselor to the formerly incarcerated, and survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault, child abuse and veterans with PTSD led to seeing that fragmented service delivery systems that allow clients to fall through the gaps due to poor service coordination not only deter help-seeking behavior and erode client successes, but also fail to leverage resources effectively for the best possible outcomes for their clients. Disjointed incohesive inconsistent and poorly coordinated efforts often fail to produce the desired results and can often exacerbate existing problems.

Comprehensive planning, implementing national evidence-based models, and creating Continuums of Care improve outcomes and more effectively leverage limited resources for sustainable success.

We are relatively new, but we have been selected to incubate the LAPRISTA which is the premier training organization to promote Louisiana's prison reform initiative in the state with the highest incarceration rate in the world. We are focusing on improving prison reentry success in 10 jurisdictions to perfect the model, which will then be applied to the other focus areas, as communities are ready to embark on the comprehensive planning process to address our other focus areas.