SCO Family of Services

As a leading provider of human services in New York, SCO Family of Services is committed to helping children, teens, adults and families meet critical needs and build a strong foundation for the future.
SCO supports strong family life through after-school programs, academic enrichment, arts, recreation, counseling and employment services. We provide transitional housing to stabilize families in crisis, adult education and vocational training. We have also become one of the City's largest developers of worker-owned cooperatives, which help to provide living wage jobs for low-income workers, particularly in the immigrant community.
We work to get children off to a good start in school, beginning our services when mothers are pregnant and continuing through the child's fifth birthday. We provide at-home visits for at-risk and first-time mothers and guidance on nurturing and teaching young children. Our early education programs are classroom-based and implemented in family child care homes, and focus on preparing children for success in kindergarten and throughout their education while helping parents learn how best to guide their children developmentally and educationally.
We launch youth into adulthood, providing second chances and a helping hand for vulnerable youth, including help with school, college, career preparation and life skills. We work with young people to maintain and re-establish strong family bonds and we help youth without family to develop relationships with caring adults. We have group homes and support services for parenting teens and LGBTQ youth, and we work to change behavior for young men and women who have been involved with the courts, providing a structured living environment and a focus on education while working to reunite them with their families.
In our programs for people with special needs, we help individuals unlock their potential and lead full and productive lives. Our day habilitation, residential, in-home and campus-based services help each child and adult enjoy the benefits of learning, work, recreation and building strong community ties.
For more than 100 years, we have been devoted to assisting the people we serve to bridge the divide between a life of hardship and a life of promise. Without turning anyone away, and by providing a suite of services, we enable each individual to meet life's challenges.

SCO Family of Services is in the second year of our 2013-2016 Strategic Plan, which maps out strategic directions to maintain our commitment and capacity to provide unconditional care and second chances for the people we serve - and to examine what we do and how to do it better.
1) Leverage Our Size and Program Mix - We are anchoring our programmatic decisions to make sure the people we serve are at the center of all we do and receive the best of all we offer; our focus is on programs where we can provide high-quality services aligned with our mission. We are increasing coordination, collaboration and information-sharing across programs to share best practices.
2) Improve Quality, Performance and Outcomes - To continue improving the quality of our programs, we are establishing baseline outcome metrics framed by three critical life-changing results - learning, work and well-being. Our goal is to meet and exceed government performance and compliance standards. In the past year, SCO developed Key Performance Indicators for Program Support Departments, such as HR, IT and Business Operations. Key Performance Indicators for programs are being developed and will include routine reporting on utilization of resources, government and funder ratings, consumer experience and demographic data.
3) Focus on Geography and Deepen Roots in Targeted Communities - We are committed to make the most of every opportunity to deliver services in community and geographic clusters where our programs are located, such as Brooklyn and Queens in New York City and Nassau County on Long Island. To meet all the needs of the people we serve, we will communicate across all our programs and join and build provider networks to provide clients access to all the programs and services they need.
4) Make SCO a Great Place to Work - We are supporting staff through competitive compensation and benefits, and a culture of learning. The SCO Center for Professional Development offers a menu of workshops each month targeting the professional development needs of staff across the agency. Taleo, the new outreach and recruitment system, is enabling SCO hiring managers to view hundreds of applications for jobs across SCO. Achieve Mission worked with SCO’s Executive Council to focus on future culture and rooting SCO's culture in the highest of values, mission-consistency and practice.
5) Enhance Financial Sustainability - We are focused on increasing fundraising, which rose 17% over FY '13, and have recently hired a new Director of Institutional Advancement to support our Board of Director’s fundraising efforts, widen our donor base, build our private and government fundraising revenue, and leverage our existing and build new strategic partnerships. We are also advocating for rate increases where appropriate and automating and upgrading key business practices.

SCO Family of Services is well positioned to attain our key performance goals and long-term strategic plan initiatives. Through the overarching work of our Chief Strategy Officer, there is an ongoing focus on quality improvement, strategic planning and performance across all programs and administrative departments, including our robust in-house Quality Improvement Department.
Addressing the need for a performance measurement system to address program and administrative performance, our new Performance Analytics Department consolidates once separate functions and expands the agency’s analytic, data management and reporting capacity. Working in close collaboration with program, administration and finance, QI and Corporate Compliance, the Performance Analytics Department centralizes existing staff and manages performance initiatives including: quarterly Key Performance Indicator Reports; Productivity and Outcome Measurement; automated performance reporting; agency-wide client/consumer demographics and data mining, mapping and visualization, creating a centralized data warehouse.
KPIs are being developed to make data accessible to key leaders and stakeholders who drive decision making and influence performance - and are intended to highlight those areas that require improvement and corrective action. The KPIs differ across administrative departments and were developed based on each department's activities. Where applicable, performance targets were developed based on performance data for prior years. SCO has engaged leaders throughout the organization in the development of the KPIs, including the Executive Director, Chief Strategy Officer, Chief Administrative Officer, Financial Officer, Chief Program Officers and the heads of Business Operations, Quality Improvement, Training, and Program Administrative Executive Directors.
We believe this work will enable managers at all levels to identify and address quantifiable trends, areas of strength and those that need more attention - while heightening our ability to attain our goals.

Critical progress has been made in each of our five strategic goals: Significant examples include:
1) To leverage size and Program mix, we have added pre-K slots and after-school slots in two of our Brooklyn hub neighborhoods, leveraging the expertise and quality early childhood education programming in those areas; A “Favor Economy” initiative encouraged program leaders to identify their needs – while staff throughout SCO listed the ways they could help with technical assistance and professional development/training.
2) To enhance financial sustainability, we have increased fundraising by 17% YTD over FY14, added a new highly skilled Director of Institutional Advancement and more than 350 new donors.
3) A highlight of our work to improve quality, performance and outcomes recently concluded – our preparation for renewal of COA accreditation, for which we prepared a record number of 29 narratives and more than 500 pieces of evidence. We have also developed a Program KPI template to incorporate systemic corrective action plans into the Quality Improvement topline report to ensure risk identification and improve practice.
4) As part of our focus on geography and efforts to deepen roots in targeted communities, we have added programming in critical hub neighborhoods (Bedford Stuyvesant, Brownsville & Sunset Park, Brooklyn) and we are securing office space to create an office hub in Brownsville. We are also implementing an emergency on-call case management system in Corona, East Elmhurst and Far Rockaway, Queens.
5) Our efforts to make SCO a Great Place to Work include the creation of dozens of workshops for hundreds of staff through SCO’s Center for Professional Development, and the recently implemented outreach and recruitment system, Taleo, enabling hiring managers to review hundreds of applications for available jobs across the agency. We are implementing a Learning Management system, and the Executive staff has worked closely with Achieve Mission to create an organizational culture rooted in the highest of values, mission consistency and practice.

We are still working to improve in all areas, including initiatives to widen our donor base and advocate for government reimbursement rate increases where necessary, and to upgrade key business processes. We are also developing Program KPIs and preparing to further increase training agency wide, including for our staff in SCO's residential schools and residences at our Taft Academy. The Taft Academy Steering Committee has been scheduled for March. One of two staff for the Academy have been hired along with a consultant to assist with the launch.