Happy New Year

Happy New Year!

One of the things that delights me about the child support community is the willingness -- no, the enthusiasm -- with which we help each other: half a dozen national conferences a year designed to offer ideas and insights, improvements and innovations to everyone else; web talks and teleconferences to explore better ways of doing business. I'm proud of the collaboration and cooperation we share, despite the competitive design of the incentive program.

I wish we saw this in politics and business and investing and even sports. Don't get me wrong, competition is important. It motivates us to improve and pushes us forward. Winning is great and losing sucks, but I think we've gotten out of balance as a culture. Winning isn't everything, and thinking it is leads to hatred and polarization and worse. In sports it occasionally leads to violence and riots in stadiums. In politics it just builds walls of one sort or another. Polarization is the mother of terrorism and fascism and all of their siblings.

We will not solve global climate change or world hunger or violence against the vulnerable or the opioid epidemic while we are polarized.  We will solve it when we begin to listen to those we disagree with and they listen to us, when we look for the common good and, well, promote the general welfare, to steal from the constitution.

Even in the amazingly collaborative child support community we nestled up together for a long time, not wanting to think of ourselves as part of the social services world, feeling a little of the "us and them" when budgets are tight and approaching our caseload as adversaries to the non-paying parent. We've come a long way, finding ourselves working closely with social service agencies and nonprofit partners in order to address the holistic needs of the family, even taking a back seat, now and then, to other important issues. NCSEA has begun meeting with APHSA after a long silence, to explore where the organizations can complement each other's roles. I anticipate breakthrough ideas will spring from the collaboration of these organizations.

This is the kind of action that leads to great outcomes and you should be proud to be a part of it.