Howdy Pardner

Howdy Pardner,

For much of my early career with the Washington child support agency, I viewed any partnerships the agency had as one-way relationships. After all, why wouldn’t public assistance and foster care and employment security and the IRS and employers and banks just want to help us find parents and make them pay. What’s more, the list of “partners” was pretty limited. And if they didn’t want to help? Well, we had federal and state law that said they had to. Or else.

It took me a long time to get my head right. The change in paradigm came when I began thinking about services from other points of view: the view of the parent and the view of other service providers. In my defense, I am not always a ham-handed clod thinking only of my own self-interest, but on this particular topic I was more firmly planted than I care to admit. Finally, I did come around … with the help of some really smart team members, when I began pondering about how to break our national average 65% rut as a new director and looking enviously at higher performing jurisdictions. The light that eventually flickered on was not some bright, incandescent 100 watter, though, but an aged florescent tube with a worn-out ballast. Still, sufficient light shone out that I could make out the outlines of my surroundings.

Many of you have heard me speak often enough about our need to help the less fortunate parents find their way to supporting themselves so that they can ultimately participate in the support of their children. The first question I had to reflect on was how they could get there. Where would the go to find help? Those were potential partners. Some we’d thought of and had approached … food assistance, TANF, employment services, corrections; we’d started working with sister government agencies looking for common cause, and most were open to working with us once they knew we really wanted to be partners and not parasites.

Trickier were the community-based agencies that thought of us as barriers to their ability to help their clients. We needed to earn their trust. Managers met with them to let them know we had a common purpose and what we wanted was the parent in a better, more stable financial position. Then we had to be sure it happened. When the first few skeptical calls came in saying that our driver’s license suspension or our 50% withhold or our IRS intercept was keeping this parent sleeping in their car (that they couldn’t legally drive) we had to be ready to bend, and work for the mutual benefit of both organizations. Thanks to a team of highly motivated staff and continual communication and mutual respect, we began making progress. In fact, these organizations turned out to be our best referrals to the Alternative Solutions Program because the parent who owed support had sought out the help of these third-party agencies and the social workers there tuned in on the child support issue and gave us a call, taking a chance that we meant it.

Of course, it’s not perfect (not yet, anyway) but we made giant strides over the course of a few years and many of our collection staff began to embrace the power of these partnerships and a customer-focused approach. I hope that over the next few years more community-based organizations will come to trust child support agencies and recognize the community as a true partner in their desire to help families.