I have been following the work of Katherine Ortega Courtney and Dominic Cappello since they wrote the book Anna, Age Eight in late 2017. They are honest in their assessment of the systemic problems in most of our state agency networks and too frequent failures to protect children and families as a result of those breakdowns. What I love most is they are solution oriented and offer fairly simple solutions. The caveat to that is these solutions require a huge paradigm shift - bigger for some than others - but nevertheless a new way of building strategies and budgets, listening to the community and committing to serve the basic needs of 100% of the community.
In their follow up book, appropriately named 100% Community: Ensuring trauma-free and thriving children, students and families, they name the 10 surviving/thriving services that must be available to every child and their families within a community, and they lay out detailed plans for creating that 100% Community model. It’s my dream for Oklahoma that we could make this happen here. New Mexico is no different in terms of resource challenges. Our children and families don’t have time to wait for our revenues to increase. We have the ability to get on the right side of this and now we have the guidebook to do so.
Hope theory reminds us that we need a goal (strengthening our children and families), way power or path (100% Community guidebook) and agency or willpower (what other real choice do we have?) to succeed. I challenge everyone who reads this to download the book (the authors are offering it free!) and read/study it. If you would like to discuss further about how we can work on this in Oklahoma, please let us know.
Linda Manaugh
Community Manager, Raising Resilient Oklahomans!
Director of Communications & Program Support, Potts Family Foundation
https://www.pacesconnection.com...ts-into-the-lifeboat
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