Oregon Family Support Network

For more than 35 years, Oregon Family Support Network (OFSN) has worked to promote mental, behavioral, and emotional wellness through education, support and advocacy in Oregon and at the national level. A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of talking with Tammi Paul, OFSN’s Executive Director, and Lisa Butler, Family Support Services Director, about OFSN’s past and present, and its vision for the future.*

OFSN got its start with a group of parents who basically said, “We’ve had enough. We’re frustrated with not being able to get the support we need for our kids and we want to do something different.” It literally started in one of those parents’ garages when they started to convene other parents who were having similar experiences. Our founder is Judy Rinkin, and she is still a great friend of ours in the community. She did the work, not because she had a vision of creating an organization that would be around 35 years longer or later, but really because she wanted to see something different for families in the future. I would say that we continue in that vein. Our work is not necessarily about how our families will be changed by our work, but how future families’ experiences will be changed.

OFSN works in a variety of different ways to accomplish this vision. First, we provide direct one-to-one family support, with certified family support specialists walking alongside other families who are navigating on behalf of their child or youth experiencing mental health, behavioral health or other complex health needs. Most of that work is funded through contracts with local coordinated care organizations throughout the state, and includes working with families in the Wraparound process.

While this kind of direct service has been the primary focus of family support work for OFSN, it’s a smaller part now as we experience an increase in family support specialists being hired directly by clinical provider organizations. This has required OFSN’s work to expand in the area of workforce development as this model can cause challenges, with more marginalization and higher turnover among family support specialists. In many cases, family support specialists may be hired to work in one program and then they end up being called in to work in other programs as well. This often leads to confusion and lack of fidelity of family support work.

A second major focus of OFSN’s work is training development and delivery. We have quite a robust training program, delivering training across the state in both English and Spanish. For example, OFSN holds the certification training for all family support specialists in Oregon. Parents, with the lived experience of raising a child experiencing mental health, behavioral health or other complex health needs attend our forty two-hour training and then apply to the state to be certified. So we get the opportunity to develop an initial engagement with parents who are moving through that process.

But our training program is also bigger than that. We provide training directly to families, to support them in things like developing natural supports, navigating Wraparound, working with services providers and so on. We also provide training for organizations and providers, mostly around best practices for family engagement.

Another major piece of our work focuses on advocacy and building family involvement at the systems level. We support family members to participate in more than 20 groups around the state, including committees, task forces and councils. For example, right now, OFSN is participating in rewriting some of the state administrative rules for Wraparound. We know that there’s been something of a drift away from the values and principles. And so what we’re doing is going back to the technical pieces around the plans of care and around the phases of Wraparound. We need to have language that ensures that families are adequately engaged and that their voice is elevated throughout the Wraparound process. We’re also working on adding more specific language around the family support specialist role and how to put boundaries around that so that it’s clear what’s within the role and what’s not.

We also operate the parent warm line that is available to any parent in the state at no cost, and that is staffed a hundred percent by certified family support specialists. We see various different needs from families, everything and anything starting from basic needs like food and housing assistance to an empathetic listener when a family is experiencing dysregulation or exhaustion from caring for their child. We have families calling because they need support working with their child’s school—they might be starting to get calls from the school, or they’re seeing that things are changing, and they’re just beginning to explore what these experiences mean and if there are other families out there like them. Our staff are able to go out and support families directly, or they can be referred for more long-term support through OFSN or our partner organizations.

In all our work, of course including Wraparound, what we hear from families is that when needs are met, they flourish. That is the beauty of the Wraparound process: if we can really get to what are those needs and what is going to work for the youth and the family, then we can have a holistic approach, and that’s where we see that transformation. That’s where we see families flourishing as a result of the process.

* During the interview, Tammi and Lisa often elaborated on one another’s points, so the quotes here often contain contributions from both. Tammi and Lisa have approved this version.