Welcome Zaki!

Dear Imagine friends and family,

First of all, we want to welcome Zaki and his family to the Imagine family. Zaki is a young man from Aptos with sweet hands for catch, a fond ear for music and a horseman. He will start services this month with Imagine through the self-determination program. He is shown here at home with his father, Shamim. When you meet them, please make sure to let them know how welcome they are.

We had to part with Fabi, alas. Fabi joined us, subbing for Patty when Patty went on maternity leave and then had her own in 2023. In between, Fabi did the hard and vital work of recruiting caregivers. She's been fun to work with, engaged and proud to help Imagine and our next employees find one another. We're keeping her husband (one of her fine recruits) and hope to see a lot of her baby daughter, Ximena, who is also an excellent recruiter. Fabi is going on to a position helping people in Monterey County qualify for benefits. Fabi leaves Imagine when, for the first time in my tenure, the big stress in recruiting is good candidates without a matching position open. We wish her and the family the best and look forward to seeing her at our events.

Which brings us to a brief note about the state of the agency. Imagine has not been this well staffed in years. We have lots of new caregivers many of whom seem excellent and some of whom I haven't met. There are still a few positions open but those are mostly a failure to match well.

For my friends who fret about how I spend my time, I did only 14 hours of coverage in all of January. I bet I beat most Facilitators too. Full staffing is not doing the job, but it does allow attention to rest with our clients, their struggles and well-being. It's a better agency where that focus can be a habit instead of a discipline.

We still haven't settled on a job title for Lia's new position. As a recap from last month's newsletter, we are very eager to improve the work lives and focus of our Facilitators. We are running a test from now through June where one Facilitator has half a caseload and the others add one client and the yet-untitled (but named Lia) Facilitator supports her peers in various ways.

One of those ways, is that Lia will be reaching out to 10-12 stakeholders each month for 1:1 interviews. These will be broad conversations built around the "What's Working/What's Not Working" Person-Centered Thinking tool. (See below for a description of the tool.) The goal is to push our Open-Door policy outward and so to get more offers of exciting ideas, earlier warnings about frustrations building and better documentation of how stakeholders on our teams are feeling over time.

This work, we hope, assists Facilitators by giving them information which may not flow as easily face-to-face between them and their clients, staff, families and other members of the circle of support. We hope this will also assist senior management by giving us insight that doesn't come to us on our own.

Imagine has many stakeholders from every group that are generous with their thoughts, concerns and opinions but we have more that senior management seldom hears from. We are looking at these interviews as a way to hear from those who don't reach out to management and/or facilitators. For that reason, we are not asking for volunteers. Lia will reach out or I will to those selected each month to set up the meetings.

Further down, this month's newsletter includes the following:.

Patty Lopez, welcomes you into the new year and wishes you well.

In The Service Sector this month, Heather helps you rest your tired eyes with a short column about a big party coming up and some computers coming out.

The Person-Centered Evolution column talks about What's Working/What's Not Working as a tool.

In Community Connections, big news. We have a column from the new leader of the group.

In the Advocacy Corner, the start of California's first budget of the latest state budget deficit.

Our usual stuff in the columns around self-determination and Transparency.

This month we have spotlights on Wendy and Hayley, who is going to be his own employer of his staff through self-determination in 2024.

As ever, I am at your service. If you have any questions, feedback or concerns, please don't hesitate to get in touch. You can write me here. I look forward to hearing from you.

Gratefully yours,

Doug

Human Resources Corner

It's Doug again. After three straight months of slowly creeping into Patty's columns- a sentence or two at the end of this one, a run-on paragraph in the next, this month I am going full pirate. The Arabella is mine! Ahoy, y'all.

I have two main topics I want to follow up with our caregivers on. The first is, I want to recognize how much turnover we've had among Facilitators and how hard that must be for our caregivers. The Facilitator's job may not be harder than a caregiver's or an Executive Director's, but it requires a lot of skills that aren't closely related and few if any new Facilitators have them all. Most successful facilitators during my time said and seemed like they didn't really get the hang of it for a year. Depending on which team you are on, you may have had 2-3 different new Facilitators in the last two years which means you haven't had a fully developed and ready leader in that position to support you.

I have been wanting to recognize that and thank you for your patience. To those of you who reached out with concerns, you have been helping a lot (filling the sails?). Anyway, thank you. We obviously haven't cracked it, but we're far from done trying.

And the other thing I wanted to share comes from the first. If you read my usual article (the one I do when I'm not jacking Patty's) just above either last month or this, you know that we are experimenting with a new position to better support Facilitators getting the hang of the job. Many of the details are in the other columns and some are still in development. But the one I wanted to discuss are the interviews upcoming.

We are asking the new Support Facilitator to conduct 10-12 interviews per month that are meant to find what is going well and what needs attention on each team. The majority of those will be with caregivers because (1) there are more of you than any other group of stakeholders and (2) the purpose of the interviews, to help us better manage and support Facilitators, requires rich information from the people who benefit or suffer the most from each Facilitator's strengths and weaknesses.

I want to make some reassurances about the integrity of those interviews. The best guidance we can give depends on the most honest feedback. At first, we will be recording zoom calls with you, but we want to reassure you that Lia, Patty and I will be the only ones permitted to see them. The feedback, when it is presented to Facilitators will come without attribution. We want and hope and train for candor between Facilitators and direct care staff, but if there's something you have been itching to say and felt timid, worried or awkward about it, say it to Lia. Once we are comfortable that the interviews are happening in a constructive way, we will reduce the recordings and future interviews can remain fully anonymous.

OK, so who votes that I let Patty have her column back next month? To answer or to follow up with any questions and concerns, you know where to find me, my number is in your house binder and you can email me here.

Submitted by Doug "Pegleg" Pascover Argh