Onsite Training

Family Development and Case Management Summer Institute for Head Start Programs: Onsite Training

The Center for Community Futures now offers ONSITE TRAINING for Head Start staff on Family Development and Case Management!

Our faculty members can do training in Family Development and Case Management at your site. Our training experts are faculty members of Bay Area Universities (U.C. Berkeley, Cal State University East Bay, San Francisco State) or MSW graduates who are managing programs in the Bay Area.

A typical Summer Institute in Berkeley will have 10-15 faculty members involved. The reasons we do these 4-day long Institutes in the summer is (a) because the faculty are available; i.e., they are not teaching their regular courses, and (b) we can rent the college classrooms and dorm rooms at U.C. Berkeley to conduct the Institutes.

Even if we do this training at your site, your participants can still get college credit from California State University East Bay (CSUEB). The amount of credit is keyed to the number of classroom hours. Our regular 4-day long Summer Institute provides 3 credits, which is one credit for each eight hours of classroom time. If they want this credit on a pass/fail basis all they have to do is be present. If a person wants a letter grade, they take a short True/False quiz at the end of each class. Everything they need to know to get a good grade on the quiz is covered in the course. The college credit requires an additional registration fee of $89 per credit, or $267 for 3 credits. This additional fee can either be made out to us or to CSUEB. (We are also a continuing education provider for MFTs and LCSWs to get CEUs.)

Since it is impractical to move ten or fifteen faculty members to your site, instead we do the on-site training in a seminar format. We would send one or two or maybe three trainers to your site. You would provide the location, refreshments, and copy the handout materials. The first step is to identify the specific topics on which you want your staff to have training. There are several ways to do this.

  1. The first way is that you can just tell us what you need. Maybe you have a specific skill capacity that you are trying to build, i.e. crisis intervention or working with the mentally-ill parent. If your program has sent staff to a Summer Institute you can talk with them to get their input about what would be useful for the rest of your staff.

  2. The second way is that you can look at the agendas for our summer institutes and tell us which topics you want to cover. Note that there are three different Institutes:

* Managers, Supervisors and Policy Makers

* Basic Skills 1 (about half of the 9 competency goals and 41 indicators)

* Basic Skills 2 (the other half of the 9 competency goals and 41 indicators)

You can click on each link above for a copy of the agenda.

  1. The third approach is that you can do a more systematic ‘self assessment’ to identify what your staff already know (knowledge) and what they know how to do (skills). Our assessment form is based on the social work framework for case management: engagement, assessment, goal setting, interventions, evaluation, and termination (transition). You can either ask the individual staff members to fill it out for themselves and then tally it up, or you can get a supervisor or manager complete this based on their understanding of current staff capacity. Click here for the assessment form in MS Word or here for HTML. And of course you can tailor this assessment to your own needs.

After you tell us what topics you want covered, we can figure out how much time that will take and/or how much time you have available for people to attend the training, e.g. 1 day, 2 days, 3 days. It does not make any difference to us how many people you have in the training -- our faculty can do these workshops for anywhere from 10 to 200. And, we can run more than one track if you need more than one trainer. You might see if other programs in your area want to share in the training and in the cost.

We then agree upon dates. The cost structure for us to put a trainer on the road is $2,500 per day, per trainer plus travel expenses. If you have a group of 10 or more people you will find that the on-site training is less expensive -- and more targeted -- than sending ten people to the regular institute. If you have fewer than ten people it is probably cheaper to send them to the regular institute in Berkeley.

However, we think that it is a good idea for you to send a couple of people to the regular Institute anyhow so they can show you the materials and give you the background you need to shape an on-site training program to meet your specific local needs. (Eventually, we will have all these courses on-line through the California State University at East Bay. They have approved it in concept but it will take 2 or 3 years to get it done).

After you have given some thought to the topics you want to have covered in your on-site training, call Jim Masters at 510-459-7570 or e-mail him at jmasters@cencomfut.com to discuss how to proceed.