Eligibility/Self-Sufficiency Blog Posts

2024 Autumn Institute for Public Assistance Professionals Builds Resilience and Leadership in Human Services

Human services professionals gathered from across California to exchange insights and develop approaches for cultivating resilience, advancing leadership and creating transformative outcomes. 

Held on November 13-15 as an online conference, the 2024 UC Davis Human Services Autumn Institute brought together leaders and professionals statewide from across the field to virtually explore strategies for fostering resilience, leadership and meaningful change.

Using Data to Strengthen Connections and Communities: CalWORKs and Child Welfare Services

The field of Human Services is as wide and complex as its moniker might suggest. For larger agencies, an overlap in services is almost inevitable, but this doesn’t mean it should be shrugged off. For services that deal with vulnerable and/or traumatized children and families—such as CalWORKS and Child Welfare Services—each contact with children and families has the potential to cause additional trauma. The need to prevent inefficient, repetitive, and/or otherwise overlapping communications becomes paramount.

Cal-OAR Assistance Now Available for CalWORKs and Welfare-to-Work

The Human Services division at UC Davis Continuing and Professional Education is ready and available to assist you and your county with the California CalWORKs Outcomes and Accountability Review (Cal-OAR) process. Cal-OAR facilitates continuous improvement of county CalWORKs programs by collecting, analyzing and disseminating outcomes and best practices. We have supported more than 160 County Self-Assessment processes over nearly 20 years, and our outstanding team is ready to use this knowledge and expertise to help your county in Cal-OAR process implementation.

Linkages Revisited

The Linkages Project was implemented by pioneer counties with the direction and support of CDSS and the California Center for Research on Women and Children in 2000. This project represented a collaborative approach between child welfare and CalWORKs staff in serving families, with a focus on prevention prior to intervention. Fast forwarding twenty years later, the philosophy of Linkages remains, and has impacted culture and service delivery across the field of human services.