What We Do
We help organizations and their leaders assess what’s working, what isn’t, and why. We help design, plan, and deploy effective strategies to achieve an organization’s goals and to support its initiatives through strategic and operational planning, program development, process consultation, and capacity building.
Child welfare work is complex and fraught with challenges and dilemmas. Organizations can become overwhelmed by heavy workloads and the instability of constant change.
The following components form the core of our work:
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We form partnerships with managers and staff in client organizations and work collaboratively in all facets of their work.
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We involve the organization in completing a structured assessment of its vision and mission, needs, strengths, opportunities, and obstacles preventing the organization from achieving its goals.
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We help identify clear and manageable objectives and action strategies, formalizing them into both strategic and operational plans.
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We build the capacity of an organization’s managers and staff through competency-based in-service training, coaching, and other learning strategies to ensure that newly learned skills transfer to the job.
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We help organizations establish ongoing data collection and evaluation methods to promote continuous quality improvement.
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When requested, we can stay involved through reassessment, monitoring, and troubleshooting, both to constructively shape the work and to ensure its sustainability over time.
Our Process
IHS uses a process consultation model in all its work
Process consultation is based on the assumption that challenges in organizations can be met more effectively if managers and staff acquire the assessment and problem-solving skills to direct their own change initiatives. Consultants apply their expertise to help find and implement the best solutions.
In process consultation, the consultant does the work “with” the client – not “to” the client. Engaging organizations to participate with consultants, from diagnostics through implementation, empowers them to discover and implement effective solutions themselves, and also helps to sustain changes. (Schein, 1987).
