Projects & Issues Update: COVID-19, Roundtable, MCFD Services HUB

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From the beginning of this public health crisis, we have been very aware that the community social services sector is responding in ways that we may not have expected or been prepared for. The sustainability of our sector has been a central focus of The Federation’s work for many years and it is very important to us that this sector not come out of this emergency less strong or less sustainable than when we went in. This is a focus I am bringing to the Social Services Sector Roundtable and to the provincial Economic Recovery Task Force during our weekly meetings. There have also been some recent announcements from the Federal government about supporting the charitable sector and we are working to gather more information about these resources.

While we may not have been adequately prepared for this crisis, you should all know that you are doing a remarkable job during what is a truly trying time. I want to thank you and your staff for all the work that you are doing day in and day out to be there for your community members and provide them with the care and support they need and deserve.

I know that COVID-19 does not erase the many issues and challenges that your community members are faced with. COVID-19 or not, parents are still needing support, people are still needing substance use help, women still need to be protected from abusive partners, babies are still needing to access infant development. All of the caring, committed people who have chosen to dedicate their career to community social services are going above and beyond right now ensuring that people will not be worse off when we come out of this crisis. Thank you.

As we continue to address your various COVID-19-related needs, there is more and more overlap with other projects, initiatives, and issues that we want to make sure you are informed of. A few of these are listed below. If there is anything else you have questions or concerns about, or if there is anything The Federation team can do to help you over the coming weeks, please let us know. We’re always here to help.

Rick FitzZaland
Executive Director

 

Social Services Sector Roundtable

The roundtable is meeting every week at the moment and this is proving to be incredibly useful both for accessing information on your behalf and when it comes to advocating for approaches that will protect and sustain the community sector as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to unfold. The updates from the Roundtable are posted on our COVID-19 webpage and below.

There is still no information available from Treasury Board about the compensation funding that was announced as part of Budget 2020. However, we have been assured that the money is protected, and we (along with our sector partners at the table) have been very clear about why an announcement is needed as soon as possible. We believe our government colleagues understand this well and I hope that we will have more information for you very soon.

MCFD Centralized Services Hub

On April 22nd, The Federation hosted a call for members with staff from the MCFD Centralized Services Hub. The MCFD representatives noted that the expedited process for managing applications through the Hub is working 98% of the time. They also affirmed that efforts to make sure the application forms are completed correctly have helped a great deal. You can find a recording of this week’s webinar on the Member’s Page of our website (under Issues & Analysis). Overall, the Public Safety and Solicitor General caseload for completing checks is down because a lot of the other groups that would normally be submitting checks are not operating right now.

We have regular webinars scheduling with the services hub team over the coming months. You can find the dates of those calls on our Webinars page. You can contact our Director of Programs and Services at sherry@fcssbc.ca for more information about these calls. We have also heard concerns from members about some other requirements for staffing such as medical checks and First Aid Certification. If you are experiencing hiring challenges related to these issues, please contact Sherry with your examples.

Guidelines on the use of technology

Over the coming weeks, The Federation will be working with the Community Action Initiative to create webinars designed to support community social service organizations in using technology to meet the needs of both your clients and your teams. Stay tuned for more information about these offerings.

Earlier this month, CLBC circulated information about the use of technology [PDF] and MCFD’s Inclusion Policy branch has circulated a letter to Aboriginal Infant Development Program (AIDP), Infant Development Program (IDP), Aboriginal Supported Child Development (ASCD) and Supported Child Development (SCD) Service Providers. [PDF] Some additional guidelines from MCFD and from some fellow Federation members have been posted on the member’s only website.

COVID-19 Expenses

We have been informed by multiple funders that members are advised to keep track of your COVID-19 related expenses and that if you are experiencing financial difficulties in managing these additional costs to connect with your funder representative. Please keep us in the loop as to how this process is working.

On knowing how to do the right thing…

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The past few weeks have been especially challenging and stressful for everyone involved in BC’s community social services sector. Two weeks ago, our Executive Director wrote about the many ways that BC’s community social services sector is being called on to support those in need, maintain emotional and social wellness, and care for those who would otherwise fall between the cracks.

You have all stepped up in profound and significant ways and you continue to do so. With each day that goes by, we are more and more impressed and thankful for your ingenuity, creativity, and flexibility—for doing whatever is needed to support your clients while still recognizing their individual humanity. We know how hard that is amid the fear and uncertainty and onslaught of recommendations and projections and statistics.

We have been shocked and not shocked (often at the exact same time) by many of the things our members want information about and many of the questions our members want concrete answers to. Without information and directions, it can feel like we don’t know what to do. Many of us are tired and stressed out and scared and just want someone to tell us how to do what’s right. We are all searching for certainty and control in a moment without much of either.

But the truth is that our sector has always known how to adapt and change and provide support and care and kindness. It’s actually one of the things we are best at and what sets us apart from others. Yes, these are unprecedented and extraordinary times. But you are extraordinary people who have done and survived the unprecedented before. Don’t forget that.

The Federation has done—and will continue to do—as much as we possibly can to get you the information and resources you need to get through this crisis. But when you find yourselves in those gaps, in those moments of uncertainty, trust yourself. Act with the compassion and creativity that our sector is known for. There isn’t always going to be a right thing to do; but those of us doing this work know that there is a right way to do things. And that’s how we have always done things—with kindness and intention and care.

Below you will find updates for employers, links to new guidelines, webinar information for Federation members, and resources on things like mental health and wellness, parenting during COVID-19, and working from home. And as always, if there is anything we can do to help you or your staff, don’t hesitate to get in touch.

Rebecca Atay Lang
Associate Executive Director

Sherry Sinclair
Director of Programs & Services

Working from Home, Parenting & Wellness Resources

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Among the many, many changes we have all experienced in recent weeks, some are easier to get used to than others. Most of us find ourselves working from home and parenting in the midst of an unprecedented public health emergency. So while we keep up with policy changes and government guidelines, we also wanted to offer some resources on working from home, parenting, and taking care of your personal wellbeing to help you with your new day-to-day life.

Working & Working from Home

Working From Home

Working from home is awesome… until the cat throws up on your computer and your neighbour starts firing up all sorts of power tools and noisy machinery to build what you can only assume is a time machine. But the good news is that many people have been working from home and surviving such calamities for years. Here are 20 tips on working from home from people who’ve been doing it for a while.

Working From Home… With Kids

Having kids can make you more productive – except when they’re there all the time. So how can you meet work obligations now that schools are closed? This is a great article on working from home with your kids during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Easing the ‘Work From Home’ Burden

Working from home on a normal day can feel challenging. And it gets exponentially harder for single parents, kids with special needs, families experiencing homelessness, and parents who have to work outside of the home. Add financial worries, annoying/confusing technology, distracting pets, a lack of space and it can all feel downright paralyzing. So here are even more tips and resources on getting through the mess we find ourselves in. My key takeaway? This situation is unprecedented, so go easy on yourself.

Wellness and Mental Health

Self-care for Educators & Caregivers During a Pandemic

Self-care at a time like this is key. We can’t be available for our children if we don’t have the energy or bandwidth ourselves, worse still if we get sick. For this reason, Morningside Center has pulled together resources and tips to help you take care of yourself in the coming weeks and months.”

CMHA Resources

A pandemic is a very stressful event for individuals and communities. It’s normal to feel some stress and anxiety. It’s also very common for people to display great resiliency during times of crisis. CMHA has put together some great resources and suggestions to help support your mental health at this time of uncertainty.

Taking Care of our Communities

In collaboration with the FNHA OCMO and Chief Nursing Office, Nursing Services, the UBC Learning Circle is launching a new collaborative Wellness Series. Throughout the course of this series, guest speakers and experts will tackle topics around ensuring the wellness of ourselves, our community members, and caregivers during this time of physical and social distancing.

Mental Health Commission of Canada

In times of high anxiety and stress, it’s more important than ever to safeguard your mental wellness. The Mental Health Commission of Canada suggests that doing so includes stemming the tide of non-essential information and paring down your news consumption. Learn more by visiting the MHCC resource hub.

“The Power To Play To Take Care Of Us”

In this webinar, Neufeld Institute faculty member Deborah MacNamara Ph.D. talks about why play—for children and adults alike—is critical to our survival in times of stress. Dr. MacNamara explores why it is in our nature to play, how play can heal and restore us, and why we will need to lean on play more than ever in the days and weeks to come.

COVID-19 Stress, Distress & Trauma Series

This series of videos with Dr. Bruce Perry from the Neurosequential Network (an organization that develops and disseminates innovative programs and practices to improve the lives of children, families, and communities) goes over topics like patterns of stress, understanding state-dependent functioning, regulation, and more.

Mental Health Videos from the Conference Board of Canada

The Conference Board of Canada has created a resource page full of insights and analysis on COVID-19 including a series of videos with Dr. Bill Howatt on Mental health and COVID-19 (you can find them halfway down the page) as well as recorded webinars and interviews on advice for employers and best practice standards for return to work and disability management during COVID-19.

Parenting

Parenting During a Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has upended family life around the world. School closures, working remote, physical distancing is a lot to navigate, especially for parents. To help parents out, UNICEF teamed up with the Parenting for Lifelong Health initiative to bring caregivers a set of handy tips to help manage this new (temporary) normal.

Sharing Custody During a Pandemic

With public health officials urging people to quarantine in their homes, divorced or separated parents who share custody of their children are faced with the unprecedented challenge of settling on a new arrangement in the midst of a pandemic. CTV spoke with family lawyers to get insights on how to share custody while staying safe and healthy. For more information on co-parenting during COVID-19, visit the Government of BC family justice legal questions page.

A guide to parent self-care during COVID-19

Keeping ourselves healthy and safe is a tall order and is further compounded by the challenge of maintaining our values and goals as parents. And it is vital that we remember to support ourselves as individuals because maintaining our mental and physical health is the foundation from which we support our children during these trying times. This guide to parent self-care can help you tend to your needs so that you continue to be able to tend to the needs of those around you.

How to do School at Home

Many parents have found themselves in the position of homeschooling their children. While this may be familiar and welcome for some, others may be navigating new and uncharted territories. In this webinar, veteran homeschooler Tamara Strijack explores the important things to consider as we attempt to maintain some normalcy in the midst of a world crisis. She also looks at practical ideas around what learning at home under these conditions might look like—whether our children are 5, 10, 15 or 20.

Active Coping Calendar

With the world is in crisis, it can be hard to keep calm, stay wise, and be kind to ourselves and those around us. This Active Coping Calendar has daily actions (like “call a loved one” or “revisit a game you enjoyed when you were younger”) that can help us look after ourselves and each other as we face this global crisis together. You can also sign up to get future calendars.

 

“It is only natural that we and our children find many things that are hard to talk about. But anything human is mentionable and anything mentionable is manageable. The mentioning can be difficult, and the managing too, but both can be done if we’re surrounded by love and trust.” – Fred Rogers

Projects & Issues Update: COVID-19, Labour Market Research, HR Strategy, Research

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The Federation team talks a lot about how interconnected our work is—how our leadership development work is also related to our recruitment and retention work and how our commitment to reconciliation and resurgence is also very much about the strength and sustainability of the sector. And this interconnected nature of our work remains during these strange and frightening times.

Over the past month, our attention has largely turned to COVID-19. We’re focused on understanding your needs, getting information to you as quickly as possible, and advocating—always—on behalf of the community social services sector and the people you serve. And, not surprisingly, a number of the issues you are grappling with right now are ones you were grappling with before this pandemic. Our team is working incredibly hard to ensure that you are as informed and prepared as possible during this unprecedented crisis but this does not mean we have forgotten about the other issues you are facing related to contracting, procurement, screening, and wages.

This week, the SPARC BC/Federation team is drafting the final report of the Social Services Labour Market Research Project. This important piece of work will be even more relevant when we come out on the other side of the COVID-19 pandemic and look back at what we have learned from the crisis and how we can respond to the most pressing issues going forward.

In addition, the work that took place at The Federation’s Social Policy Forum in February will also be incredibly important when we begin building a stronger sector post-COVID-19. The precarious nature of staffing in the community social services sector is now affecting everyone in this province and will need to be addressed. Your staff are working incredibly hard to maintain the essential supports that vulnerable people and families need and they too deserve better and stronger supports.

If you have questions about any piece of work The Federation is undertaking on your behalf, don’t hesitate to reach out. We very much value your insights, experience, and ideas.

Rick FitzZaland
Executive Director

Social Sector HR Strategy

Thanks to the work of the Social Services Roundtable and the Social Services Labour Market Research Project, creating a human resources strategy for BC’s community social services sector has become a very real possibility. For this reason, the second half of The Federation’s 2020 Social Policy Forum gave participants an opportunity to begin exploring what that strategy could look like and how it could work.

Staff and leadership from government and the community social services staked out the boundaries of their vision—the things to remove, stop, encourage, expand, keep, avoid, mitigate, reinstate, encourage, and create—and then identified the key questions and issues that resulted. These were explored and discussed and then key considerations were determined for some of the most pressing questions that emerged.

All of that work has been documented and compiled into a summary document that will inform our next steps. This report contains 11 of those key questions and the central considerations that were identified for each. (There are also additional notes and comments for each question as well as appendices containing the results of the initial high-level mapping exercise and a breakdown of the event’s design and structure.)

This report, along with the soon-to-be-released Social Sector Labour Market Research Project Final Report will guide the work we do with the provincial government to build a sector-wide HR plan for BC’s community social services.

Research to Practice: Indigenous Fatherhood

The latest article from The Federation’s Research to Practice paper is about Indigenous fatherhood, the challenges Indigenous fathers face, and how social services workers can understand and reach out in different ways. The article explores three aspects of Indigenous fatherhood that have changed in ways that make it increasingly challenging for fathers to be connected and involved with their children—fathers and fishing, fathers as grandparents, and fathers in culture.

“I believe that we need to talk more openly about how many roles our Fathers are trying to fill,the places and activities where learning has historically come from, and the changes that have happened to spaces and practices.”

By exploring the unique impact of these changes, the article provides ways social services workers can better understand and support the fathers they work with in their communities. You can read and download a copy of the article here. And please pass on the link (or this email) to colleagues in your network working with Indigenous families.

COVID-19 Updates

As the COVID-19 pandemic unfolds, our team is doing their very best to keep Federation members informed and up-to-date. We are in constant contact with government colleagues, and sector allies, and our members and will continue to share updates and information regularly.

The Federation’s COVID-19 Resource page contains government documents, official updates, and a range of resources for social services organizations. The most recent additions are below.

If you are looking for the recordings or summaries from the member’s only COVID-19 and Your Organization webinars (the Thursday morning sessions) or examples of policies and procedures from fellow Federation members, these can be found on the member’s section of the website.

CLBC is also hosting some useful and informative calls with Dr. Behn Smith from the PHO that are posted on their website. You can find recordings of those calls and additional resources here.

 

Social Services in a Time of Crisis

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One of the messages that The Federation has been using for many, many years describes our sector as one of three legs of a stool. The point this makes is that without a stable social care sector the other two legs—health and education—aren’t able to keep our province strong and steady.

This idea has been a key part of our communication and advocacy efforts for over 10 years. It has informed our submissions to the Select Standing Committee on Finance and Government Services, numerous editorials we have had published, and countless conversations and meetings with government.

Recognition

In February, for the first time that I can recall, a BC Finance Minister made specific mention of the community-based social service workers in a provincial budget speech. And now, in this ongoing state of emergency, we are seeing on a daily basis the many ways that BC’s community social services sector is being called on to support those in need, maintain emotional and social wellness, and care for those who would otherwise fall between the cracks.

For many, many years the community social services sector has been drawing attention to the impact we have on the health of our cities and communities. And now people are paying attention. BC’s Provincial Health Officer is responding to this crisis by, among other things, explicitly calling on our sector to keep doing what we have been doing for years—showing up and caring for our clients, supporting those in need, and ensuring that vulnerable people are not made even more vulnerable by this public health crisis.

Inclusion

Over the past few weeks, Premier Horgan has called together an economic recovery task force for the province and The Federation has been invited to participate to ensure that the perspective of the community social services sector is included. The Premier chairs this task force along with Finance Minister Carole James and the Minister of Jobs, Economic Development, and Competitiveness, Michelle Mungall. The Federation joins SUCCESS, Creative BC, the First Nations Major Projects Coalition, BC Federation of Labour, and several boards of trade as the non-governmental members of the task force.

The fact that the social services sector is already being included in the planning of our province’s economic recovery feels like a major milestone and something we should be proud of. My work on this task will, of course, be informed by the knowledge and experience of the Social Services Sector Roundtable Reference Group and, for this reason, I am especially thankful for the strong, collaborative effort that our partners and sector allies have put into this initiative over the past year. To me, this is a perfect example of what it means to be altogether better.

Acknowledgment

And while this crisis has demonstrated the importance of a strong social care system, it has also laid bare some of the gaps in the system that still exist. The fact that we are urgently needed does not mean the inequities and barriers that challenge our sector have magically disappeared.

Right now, some of the lowest-paid staff in the sector are the ones that our entire province is relying on most. Many folks across the sector often work in more than one setting. Communications challenges feel amplified due to the urgency of the crisis. Planning and risk management are made even more frustrating when you are struggling to access timely information.

A number of the issues that The Federation has been talking about for years have been put in sharp focus. We are working to address them at this moment while also trying to learn from them and connect the dots for our partners and funders so that the sector will come out of this stronger and more able to face what the future holds.

I want to acknowledge all of the frontline staff who are showing up for their shifts ready to support people and who are being flexible and creative so that no one is left behind. Thank you for your patience and compassion as you support your community members.

I want to acknowledge the community social service leadership teams who are finding ways to keep your organizations operating, making tough decisions without all the information that is needed, and continuing to provide guidance and security to their staff teams. Thank you for going above and beyond in a time of unprecedented crisis.

I want to acknowledge the boards of directors who are guiding their organizations through this uncertainty. Thank you for ensuring that our services and supports continue to operate in the spirit of the visions and mission with which they were created.

And I want to acknowledge our colleagues in the provincial government for working with us as true partners in a time of chaos. Thank you for your willingness to speed up and take the kinds of risks that do not often come easily to government.

If you have any questions, concerns, or information to share, please do not hesitate to reach out. Contact information for our entire staff team can be found here. We are doing our very best to keep members informed and supported as things unfold.
Rick FitzZaland
Executive Director