A Great Start for 2020
Happy New Year! I hope that 2020 is off to a great start for you and your organizations.
We had an amazing year in 2019 and we will be publishing our annual report at the end of this month highlighting some of our accomplishments. Two big projects that we will continue to grow in 2020 are the ResourceAbility program and The Leadership Academy. I wanted to send out a quick post to let you know of our plans for 2020 around these two initiatives.
ResourceAbility – Financial Health for Adults and the Transitioning Young Adults Programs
We are excited to announce that we will be continuing the ResourceAbility program going into 2020. This program for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities is supported by Mill Levy funding through Rocky Mountain Human Services. We have been developing ResourceAbility – Financial Health for Adults for the last two years and have made tremendous progress. In 2019 we delivered 154 classes and worked with 587 unique individuals to help them develop life skills and make choices that align with their values.
The ResourceAbility – Financial Health for Adults program in 2020 will focus on delivering classes to a similar number of participants. However, this year is about formalizing the program in preparation for a study to demonstrate it as an “evidence-based program.”
We learned in 2019 that there is a tremendous need for classes on life skills for transitioning young adults with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities. We are pleased to announce that we have received the funding to deliver classes, including financial health and employment skills for the transitioning young adults in Denver in 2020. We have already established relationships with the public schools and are looking forward to building more great relationships and delivering these learning opportunities in the coming year!
The Leadership Academy
In September of 2019, we soft launched two programs as the beginning of The Leadership Academy. If you ran into me over the past six months, you know I have been talking about this a lot. The Leadership Academy is a leader in adult learning, learning technology and learning evaluation through a community of representatives of Health and Human Services that are working together to create a culture of efficiency, efficacy and empathy.
Last year we launched a “Motivational Interviewing Integrated Learning Program” and a “Person Centered/Data Driven Organizations Integrated Learning Program.” These two programs were designed to improve how trainings are implemented in the field and how outcomes can be tracked over longer timelines as a means to improving training in health and human services. The two programs filled up almost immediately and they are just now concluding, so we should have data on the outcomes of these efforts available by the time of our next newsletter.
During 2019, participants completed 2,109 online courses through FHI and The Leadership Academy.
We are learning that these programs are effective at creating ongoing conversations in conjunction with live training and that we can discern to some degree that the trainings are actually being successfully implemented on the job!
Upcoming programs from The Leadership Academy
In 2020, we are launching more robust Motivational Interviewing options (see the first offering here). We will also make the Person Centered/Data Driven Organizations ILP available again later in the spring.
Also, in March, we will launch what we are calling our Human Services Professional Essentials Training Program. It is designed to prepare human services professionals to apply skills, knowledge, and attitudes across diverse practice settings, while building program capacity so as to offer clients the highest quality care and support. You will be receiving more information from us in the next few weeks about these programs and how to sign up.
I’ll try to get another blog post out by the beginning of February to talk about our annual report and to discuss everything else FHI will be doing in 2020, including our training calendar for the first half of the year. Once again, Happy New Year! And we look forward to supporting you and learning with you in 2020.
