The Clinic's Strategic Direction-Setting Plan – developed and monitored by our Board of Directors – guides the Los Angeles Child Guidance Clinic's business and program operations. The plan honors our stellar body of existing services, founded on creating access and intervening early on before mental health-related problems become more intractable and persistent. It also guides our expansion and areas of focus in alignment with our mission, goals and guiding principles.

Key accomplishments include the following:

Operations, Accountability and Risk Management

• Clinic Management Software System (CMSS) Implementation
  The Clinic has provided considerable resources to development of its CMSS toward ensuring that services are effective and efficient. The system is designed to collect time-sensitive information including data about the Clinic's adherence to its mission, goals, and guiding principles. CMSS serves as a critical tool to help management staff assess the best use of resources including staffing patterns, provision of face-to-face services, locus of services, and adherence to contract requirements. At the heart of our CMSS is an electronic records system which is designed to meet Medi-Cal and other funders' chart documentation and billing requirements. As of July 2010 all service providers have been trained and are using CMSS' clinical module.

Effective Services and Increased Clinic Visibility

• Standards of Effective Care Development & Implementation
  The Clinic has developed and implemented its Standards of Effective Care, which embrace core principles and direct provision of services. An outside reviewer – Bruce Anderson of Community Activators, Inc., which provides training and coaching for community activist organizations to help create innovation – noted the following: "The Clinic's Standards of Care do not shy away from the tough questions facing organizations trying to deliver genuinely community based, customer-focused support and services. It contains a values approach that is both affirmed in the research base and in substantial data collected from customers about what matters to them, and it clearly operationalizes those values into the daily work life of employees. The Standards both talk the right talk and walk the right walk."
• Early Intervention Training Institute
  In response to the expanding need for more early childhood mental health training in Los Angeles County and surrounding areas, the Early Intervention Training Institute increases the capacity of community-based, educational agencies and other key "gatekeepers" in identifying children at risk for emotional, behavioral or social delays, as well as other challenges. Additionally, we train professionals in effective interventions with these children and their families in settings such as mental health agencies, Head Start and day care centers, and child welfare organizations. Our social enterprise has trained over 1,400 service providers to vulnerable children 5 and younger.

Strategic Alliances and Partnerships

• Schools
  The Clinic provides on-campus mental health services at 22 school sites. Recently, the Clinic marked the culmination of an innovative project to develop a national model for school-based services – the 3R's Project, part of a prestigious Robert Wood Johnson Foundation national initiative to identify effective ways to help immigrant families. The 3R's—Relationships, Resiliency, and Recovery—brought the Clinic closer to its longtime community partner, Norwood Street School, and its Healthy Start Program and Parent Center. The report card for the three-year 3R's Project has been nothing short of positive—with significant gains for participating students in self esteem, social skills, behavior, effort, and academics.
• Primary Care
  The Clinic has established a partnership with South Central Family Health Center (SCFHC), providing on-site services in collaboration with a leading federally qualified health center in our community. In 2010, the Clinic also launched a three-way partnership with the SCFHC and The Accelerated School—a multiplex of pre-K through 12th grade. The partnership provides coordinated services to students through the health center's on-campus primary care clinic.
• Domestic Violence
  The Clinic is providing services on-site at Good Shepherd Shelter for Battered Women & Children, a safe haven for women and families recovering from domestic violence. Staff from the Clinic's award-winning First Steps Program provide specialty services to infants, toddlers and their mothers.

Policy Leadership

• Advancing Sound Children's Mental Health Policies
  Clinic President and CEO Betsy Pfromm serves on two key boards of directors that are leaders in policy developmen t– Mental Health America in Los Angeles and Mental Health Association in California. Reducing stigma and advancing recovery-oriented models are hallmarks of these two organizations. Equally important is the critical role of ensuring that consumers and family members are equal partners in planning and overseeing mental health services.
• Media Campaigns
  The Clinic's "Get Behind It" media campaign is underway, as is coordination with two sister agencies on an anti-stigma campaign.

Read more about the Clinic's Policy Leadership here