New intakes are on the rise. What’s next?
At Community Progress Council, we don’t help people to live in poverty. We empower them to achieve self-sufficiency and live independent of public supports. We do this by serving the whole person through comprehensive, integrated services.
Over the past decade, CPC has revamped our service delivery model to reflect this work. In fact, we won a Central Penn Business Journal Nonprofit Innovation Award for it in 2022.
By linking families to multiple CPC services and connecting with participants more regularly through a Coach, people make progress towards self-sufficiency. Today, when an individual works intensively with a coach at CPC for twelve months or more, their income increases, on average, by $5,008.
We continue to evolve this model, and adapt to changes in our team, participants, and community’s needs.
Expanding centralized intake
In 2023, Community Progress Council was selected — through a highly competitive grant process — to implement a WIC Community Innovation and Outreach Project (WIC CIAO) to develop, implement, and evaluate innovative outreach strategies to increase awareness, participation, and benefit redemption in the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), and reduce disparities in program delivery.
This was an opportunity to put resources behind a practice we know is impactful: Meet people where they already are, and connect them to comprehensive, integrated services.
Outreach Navigators, a role created through the WIC CIAO grant, would implement the same centralized intake process that is key to our revised service delivery model. But they would do so with a focus on families with children under 5, helping them better connect to the full complement of services they may qualify for.
“Service delivery is an iterative process,” said Ruth Robbins, Chief Program Officer for Community Progress Council. “Implementing the WIC CIAO grant work allowed us to recognize new opportunities to extend and expand the concept of centralized intake and comprehensive, integrated services.”
Interrupting generational poverty
As the single largest provider in York County of services to low-income families with children under 5, Community Progress Council has a powerful opportunity to interrupt generational poverty.
In early childhood education programs, CPC serves nearly 300 children and their families. Early childhood education operates with a whole-family approach: In addition to teachers working in classrooms to ensure children are kindergarten ready, every family also works with a Coach, who can help a person identify their strengths. With their Coach, a family can then create a plan together to help them use these skills and build others. Setting goal plans in education, income, employment and other key areas and working toward that goal together, families can move themselves toward self-sufficiency, changing the life trajectory of the children in their home.
The Women, Infants, and Children program serves more than 5,800 people each month, across York County — that’s a 16.5% increase year over year. And since 2023, thanks to the implementation of Outreach Navigators, every new participant who seeks support through WIC first connects to a Navigator who helps them understand all of the services that Community Progress Council offers for families with children under 5 — and connects them to a coach for that ongoing relationship and support.
The power of comprehensive, integrated services
No single program can build lasting stability.
Progress toward self-sufficiency requires comprehensive, integrated services. Through coaching, families connect with someone to walk alongside them as they navigate the complex web of public, private, and non-profit resources, setting short-term and long-term goals and working hard to anticipate and navigate barriers.
Research conducted by the Annie E. Casey Foundation in 2020 demonstrated that integrated services approaches or bundling services in a coordinated manner can help to improve the financial stability of working families, low-income students of color, and individuals who are unemployed or underemployed.
The study also indicated that providing numerous services at one location makes it easier for clients to access what they need and for staff to communicate with one another and ensure services are being appropriately integrated. Furthermore, the study noted that integrated data collection and sharing help streamline the service delivery process for clients and help providers better track and support an individual’s progress.
Serving additional people
The WIC CIAO grant enabled our team to think strategically and continue to evolve our process around centralized intake and how we connect families to services.
Based on these changes, we saw an 61% increase in intakes from Q1 2024 to Q2. Enrollment for coaching continued to increase as well, by 46% over the past six months. At the end of June, 180 people had completed their intake and were awaiting initial contact from a Coach.
Our next challenge is ensuring we can serve every person who is seeking coaching support.
Flexibility in funding
Community Progress Council’s shift in service delivery required our team to adjust hiring and professional development practices, centralize data collection and analysis, and diversify funding so government regulations do not limit a person’s ability to make progress towards self-sufficiency.
“Right now, our funding sources limit the size of our team — how many positions we can hire — and the ability of our coaches to continue working with families past 200% of federal poverty level,” said Robbins. “And yet, we know that there is a great need for more Navigators and more Coaches in order to meet the increase in referrals and intakes we are seeing.”
“And, we know this investment is worth it.”
The impact of comprehensive, integrated services is clear for Lucia, who connected first with WIC for help with diapers and formulas and now, through ongoing coaching, has also achieved stable housing, improved her English, and is opening an in-home child care program to achieve stable employment.
It’s clear for mothers like Christine, who reached out to CPC’s Community of Hope for basic needs for herself and her three children and, after four years of hard work, closed on her first home in May.
And it’s possible for the 10,420 others just like them whom Community Progress Council served in the past year.
Progress toward self-sufficiency requires comprehensive, integrated services. Evolving our work thanks to support from the WIC CIAO grant has underscored the greater impact we can have for our York County community when we double down on this process.
Now it’s up to us and the generous funders in our community to expand our resources and team to continue to serve our increased caseload.
An end to poverty starts here. Get involved.
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Community Progress Council, Inc.
Attn: Soan Vu, Executive Assistant
226 E. College Ave., York PA 17403