ALC-Hospital, Medicaid, & Developmental Disabilities Study Subcommittee
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- October 2, 2026
Senator Breanne Davis
Unverified
0:37
Good I think we're waiting on the committee room to open up here at 11. you ready
Speaker 6
0:56
Ready ready our little ones doing they're busy my baby
Senator Breanne Davis
Unverified
0:58
started walking in earnest so she is just taken off around the house that's wonderful it's all hands on deck that's
Speaker 16
2:03
they pick Good morning. The meeting has not started yet but we will get started in just a moment we can hear everyone on teams just so you're aware
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
3:21
if everyone will get their seats we're going to start this committee meeting shortly which is giving you a one minute warning. how are you
Speaker 28
3:51
a guard out there trying to keep me out but I I know you will Good morning everyone. Welcome to Monday morning and another
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
4:13
exciting meeting of our our subcommittee I am truly excited about this committee and
I believe this is the first time that an ALC committee meeting
has met since our buddy uhary Stelbafield finish his race and went on home to be with thelord and I just want to say what an honor it was to work with Senator Stubblefield, how much he will be missed I had the honor of serving with him for 10 years over in Yale County and I can tell you his constituents loved him as much as we did so I want y'all to continue to pray for his his beautiful wife Kathy and his daughter Amber and their grandchildren. he is a man that be greatly missed and I know that Senator Stubblefield was a man of common sense he loved what this committee was doing so we're going to continue to work hard in his memory and make sure we get some good things accomplished today. So we have a
full agenda colleagues I know that we when we got together last time there was a multitude of questions about what in the world's going on with the restore hope and 100 families and we just had so many people excited when all of us want it in our districts so we can see the great things happening in our own communities so we are have this whole committee to discuss what's going on on that level so we're gonna to call first Paul Chapman the executive director of Restore Hope and Janet Camp to come and tell us what's going on with restsore hopepe what are
they and some of the good things that are happening
Good morning. good morning if you guys would just state your name for the record and who you are and then we'll let
Speaker 35
5:46
you get started. Sure I'm I'm Paul Chapman. I'm the director of Restore hopepe pull
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
5:51
your microphone down just a little bit closer Paul thank you thank you Paul
Speaker 37
5:54
Chapman with I'm the director for reststore hope. good morning Janet Camp. I'm
Speaker 38
5:59
the director of judicial services with Restore hopepe. thank you all so much for being here
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
6:04
and we're ready whenever you are. right restore hope was an
Speaker 42
6:09
idea a number of years ago when Arkansas had a very fast growing prison
Speaker 45
6:14
population. there were a number of us that were in the direct service field and
Speaker 37
6:21
we knew that the prison population was growing so fast and as a result of that or in
Speaker 45
6:27
in parallel with that we had a very fast growing foster care population that just increasing the size of
Speaker 37
6:35
the community organizations was not going to really
change the situation that we had to find some scalable way to equip communities to work together in in better ways and and maybe address more people and get better outcomes so
Speaker 42
6:50
restore hope started with that idea of if we could align all the help that
Speaker 37
6:56
is in a community to be able to work together not only with the individual agencies be more efficient because we spend so much of our time just trying to find the help that's there and understanding the different
gateways that services have whether it be an application or eligibility and and oftentimes people that even work in this field for many many years aren't aware of services that are just a few blocks away from them and so efficiency for organizations was one and the other was a better outcomes for the people that were served and so that that was the idea we started in Fort Smith Arkansas fortsmith had in 2016 and
17 had the highest percent of children in foster care in Arkansas by a wide margin 1 of34 children in Sebastian County were in foster care that was 28 per 1000 the national average is 5 per 1000 Fortsmith was a a story of globalization of the heavy manufacturing a lot of those jobs had moved over a period of time and and kind of the the whirlpool plant moving was the real notice of where you may be able to make it work a job
or a job and a half for a family now that no longer was possible and so you saw this given your perspective you saw it in schools with free reduced launch behaviors attendants you saw it in the jail you saw it in the circuit courts and you definitely saw it in foster care where 800 children were in care for a for a county of 130,000 people. So we went there first and put together what we call an alliance that starts to align all
these different agencies and organizations to be able to work together on a singular goal how do we help someone move from crisis to career and and since then when we built the first model in 2018 in Fort Smith using some software and some human interactions that I'm gonna just highlight real quick for you there are 19 counties now running this model and have served over 10,000 arkansans there are over 1800 alliance
members in those 19 counties and on average there are 9 different professionals on one Arkansan's case trying to provide the services that they provide to help them move from crisis to career the outcomes which are tracked and updated daily and if you're interested I can give you links to the dashboard that you can check on your community and roll all the way up statewide is financial stability for people that are served have over
100% increase in in their income housing which is very difficult and many of our communities for many of the participants that were serving you go in fact I would wanted to let
Speaker 42
10:01
you know there's there's just over50% of the30600 Arkansans that have been served in this way in the last 12 months just over50% were either homeless when we met them
Speaker 37
10:11
or or they were a on the scale of 1 to5 they were 2 and so at great risk of becoming
homeless. there were elut surfing they were in a shelter occasionally like the the lady that just walked the mom that walked into my office not a few weeks ago was an Uber driver got a ticket and she didn't pay and so she lost her license and lost her job. She had slept in her car with her 14 year old and she was pregnant and walked in asking for help and so occasionally our our clients will sleep in their cars and we have to start from how do we get you
sheltered and safe and stable so that we can build back up into hopefully what becomes a stable career so they don't need that assistance any longer and so impacts are tracked on a regular basis. outcome for community Fortsmith at the fiveyear mark of running this this model in collaboration they have reduced the number of children in foster care by over50% at a30% reduction in locals being incarcerated in their jail and
crimeless down about 20% and and I would say even even more
Speaker 42
11:27
the culture of of that town is is wildly different because when we first started to to build this collaborative model all your
Speaker 37
11:37
law enforcement and your courts and your service providers that were all on kind of the leading edge of providing stabilization for folks in crisisone was stressed out turnover was very very high for for all agencies and and
really there was almost a a distrust of the other agencies and there was no hope within the partners that if they that there was any solution to the trouble that they were in Fast forward a number of years and when they saw post pandemic that juvenile crime was on the rise the first thing they did was call a big community meeting of all these different professional actors and it was called by the police department knowing that if they got together then they were going to
be able to come up with a set of interventions community interventions collaborative interventions that and they had hope that that would actually start to address this very complex problem and so the culture in Sebastian County is much different. Outcome for families also is different if we take a child into foster care and reunification as a goal oftentimes the guardian that the that the child had to be taken from is in such a a complex state of multiple
crises that trying to help them address all of that just becomes a very burdensome and they don't possess the the capacity to be able to get all the help that they need and so oftentimes that reunification doesn't help even though that's the the goal so below50% of the time to reunification actually out but if they'll work if the guardian will choose if momm chooses to work with the community in this way the last 12 months that reunification
rates just over70%72% when I took this screenshot you can track that daily it's updated daily and so outcomes are wildly better putting families back together but the largest percent of families that are served over75% do not have a child welfare case at all and so whens it ends up happening is individuals are coming from the community they know the words on the street you can go in here and get the help that you need and so they're choosing to do so before the child welfare case has to be
open and they're making their way in through various sources through nonprofits through agencies through courts and then voluntarily words just out and so they'll know someone that got help and then they go and seek that help for themselves so the model has three main parts that are missing from communities that this model adds one is you gather the appropriate agencies and organizations into an alliance that alliance is held together
by a pledge to each other that you're going to work together to help families move from crisis to career. and we celebrated every 100 is it the the initiatives actually called the 100 Families initiative which came from that Fortsmith UAFs boardroom meeting back in 2018 when everyone was stressed out and we said could we just try this until we helped 100 move and then we can you know if you can pledge to stick together that long we'll see what happens and they've helped many many hundreds
uhsebastian County may be over 1000 now families that they've helped but you've got to put that alliance together and that requires a a role and a backbone organization in that community and then Sebastian countunty it is currently the University of Arkansas Fort Smith then employees a coordinator that pulls out agency together and keeps them together and and brings the appropriate data back to that that alliance requires a software that I'm gonna show you just briefly some glimpses glimpses of it's called Hopeub
Speaker 42
15:31
it's a collaborative case management system it's a fully privacy compliant HIPA ferpa copa which means that the participant can give consent to be able
Speaker 37
15:40
to share their information and build a team around them of professionals and then you need a what we call a primary provider you could call him a case manager or a community navigator they will be placed throughout the community meeting a client doing a full blown assessment of that client and then building that support team around them.
and yeah I wanna go ahead now and open up madam chairman maybe I could take if there are any questions there before I move into the software I could take them real quick before I start demoing I'm gonna start with the first question then we'll see some other colleagues so where
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
16:21
did the funding come for us to for this to get started and in Sebastian Countysebastian County primarily TAf has
Speaker 42
16:29
been used and so we will pass we have a
Speaker 37
16:33
contract with DHS for tannaf funds temporary assistance for needy families and we'll pass that through to local organizations to be able to hire those staff, those primary providers and the coordinators but also there's been private funds and then other public funds from time to time like in Sebastian County there's a federal grant that is currently going on as a result of the police department the Fortsmith Pd calling for help we were able to write for a federal grant and then then put some of those funds and to
try to help troubled youth before they they get into court and so it's a mix it's a blended mix of fonts but the primary source in Arkansas has
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
17:15
beenanF though. secondcond question is how many caseworkers do we have
Speaker 37
17:20
in Sebastian County that are on this that's a great question uh5 to7 there's a mix of funds being used. I'm going to pull a dashboard up which you all could have access to I can send links after this and allow you to
you'll send it to staff and they'll get
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
17:38
it out to the whole committee that'd
Speaker 37
17:41
be great. and so this is a picture of as of midnight the active case loads in each county in Arkansas and then you can hover over and actually see the primary provider and how many cases that they're currently serving in that particular county and so the low case loads would either be a a case manager from another county and and they're just helping someone that happens to be in Sebastian or their clients
moved to Sebastian or it's a community member who's acting as a
Speaker 53
18:10
case manager which this model allows does anybody else have any questions at this point Representative Crawford Thank you.
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
18:17
Good morning it's good to see you it's good to see you too. I
Speaker 57
18:28
was in that first meeting yes ma'am you
Representative Cindy Crawford
Unverified
18:30
were at the University of Arkansas when all this was going on 218 I was in a nonprofit
fighting to stay alive and so what happened in Sebastian County where all the jobs just went awayhl put clothes ring closed and when you came in Paul, you brought light and no one we didn't know what to do and when you brought us together and began to give us a vision we were able to work with you to bring that fort. There were hard
days before that 10 before tannn came it was many years it seemed like maybe just a year but I just want to encourage everyone here if you're not a part of this if you're community, your district is not a part of this. I would encourage you to get with Paul or with some of the staff and and bring it in because it it does revive and thank you
Speaker 37
19:43
thank youpresentative Crawford. I remember you in those early committee meetings as we were trying to put this model together it truly is a model that was built for the community to be executed by the community. it's a set of tools and and some infrastructure that allows the community to to know it have data that you don't currently have access to and to see in real time what your actions you you know we always call it
Speaker 50
20:06
the the so what we did some things you know so what senator English
Senator Jane English
Unverified
20:15
thank you good morning in the very first thing you have with the collective impact the stable thriving the very first thing is financial stability and you said that people were more than half the time what they were making how how are you helping them then to find once we've gotten them stable how have you helped them to be able to
move towards employment yes ma'am that's a great question there's you know
Speaker 37
20:42
if someone can actually have a job
if they have no job which is50% of everyone that we meet at onboarding and if they can just have a job it starts to help quickly but the reason why we say we we want to put that alliance together to help them all the way through careers because we believe that if someone can make enough money to pay their own rent and to get and to not need the assistance then that solves all manner of problems and gives them a level of agency that they don't have when we currently meet them
and so every one of to answer your que question directly it it is a part of that alliance to bring in your community colleges and your trade schools and the workforce department and everyone that's working on employment and especially with individuals that may not that may be hard to harder to employ if the programs exist in that community then they're brought into the alliance and then they're worked out that coordinator works out a pathway for all the
available possibilities for that individual to get their first job and then to get a full time job that that employment number that we showed was really a a movement from no job or just a part time job to full time employment. and so that's what what we're really measuring is we want people to have full time employment and especially full time employment that can provide them with the money to be able to to take care of their own family off of assistance so it depends but largely the
state agencies that we work with are are workforce and workforce boards at a local level and then any community colleges and trade schools that already exist in that community to try to create that pathway to the employment
Speaker 45
22:31
within that community. yes ma'am Senatorulllivan thank you madam chairir.
Senator Dan Sullivan
Unverified
22:41
So when I look at your data here you have collective impact a stable and thriving how do you get over 116% stable and thriving how do you move there let me let me
throw a couple of questions out at on the data and then how do you become stable and to build breach stability if you your employment rate is at50%. and then I look over it at the restore hope model gag in the communi community lost the page but you have a like a50%30%20% reduction in incarceration
so if you have a 20% reduction in cor incarceration year over year eventually you end up with zero in incarceration. so how do you get those
reduction numbers year over year yes sir that's a that's a great question so the
Speaker 69
23:37
that's why'm asking it doesn't seem possible yeah and so there's some detailed
Speaker 45
23:42
charts that that are summarized in that in that summary there that summary is really a movement from an assessment I'm gonna pull up the assessment so you can see
Speaker 37
23:55
how the data is generated let me find this and so this would be a an account for Miss Susie who came seeking help and then this assessment is completed by that navigator and then there are 13 areas in which they are marked along a scale and so that summary is just calculating the movement from
a 12 or3 to or4 or a5 and then you can drill down into the detail of that on on these more detailed reports that show at intake where were the group of people in the in the last 12 months that's what this currently is defaulted at you can manipulate all the the filters on here and then as of the last assessment if an individual has two assessments
then what is that currently so in the current36 I'm sorryen let me look real quick here on my that number of participants OK, so in the last 12 months we're looking at uh3,861 individuals who have been on boarded into the system and and having been served collaboratively and so of those3861 individuals
there were431 of them that were actively using and had a severe problem with substance abuse and then that goes on up to to5 as they they don't
Speaker 75
25:39
have any problem or they're in active recovery for over a year I'm still
Senator Dan Sullivan
Unverified
25:45
having trouble so how do you go in incarcerations you have a Susie or whomever has a at the total population how do you have how do you calculate you're having a 20% reduction ction year over year eventually
you end up with almost zero on on the
Speaker 37
26:03
incarceration from this slide that was a fiveyear
Speaker 45
26:06
number that was calculated in Sebastian County as the from 2017 to that date five years later included the people that you on boarded that was that
Senator Dan Sullivan
Unverified
26:17
was a population number for Sebastian County
Speaker 45
26:19
at the end of that period you saw 20% or whatever
Senator Dan Sullivan
Unverified
26:24
that percentage is that reduction incarceration how do you account
Speaker 48
26:31
that for your program? for for our program we right here in these dashboards just just tell me
Senator Dan Sullivan
Unverified
26:39
so you have a 20% over five years you have a 20% or30% reduction incarceration how do you attribute that reduction to your program
Speaker 69
26:48
Yes I would say that we didn't account for
Speaker 45
26:53
100% of that that it was the collaboration of the leaders in Sebastian County addressing those problems that that when you say and I
Senator Dan Sullivan
Unverified
27:03
don't want know what page it is I'm sorry I lost it but so what percent are you accounting to the reduction in incarceration yeah wou I would
Speaker 37
27:15
like to ask the leader I'd ask the Fortsmithlice department the sheriff if if they could attribute they've ok so from what
Senator Dan Sullivan
Unverified
27:25
you know and again I'm just trying to make sure you got a presentation you're presenting to us as valid data and you're attributing a30%
reduction over five years in incarceration and that's what whatch your chart says and so
I'm wondering how you attribute that30% reduction
to your program and your response would be my response would
Speaker 45
27:52
be that there is some percentage of that reduction in incarceration that was attributed to this program but largely it was the collaboration of that community law enforcement and social services
and other agencies where they had additional options available to them where they weren't now incarcerating folks in the jail can just to
Senator Dan Sullivan
Unverified
28:18
for me to summarize it so you have a 20% 50 % reduction in the hardest hit communities30% reduction in incarceration and a 20% reduction in overall crime rates and that's on your agency your groups outcomes here as the
numbers at the Fortsmith depar police department but you can't attribute that specifically all of those reductions to your program that's an overall wouldn't countywide effort and probably includes a lot of different groups for sure ok thank you thank
you madam and and I would, I
Speaker 45
28:55
would never claim to have what we do is we provide a set of tools that allow the community then to exercise their engagement in whatever way that they can or want to I would respectfully say that when
Senator Dan Sullivan
Unverified
29:11
it's on your program on your sheet for your program that it it causes me to think you're attributing those reductions to your program but that's just my
takeaway thank you I wouldn't claim that where you did on your sheetu I would claim that
Speaker 45
29:25
Fort Smith is wildly different and that the leaders in Fortsmith and Sebastian County would say it was their partnership would agree with that that that that's not what the report shows sorry madam chair
Representative R. Scott Richardson
Unverified
29:41
Representative Richardson thank you madam Chair over here to your left how are you guys doing? thank you for being here. you know to kind of piggyback off of what senator Sullloan was just saying wouldn't you agree that your program has really been a catalyst in thriving and developing families to do better which allows him to make better decisions and not end up incarcerated even if they were or go back. So your program has been able to facilitate those behaviors would you agree?
Yes sir thank you. my second question is this do you have a breakdown of I know I saw it by county but do you within the county specifically with Fortsmith being the one do you have a breakdown of the amount of families that were impacted whether it's North Fort Smith Eastwartsmith, Greenwood. do you do you have it broken down by that? I I can
Speaker 99
30:30
break down on this dashboard I can break down by a county and
Speaker 42
30:35
I can even break down all the way down to who served within that county who was their
Speaker 37
30:43
case manager and then you can see that over the history of the you know,6 or seven years that this software has been used. madam Chady, if you
Representative R. Scott Richardson
Unverified
30:53
can get that to to staff maybe she can get that out and I just one last thing I just want to say thank you guys for the work that you do we've seen the improvement let me echo what my colleague in Eastortsmith says you guys have been phenomenal to our community and thank you for helping facilitate families get back on the right track so thank you Thank you Representative
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
31:13
Richardson and Representative Crawforddamir senatorulllivan's
Representative Cindy Crawford
Unverified
31:19
questions in Sebastian County we could not work together and so the numbers that you see here are from different organizations because every entity was working as a silo so when restore hope came in to Sebastian County they
took a while with the police brought us together and actually showed us how we can work together without being afraid our funding would be cut in other areas so I don't know if that helps at all but I believe that restore hope deserves all the numbers that they're putting here it's not just even though it's collaborative it's it's because of restore hope that those numbers
are there. Thank you Representative Brown
Representative Matt Brown
Unverified
32:16
. thank you madam chairir. Mr Chapman, I believe I heard you speak
recently. You came and spoke to a group I belong to and I'm glad I get to hear about this again and maybe more but we stay with me. from what I'm hearing you say the the program assists people with developing resiliency? would that be a
correct statement to how to move forward into their lives and like solved the immediate problem but then learn skills to avoid getting into difficulty again it it will do
Speaker 37
32:59
that there there is a real training for this navigator that helps including motivational interviewing which would help someone continue to move through they're very difficult circumstances but but really what it's doing is it's finding all the resources that exist in a
community and so if there were a program or a class like that or a therapist then they would be
Speaker 35
33:24
connected to that existing resource that could provide that for the individual well I would like to say that I
Representative Matt Brown
Unverified
33:30
think that this would be a valuable tool even for us as legislators when we get constituent calls about difficulties they're having you know I pick up the phone and I get in touch with DHS but you know I never know which department to go to so I
generally dump on my dear friend Lourri but I think that it's difficult for people in the community to know where to turn or to know that there is some place to turn to and I think of program like yours would would benefit all of us yes ma'am that's what it was really
Speaker 111
34:10
designed for after a number of years of collaborating with the department of corrections and with DCfS and
Speaker 37
34:19
with many I was in a position to make grants to organizations so when you give money away everyone finds a way to come and ask you for it so you get to know a lot of people even then after doing that for a number of years it was just still so difficult to be able to find the help that someone needed so we could we could address education and housing and substance abuse but then people would come to us with the suspended driver's license and we didn't know and didn't possess the expertise or no nor know anyone who could
help them get their driver's license backing to get right with the court and so that that's true of agency personnel and nonprofit service providers in the community is you just you just don't know you can only be expert at a one or a handful of things and many of the individuals that come to us need they're they're in at least three areas of
Speaker 111
35:13
significant crisis just one more follow up so your organization
Representative Matt Brown
Unverified
35:21
functions in Sebastian countunty only is that correct? No ma'am we're in 19 counties 9 counties and then so you work another follow up. You work not only with the state agencies or county agencies you work with nonprofits you work with the whole gamut. that's all right thank you no more questions thank you Representative warren thank you madam chair .
Representative Les Warren
Unverified
35:44
I just want to say first of all thank you Paul Chapman for what you've done in Garland
County where're another county that this program has impacted and I can tell you that you have had a an ability to bring together a lot of groups that were singularly trying to accomplish something and I guess that's my point is that and I woulduu I would give this question to you Paul is what was happening before you came into
these communities I know what was happening in Garland County we would have a drug court in we would have just a couple of things where we were trying to help with the recidivism right so I would give you credit for all the numbers that you've got on your report because you have brought groups together and it's a collective effort
to reduce recidivism rather than just everybody doing their own thing but my question for you is what was happening in those communities before restore hopepe came in there yeah I think that's why we we tried to build
Speaker 37
37:08
the the first model was you've got all these really good people that work for our agencies nonprofit and governmental I mean they're good people and they're dedicating their lives to trying to help people in and really awful circumstances
and they don't they have such a hard time trying to find how do you get someone in workforce and do we have the we owe them money to get them into trucking school or welding school and maybe they're a therapist that has to on their job they've they've got to see so many clients to be able to keep the light bill on and that and and functionally that's what we want them doing that's their expertise is how do we maximize their time being a trauma informed therapist and not having to address housing issues
and so to the the direct answer to your question is we all operate in our silos and we're doing the best the best we can but we are so unconnected from each other that what it looks like to the participant that's coming to you is they may really connect with the the program that they're getting as a result of catching a child welfare case or being incarcerated or because they were desperate and sought to help themselves but they have all these other
issues that the person that they're really connecting with is largely ignorant of and and is not paid and does not have the time or expertise to help them gain and so what ends up happening for that individual now is they become they lose hope that their effort's going to produce the result and I would say that's not only the participant that's the professional the first people that gained hope back are actually the professionals that are that just say this is I wish we had had this you know it
it makes my job easier and I got in this to actually help people or keep the public safe and now I've got options to be able to do that so I'm more efficient so I I'd say we're they're good people doing good things and they're helping people but we are
Speaker 42
39:15
so disconnected it would be the the analogy that I I think is best is try to build a house without a builder you could have the blueprint you can buy the lot and you can have
Speaker 37
39:26
the you can secure your construction loan and then but you don't know about pulling permits and maybe
you know a plumber but you not so much on the electrician and now you're trying to sort through all of that that's that's probably the best analogy I can think of as someone that's trying to navigate a a set of really awful circumstances and trying to get all the way to and we need them in the workforce we need plumbers and electricians and and truck drivers and so how do we how do we help someone build a bridge to get there thank you senator Love thank you madam chairir. right so
Senator Fredrick J. Love
Unverified
40:03
Paul thank you for this presentation you know I'm familiar with your work so uhm I am gonna ask some of the questions that maybe others may not know of but the first thing I wanna ask you is about hub hub hub is that is that kind of a new system that you all have created or is it based off of the the previous session we had because I'm I'm gonna start asking about HMIs and some of these things I will explain to others that they don't know but
Speaker 42
40:33
it it's a system that restore hope owns we were gifted at six or seven years ago from
Speaker 37
40:40
another nonprofit and have put development dollars we we now have engineers and analysts that work on it full time to be able to develop it in in response to the alliance member's request so we're still enhancing that system OK so
Senator Fredrick J. Love
Unverified
40:53
now is is it that hope ubb is pulling all your I guess member agencies together is
that yeah it's a mostly what the
Speaker 42
41:04
individuals that use helpub the professionals use it as a communications platform and then we use it to
Speaker 37
41:10
track outcomes so if I wanted to talk to you about getting housing for someone then we could do that in a fully compliant way and all that would still exist there where you could
Speaker 45
41:21
always go back and maybe see documents or or plans for someone yeah. OK got you so so
Senator Fredrick J. Love
Unverified
41:29
then this feeds into it does HMIs that's a homeless management information system. This HMIS
feed into this or do you feed into HMIs how how does that work? We we have
Speaker 42
41:43
some of the HIs HIs fields are embedded there are multiple kind of programs within HMIs we have one of those programs for
Speaker 37
41:51
some funding that that we received and then we will send that file to Wellsky our HMIS provider here in Arkansas to satisfy the reporting OK so now
Senator Fredrick J. Love
Unverified
42:03
changes in the in the housing
funding and different things like that. how is that impacting you all or over the over the kind of the broad horizon has hass this impact in the housing portion of what you're doing. we've just secured one
Speaker 111
42:20
is I'm not familiar with the federal chain what federal changes
Speaker 37
42:25
will impact what we're doing right now as far as housing we've just gotten a private grant to be able to build out all the other HMIs data reporting
fields so that ultimately we would like to offer anyh mask required reporter in the state of Arkansas could use this system and then we would take care of their reporting for them up to Wellsky we won't we're not seeking to replace thehMI system but instead to avow the individual agency to use Hopeub to not only care for and build support teams around an individual they're serving but also satisfy they don't want a double key and that's I mean that that was going to be one of my points but no but the thing
Senator Fredrick J. Love
Unverified
43:09
about it is actually bringing the continuums of care and like into the loop cause I'm more concerned with housing than anything and if if there's if you see any lack of housing if you see different things like that because if you're not housed then you can't stabilize anybody. doesn't matter you know whether they're they've been previously incarcerated or homeless or whatever you can't stabilize people so I'm more concerned with kind of the outlook because I think it's a it's kind of it's genius really to
actually have everybody on one system looking cause if you can see like maybe the vouchers that somebody hands or whatever then you can actually better I guess manipulate the situation for someone seeking housing and the rest of the continuum so that's kind of what I'm I'm kinda getting at is that is I see changes in funding
I see that changes are going to be in funding so I'm trying to see over a broad range what that looks like on your system and if you can see that and what impact it's going to have
Speaker 42
44:24
on ourkansans that's what I'm trying to we're we're actively working towards trying to make this system available to all continuum of
Speaker 37
44:31
care members so that they could choose to use the system if they wanted to and we'll satisfy their reporting so that you can get that bigger picture of you know if I were your client
for housing I also may need some other services maybe substance abuse and maybe job training in the future and and if all of that was available to be shared within the agencies then it's going to make us all more efficient and it's going to it's going to leave me the chiefly respon the the legit the problem will not be logistics it'll be my capacity to take advantage of the opportunities you're providing me and my willingness to do so. those are the two things that would would still be left but yes sir that's
that's what we're really trying to do is bring all these different groups that are trying to help people and allow them to be able to share information and communicate I think I think it's good
Senator Fredrick J. Love
Unverified
45:24
work. I think if you can if you could really bring everybody together on one continuum that that's that's gonna be that's gonna be good work so hats off to you hats off to 100 families and and I keep supporting it. thank you thank you madam chairir. you thank you Senatorpresentative Ggarner.
Representative Denise Garner
Unverified
45:45
thank you madam chairir. I just have a quick question on the communities that don't have representation alreadyeveral of the when I looked on the on the website several have community agencies that are I assume the umbrellagan organization that are working with you guys and then or the convenor whatever alliance chair and then several lists folks that are actually restore hope employees I assume or team
members how do you determine in a community who needs to be in that function that's a great question and
Speaker 37
46:25
so the the first four communities that we started we're all led by restore hope it was one you know we started in White County and Sebastian County trying to build models in two different communities. it took first in Sebastian County where there was a wide scale adoption of the software . and and just out of desperation for the situation that that was going on there
and and so then we needed to prove you know, was it just was it only Fort Smith given their situation or were there some pieces of the model that could be contextualized and so then we we hired we work with United Way of Fortsmith to be able to expand the program into3 additional counties that was lasky white and crawford we proved out we were starting to get the same outcomes there and so then the expansion after that started to become how do we
help find the right community backbone organizations and then if we can find money public or private then we will give that money to those organizations to be able to hire coordinators and and case managers the way that we go about trying to find the right organization as we work with with our partner state agencies who's working currently with DCfs we always try to find an address that child welfare problems first and so who who are the organizations that are
in that space in that community and then we'll hold community meetings and largely what we're trying to do is get this conversation this was Garland County is there were a number of community meetings and then that that group that was meeting just said we want it to be washedallhavial healthal. and so there was kind of this agreement that that would be the right agency and so there are there are two community colleges, two universities, a school district two churches and so it's not so much the
type of organization that could be the backbone, but it's the reputation and the situation of that organization in that community where the other community members don't feel any any kind of competition from them. they've acted in a collaborative way and frankly the the only thing in it for the organization really is more work and so that it's got to be it's got to be part of what they're trying to do in their communi in their community and so that it's somewhat of
an inexact science we have some kind of hard you've got to be financially stable and thought of you know in the community and we kind of work through those you've got to be able to take a federal dollar and and that has all kinds
Speaker 94
49:08
of implications you know on the counties those
Representative Denise Garner
Unverified
49:11
counties that don't have representation then would come to you and say who are you working with or or you
could kind of give some guidance as to who to bring together to make that determination maybe we we
Speaker 33
49:26
have largely been operating on you know half of
Speaker 37
49:29
all ourkansans live in in T0 counties and75% of our Kinans live in 25 counties. We've been really trying to go because this model and I'm a tell you what I what I thought and then what I know now. this model is really about organizing existing resources so the smaller the county the less resource that until a private individual who's who's partnered it it was actually doc Doctor colier from
ourare. we'll give him his honors now but he he's from Woodruff County and that's his hometown and he couldn't stand that Woodruff County you know it wasn't on the list to get it so he's paid for case managers to go to Woodruff County and and Woodruff County is there so my estimate is from the Arkansas game and fish they're they're just over 11,000 deer in Woodruff County there are3,000 humans in Woodruff County and they're doing great they're doing so good so I'd
say one of one of my premises was is we've we've got to go into a community that has the resources and we tie them all together but but have been proved somewhat wrong spectacularly with with the ooddruff County because the the people in Woodruff County know that they're all in the same boat. and and so they're they're coming up with with they've got services for sure but but they have many services just through relationships you know this church over here we know is doing this particular thing and
but they're caring for a lot more people than I would have ever expected. one more follow up yes
Representative Denise Garner
Unverified
51:11
briefly thank you you just I couldn't tell on your map there was a gray and it looks like that was Washington County maybe and then there was a purple and I can't tell what the key says. could you just just let us know what that says. Oh thank you
Speaker 37
51:26
so Woodruff is the purple that's the one person OK so purple means that they have they've they've started
the program they've built an alliance and they're getting ready to to officially launch and that launch will take place in the next month in Woodruff County. rey is we we don't have an alliance in Washington County but a partner is Arkansas Baptist Children and Family ministries and they serve a lot of mothers trying to stabilize them and and they're using the system without an alliance in Washington County and so we we want to there's a lot of
arkansans that live in in benton and Washington and so it's a real target of ours to be able to put resource there yeah we'll
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
52:08
talk thank you we'll take one more question because we've got a long agenda today. Representative McGruder thank you
Representative Jessie McGruder
Unverified
52:20
madam chair thank you so much for the work that you all are doing. I was reading it the all of you have done it and I'm intrigued by the housing and the support and the education that you offer. I
am a bit disappointed because I don't see my county on this list and with all the good work that you're doing I'm askxing how do I we getrian County involved in this.
Speaker 37
52:45
Crinick County is on our target list they're in the top 25 most populated and we are we're always applying for grants and talking to foundations about how do we how do we get torinton just north of you in Mississippi the community colleges is the backbone
organization there and so we're we're close and they're doing a good work butrinton has is on our list. thank
Speaker 53
53:09
you thank you Representative Mcgerder. OKok we do need to move on to
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
53:16
family alliance but before you guys go I want to hear
from Janet real quick on smart justice. I know there's been some little confusion that somehow maybe you guys are doing a specialty court a new one which you're not. so kind of share a little bit what we're doing and maybe remind the legislators of the bill that we passed last session to help district judges do what they're doing to help the folks and restore hope.presentative
Speaker 154
53:36
Bentley. Yes, we are working for a quick pull your mic
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
53:39
a little bit closer to you think that better
Speaker 157
53:44
we are working in the district courts we are utilizing funding that's been provided to us from attorney General Griffin in the opioid settlement to establish a pilot program of this exact model in the district court. there's been some confusion or misconception that we are operating as a specialty court program as you've seen from the information shared today this is not a specialty court program I think Representative warren stated it
best there are drug courts that operate in Garland County but that is addressing a very specific and limited need of substance use and often with our specialty courts we see that limited to substance use and mental health they also have extensive supervision and treatment requirements that go into those programs as well as eligibility criteria. those are not the same contents that you would find or elements that you would find in our district court initiative of this same model. So essentially the dredge
is able to refer any any individual whether through a preventative track or through an alternative sentencing track to allow a defendant to work with a ca a court coordinator or case manager in this case to navigate through the system and identify the needs in each of those 13 care areas that Paul described earlier the act that was passed in this legislative session Senator Bryant is no longer in here but he was one of the sponsors on AC I believe it was 275 and that that clarified
to the district judges that they have the authority to postpone judgment in those cases for up to a year to allow a defendant to complete a set of conditions or requirements that are imposed on them by the district court. we have been in operation just to give quick statistics we've been in operation since June of last year we've served approximately 252 participants as of last night it was 2fi0 on Saturday. I guess we've got information coming in. so 252 participants se4 of those
have moved from crisis to career in just a year and we have a 93% retention rate we're seeing on average engagement around6 to6.5 months in the initiative so that falls well within the jurisdiction that the that the district courts have to allow some supervision in this component. great so colleagues I think we've heard some great things said know all of us
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
56:04
have a lot more questions on how we can get this across the whole state and that's definitely our
our goal so we'll be continuing this
conversation so we can find some funding to make that happen. I'm gonna give you just a couple minutes if you want to close
Speaker 37
56:22
Paul before we move on to the next I really do think that that the communities that are using this model are are showing that that we can actually we can be more efficient in the services that we're providing and and provide better outcomes but I think we're just on the front end now of what's possible if we actually
start sharing the information that because the individuals that we're trying to move let's say we're trying to move them into the workforce and and then of course help them deal with some of the issues that they have there many of us are are touching them and don't even know that they're across the street with a different agency or organization and so you know, using technology to be able to share information and then and then remove the burdens of being able to access available services
whether they be provided publicly or privately I think is is going to is going to create a pathway for many individuals right now to be able to take the jobs that we need them to fill here in Arkansas great thank you so much for
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
57:31
again soon. thank you very much next on our agenda we are have her presentation from Arkansas Family alliance with Matt Whitson and heather. Sanders is going to come to the table and present to us
I'm sure all of you have seen colleagues that in your binder there we have some documentation from each group that's presenting today. if you guys will
give us your name for the record and we'll proceed when you're ready. your microphone needed to press the button
right and the verse there you go perfect good to go to learn here thank you thanks
Speaker 166
58:20
for letting us be here by the way it's very kind my name's Matt Whitson and I am the co-founder and executive director of Arkansas Family alliance.
Speaker 168
58:29
and thank you for having us. I'm Heather Sanders. I'm the director of development and operations for Arkansas Family alliance.
Speaker 166
58:41
Welcome we're ready for your presentation. thank you and so Arkansas Family alliance was birthed out of felt needs from the personal angle from the personal level of my family I'm a adoptive father as well as a foster fam a foster father and we have two children that were adopted foster care as well as felt
needs in our community where Paul has already talked about we are from I am from Fortsmith. I was born and raised there and spent most of my life there and understanding the felt needs in our community as most of you have heard as Paul talked about from that felt need I was a pastor in town had been in ministry for or I was in ministry for about 20 years before I resigned realizing that the families that I felt like needed to be impacted more we're not gonna walk through the the
my church doors, OK? so we my wife and I decided that we would re design the church but still to influence the church to help take the church upstream to the point of the crisis and allow the church to wrap around those people in a great a way our mission at Arkansas Family Alliance is uniting the community to support children and families in crisis and the way that we choose to do that not on the not just in Sebastian County but across the state hopefully sooner than later with a majority of
the counties is through we we are the implementing partner of Careortal which is a care sharing technology driven system that takes the most vulnerable children in our counties that work already with division of childrenldren Family Services they're working with 100 Families alliance they have this system that they can use to put it in front of the church we believe the church wants to help but doesn't know how a lot of times and so through this system
it takes the church upstream to the point of crisis where the vetted tangible needs can be resourced so that the ripple effect does not continue so that hopefully and we've seen this that children don't end up in foster care and or more crisis enters into their life so we have about a two minute video that kind of explains it on a greater level and then I'll come back and and talk just a little bit more.
Speaker 173
1:01:11
Care portal is a care sharing technology that drives action for kids and families in crisis. it offers a connection that we need to put our individual networks and resources together and make the mostv Care portal is a care sharing technology that drives action for kids and families in crisis. It offers a connection that we need to put our individual networks and resources Neighbor by neighbor neighbor to neighbor. we prevent the preventable
it's the power of care sharing at work. connection changes everything and it's closer than ever before so the
Speaker 166
1:02:07
great opportunity that CarePortal has is an Arkansas Family alliance has as the implementing partner in Arkansas
is that it engages the faithbas community on a high level and we believe and I believe and I believe that most of you in here would say that if we can get the faithbased community involved with the crisis they have the people and the power and the resources and the time to do something about that crisis and it does not matter what your denomination is we stand we are creating an opportunity for these churches these faithbased organizations to stand shoulder to shoulder in
our communities in our in our counties to be able to wait on these these needs to come in from the division of childrenldren Family Services that are working hard and are are are are using their tireless efforts to to work with these families but what it what it is doing is it is giving the church the opportunity to meet a realtime tangible need that is vetted through a caseworker that's already working with these families so we're connecting the church with
the state we are also engaging the DcfSunity division Children Family Service community where it takes effort and time and and energy to be able to figure out how to resource some of these families that are in crisis so we're also taking that away from a DCfS by allowing them to use this system that is called Careporttal it's working they entered into a system the system then sends it to the churches the churches then get to respond directly to these families these families
are inviting that's a key word inviting these churches that are in their community to come support them in their crisis with them and so we're not trying to do something of a handout we're trying to do something as a hand up. it is another opportunity for wrapparound service with these families typically from poverty that are in crisis that we can serve them again in real time through our faithbased community. just a few numbers here we started in Sebastian County you heard the crisis that Sebastian County
was in I I believe that the church needed to be involved with that and if it wasn't going to be involved with that we could still do it but it was gonna go a little bit faster because of the faceba faithba community getting involved we've seen just since we started in 2018 and you throw out those two years of COVID just because not just the church shut down and DCfS was you know doing their thing and so we s we struggled
to to impact that so just the last few years or excuse me since we started we've been able to serve over3,000 children and what you see is you see economic impact happening because the resources are not coming from the state and out of taxpayers' dollar or taxpayer money they are being resourced by the local church and the community so you see an economic impact of a million6 and over a million6 so that's a whole lot of of impact just this year we've served766 kids
that's most of the request or at least 88%, almost 89% of those requests have been met with an economic impact this year of331,0422 dollars that's just in a few counties let me give those counties to you Sebastian Washington Benton White and Pulaski Sebastian County would be the leader of that that's where we originated517 of those requests our kids have been served just in Sebastian County so you see you can ask the
question why have these other ones not because they are new we are building the community we're building the faceba faithbas community we're building trust between the state and and and the faithbas community so that they can begin to meet needs we're seeing it begin to to get some traction and some momentum and so we're excited to see what that's going to do as well as we're currently recruiting and preparing to launch the following counties this is Crawford County, Woodruff County, Loanoak County, Pope
County and Yale counties we think and and we're working towards trying to launch those counties to add care porttal in those counties before the end of the year and also in that we are stabilizing and and and and gaining some more traction in Pulaski County by putting some more resources there what you have that is that we are giv that we have given you is a map we put together about two
years ago and and our my team sat down at at a table and I said if funding was not an issue how can we get this thing across the state in the next five years you'll see that map. The map has changed because we have been able to move into some of these other counties to begin to impact these children that are in crisis and because of the relationship that we've we've gained with the faithbased community. so that's just adapted through excuse me you have a map you see
that that's our goal without funding being an issue we can't out kick our our funding so we're doing our best our majority of our funding until recently this year by procuring $160,000 from DHS to be able to go across ive new counties we have to fundraise ourselves and so that's that's the reason that it's it goes slower than faster and then let's see also that you see on there you have a handout that is a vision casting of the for the state of Arkansas
Careportal is a national organization it's presently in38 states it is also in Washington DC in Manitoba and so let me just give you some some round numbers that helps you understand the great opportunity that CarePporttal has not just across our nation but has in our state if we begin to take this into more counties the there have been so in these thirtyeight states there has been 156
, 408 requests met. There have been43,0368 children served that's an economic impact of just over $1557 million so in our in our state right now we have52 active churches in our active counties what we are looking for and you can read through that so you'll under it'll help us understand that the investment that people make in
us we are able to have an impact that is greater than that investment sometimes3,4,5 times depending on the county. let me give you one more example then I'll let you ask questions our neighbors in Oklahoma they are a couple of years ahead of us as far as being the implementing their implementing partner and so their state got behind them and they are in every single county and now Oklahoma leads all states in the number of children served each year so
just gives the faithbas community the the real time tangible way to get involved with these families and these children that are in crisis and what it does is it puts another another level of support around them so that it allows those those crisis to be able to be stopped in the moment so the ripple effect doesn't continue so that they end up not going to foster care which we know the numbers of what it costs the state
taxpayers each month and an average of six months of children staying in foster care if they're removed at just over500 dollars and then also keeping the stress away from a mom or a dad that could end up making a decision that is not very healthy therefore ending up incarcerated as well and so that's kind of the short version but I would take any questions thank you so much and real quick before I pass off to other colleagues. so are you
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
1:10:35
guys connected with Hopeub? are you part of the website that they're they're working on
? it's a great question thank you
Speaker 166
1:10:44
we did a pilot recently in Sebastian County adding adding Careporttal a Care portal button to Houb, OK? so yes in the we're in we're in Hopehuubb in White County, Sebastian County and just finished training the caseworkers of of 100 families in Pulaski County so and beon what I say and benton so sorry my the woman that that's in charge really she's
so those four counties we are a part of or the caseworkers from 100 families have the ability to get the faith-based community involved with their clients as well by using the button that's on hope up so yes another quick question now the spermyalgia another quick question. So
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
1:11:24
in those counties where you're not connected with hopepeubb, how does an
individual family get help by you and how are you aware of the families that are in crisis. in order to be a
Speaker 179
1:11:37
part of Hopehu we first have to be launched in
Speaker 166
1:11:41
one of those communities Careporttal has to be in that in that in that county we launched county by county the way we get there is we typically depending on the size of the county we have the ability to control the number of needs that can be entered into the system we typically like between3 to5 churches depending on the size of the response teams that are part of that church and if if if let's say we have5 churches in the next county that we're going to
whatever an example would be let's say Faulkner County which we're beginning to work there in infaulkner County if we get ive churches and and 100 families in Hopeub is there as well as soon as we get5 churches we train them we train the vision to children and family services and the team at that are work the caseworkers that are a family advocates rather that are working with 100 families as soon as we train them on board those churches and train them we can push the button so that both of those organizations can begin to use the faith bathed community to wrap around those children and
families in a crisis so they come from division of childrenldren Family Services as well as as 100 families our hope would be down the road as we build the faithbas organization to a greater level so the response team there needs to be more needs being put in eventually our hope would be and this is down the road again and it takes some funding from the school systems in each county so a title one school could be able to and and a social worker or a counselor or a principal there would be able to also use the system in order to engage the faithbased community to go
to to resource their families as well great thank you Representative Richardson thank
Representative R. Scott Richardson
Unverified
1:13:24
you madam chairir. Good morning. thank you guys for being here for those who aren't familiar with how you guys operate, could you walk through the process of what how families are actually helped. I mean we talked about Caporttal and being a part of hub and all of this but give me something today. So tell me how how does the process work right now?
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
1:13:47
you can just leave that button on when you turn hit
Speaker 172
1:13:53
it one more time yeah yeah just trying to learn here so representative Richardson thank you
Speaker 166
1:14:00
for your question it is I'm gonna give you an example OK? so division of childrenldren Family Services is working with a single mom,3 children this is this is actually one that that has come from our from the portal she goes out she's a pS a protective service case
she goes out she's gonna go take her kids to the daycare where she gets a voucher from the state then when she's finished she's gonna go work her shift at Walmart stocking shelves or the local convenience store or whatever that may be she ends up walking outside not being able to start her car and so in poverty the number one thing that we see is the lack of support she doesn't have somewhere where she can go or someone she can call or she does have another car that she can get in at that point she can call
DHS she can call 100 families that she's already involved with right because these are where our our needs come from and instead of her not having Careporttal so if she didn't have Careporttal for instance you can't make it to can't get your children to work or excuse me can't get your children into daycare can't make it to work don't get don't get to work can't get paid and you see how the ripple effect can go before you know what her waters turned off her electricity's turned off and it's a greater scale situation that happens with this mom which eventually could get
her children removed because of you know this law because of policy what happens with Careporttal is now we're able to put it in the system and in the system we can have a church be able to go check her car or or pay for a place to look at her car an example that I would use in this spot would be there was a church that engaged with this single mom and the the only thing that was wrong with her car with a was a $5 spark plug and then that5 dollars spark plug they were able to get her
from missing just a part of her day of work or missing a whole long time of work she was only able to miss she just missed one day it should continue so you see how the ripple effect could could could really change the trajectory of those children's lives and that single mom's life so the church engaging in that because of the portal because of the relationship that's very important going from this is a connection piece that takes people upstream to that to that point of crisis the church wants to help but does not know how is what we'd say this
gives the the opportunity and and and as Paul was talking about collaboration this is us being able to collaborate not just in our communities but but what we believe in our in the state of Arkansas that the faith faithbas community has an unbelievable amount of impact in our communities if we can just engage them in the right direction Thank you. One follow up and maybe it's not necessarily a question so the way I understand it
Representative R. Scott Richardson
Unverified
1:16:54
A family, a mother who's already involved with DCfs has an issuehurs have now signed up to be a part of Careportal. They reach out to DCfS they put out a signal to the people within Caport the churches that are involved to come and help who can help this particular family. They help the family keep the family together and continue to help other families within their community that firm it up that's correct thank you sir Thank youpresentative Richardson Senator Sullivan.
Senator Dan Sullivan
Unverified
1:17:25
thank you madam chairir. so what by your presentation today your expectation would be for us as a
legislature to do what what we had hoped to get for
Speaker 184
1:17:34
you guys to get behind that and help us figure out how to mean behind how to figure out how to help us fund this
Senator Dan Sullivan
Unverified
1:17:42
to get it across the state so it's funding your expectation present today and that your project would be funded the legislature would vote for funding through DCfs that's correct OK you know so
you know we're really struggling with it appears to me with a bureaucratic nightmare for families to get services and now we're adding to one more source so how are we reducing and making it easier for people when we are increasing the bureaucratic process well what we believe is the impact with the faithbas community and and
Speaker 166
1:18:19
correct me if i'm not answering your question right or or misunderstood but because of
the impact of the local church and the ability that we have to through the portal to take them to that to that situation the economic impact will be greater than ok so you're what I drew from that is the church is
Senator Dan Sullivan
Unverified
1:18:40
gonna do a better job than other institutions in meeting those needs No I don't maybe not better job it's just a greater number
Speaker 184
1:18:49
of people that have not been engaged yet that aren't affiliated with you know, I would say that
Speaker 166
1:18:57
from the foster care and adoption angle less than5% of faithbased the faithbased community would would take part of that so there's another 95 or so percentage of people that can support that just
Senator Dan Sullivan
Unverified
1:19:09
again I'm just from a logistical perspective everybody that presents says it's a logistical nightmare for families to connect with services and we want to add one more piece to that to make that more complex I understand what you're saying apologize is yes sir thank you
Representative Cindy Crawford
Unverified
1:19:28
Representative Crawford thank you madam chairir . heather, I want to address to you since you have been for years at the community rescue mission with homeless people. yes ma'am and you're now with Arkansas Family alliance lead us through what happens with people that come to the community rescue mission and then I have another
Speaker 191
1:20:01
that I wanna ask after that yes ma'am so at community rescue mission we are a family shelter so our focus is on serving individuals that have children. they come to us from all walks of life I will even share that we had a nurse practitioner that ended up there due to domestic abuse. so any one of us could end up in this situation but it's because they don't have support or they don't know where to turn to. So through collaborations through 100 families through Careportal, through community rescue mission through our strong alliance in Se ba s t ian County we are able to
help these families and move them from crisis to career how with wrapparound services yes absolutely there are so many steps along the way that create issues but if you don't have a community that can be there to support you and know all of the resources it makes it very difficult. So I got in partnership with Matt obviously while I was the director of the rescue mission because we would bring families in they would live with us for about six months but where did they go after that? They still don't have support they still don't know how to do
these things we teach them but that's not long term care. So then that's how we then partner with Matt with Family alliance or myself now is through that partnership because we know that the church is the connection that allows them support. I'll share an example from last week from 100 families a request was put in the care portal for a mattress because that's the number one need in our community is that we need to get children off the floor so they put in a request for a bed we were able to meet that
through one of our local churches. They then be a connection with this mom. she was a single mom that had lost her child for a while due to domestic vi situations she had gotten her child back she didn't have anything in her apartment but all she wanted was a bed to be able to keep her child Through that church they then realized she needed so much more. They brought her a couch, they brought her a high chair, so many different things and guess what that church became that mom's family and as of last week because her car broke down and she couldn't get to work
anymore we were able to bless her with a gifted car. This mom is now 100% on the trajectory of success and she has a church family there with her that's what this collaboration between all of us matters
Representative Cindy Crawford
Unverified
1:22:24
kind of answer it does and outside of funding I know that when you first started matt what I guess just really touched me is
where restore hope was restoring families trying to get them all the pieces back together you were working to where the family was never separated where DHS said, OK, if you don't do this this or this you will lose your child so they were able to find you or you found them and you were able to take care of the problem so that the family was never taken apart. Is
that correct? That is correct. there's
Speaker 166
1:23:13
about lele there's 11 different ways uhpresented rawford that Care portal can engage the child welfare situation and in all counties and but specifically what we would hope for into your comment is that we get as far upstream to that to that crisis so that the the continued crisis doesn't happen and the way that we do that is through the trust that we have built and that we will continue to build in these communities with division of childrenldren Family
Services and which which and and and 100 Fami alliance because they are working with the most vulnerable children in our communities the most vulnerable families in our community right and in in that spot I don't need to go find them. I need to figure out a way to help walk alongside them and bring the church to them right and so knowing my background and knowing who I am you do from from the church angle it's a greater you know the church big C is what we would call it has
the opportunity to serve on a greater level and if we are building the relationship between the church and those people who are walking every single day with the most vulnerable children in our communities and we can enga make a connection through the portal, right? The portal's just a system that helps resource it's a connection piece that ll connects relationships and support people to people right and so that's what our hope would be and I hope that answers your question to to to be engage those families at the point of contact through investigative
Speaker 165
1:24:42
work or or protective service work or whatever that might look like so that those children never enter into care
Representative Cindy Crawford
Unverified
1:24:50
correct so the way people get a hold of
you is through let's say the mom was not already connected to you guys when her car broke down. how would she
know to get a hold of you or someone to help her that's
Speaker 166
1:25:06
a great question she really wouldn't all of our families come from those that are working specifically with
those families that are crisis already our relationship again through divi with division of childrenldren Family Services and or Hopeub there is resources available for others like in Sebastian County, it would be different because that's where we are the portal's different because it wouldn't it wouldn't we wouldn't have all the resources that in these other counties that Arkansas family does and Sebastian County however let me throw this one at you. We didn't realize that the number one need in all of these
communities that we saw coming into the portal not just not just in the state of Arkansas but across the nation was a bed and we we researched that and realized that between 2 and3% of children nationally sleep on the ground and so we created an initiative to support Careporttal and support this move that a movement called re am teamam and so that dream team's vision is to get every kid in the state of Arkansas off the floor. So through local manufacturers that have donated us mattresses monthly right so that we can move these to
different locations in our state we realized that we don't want a financial situation to cause a church not to be able to deliver a bed into one of these homes so that eventually support can take place in a relationship can be built it's not always there and it's not always perfect sometimes it's just a drop and go just to keep a kid in care or reunify care because a bed is an issue but what we've seen is because of that number one need there are the the community does have the ability to get a hold
of us in all these different places school systems but as far as the other resources uhpresentative Crawford unless they're working with those organizations they wouldn't they they they wouldn't use the portal all righty well I had another question forgot it so I'll get back to you think we need to
Representative Cindy Crawford
Unverified
1:27:00
really move on to the next one thank you uhpresentative Duke, thank you. thank you madam chairir.
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
1:27:05
thank you all for your work and and doing your best to help
Representative Hope Duke
Unverified
1:27:18
families and kids it's it's some of the most important work that we could do.
I have a couple of questions so is this a similar in scope as like bright futures are you familiar with Bright Futures? so yes I
think it's going to be a little similar.
Speaker 191
1:27:34
I don't know too much about bright futures but instead of it just being limited to online or Facebook or something like that I think they do a lot of their work through Facebook when a need comes into this system it automatically
sends it out to everyone that has signed up and so there's a lot more traction with this and the ability to get it out to all of the churches the other part to this it isurchcented so the only individuals that can deliver the items would be the church now community members can sign up to be community champions so you can donate or you can say hey I have a crib at my home that I no longer need but the church would have to be the entity that comes to pick it up and deliver it to the family that DCfS or 100 families entered the need
Representative Hope Duke
Unverified
1:28:19
for. So right now you all don't receive any funding from the state. Is
Speaker 166
1:28:24
that correct? We were able to procure 160,000 to move to five new counties and I guess it was two months ago that was the that was the first one yes ma'am and how
Representative Hope Duke
Unverified
1:28:34
does this work with the school system? so the way the school system
Speaker 166
1:28:38
would have to be involved is to there's a fee based on the number of kids that are in the school system or the school systems that need to be involved that would go directly to Careporttal corporate which is
an entity of global orphan project they're out of Kansas City so in order to have a school in your community that would engage the portal or be a requesting agency they would just need to we we would research that give you a number as far as how much that would cost them and then when they pay that fee for the year then it would then they could give could begin to use the portal to engage their families with the local church and so when you do that is there any kind of
Representative Hope Duke
Unverified
1:29:21
indication of what churches are a part of your group and who's going to be coming alongside and are you do you have the ability at this point I mean if
you're if you're not taking government money you've got lots of different abilities. If you are taking government money you have less, right? And so and and typically those strings grow right so I caution you on that. I'm I'm not a big fan of of mixing those but do are there any
as far as families, how do you make sure that a church is coming alongside that is aligned with that
kid's faith particularly if they're in foster care or something that is I mean I
don't know what the rules are with that but I would assume that when they're in foster care you're not necessarily bringing them into another religious faith? What are what are the guardrails on
Speaker 166
1:30:06
those pieces that's a great question so when we train the churches to be responders and and how the what what to expect when they get to the to the house this is not this is the faithba in community basically being another wrapparound service. they're not there to
to engage in what they believe or who they are or or or make sure they go to the church that they you know that they're with that's not their primaryries reason for being there their primary reason for being there is to engage in the tangible need that has been put in the portal that's their first and and but a lot of times what we see is an organic relationship begin to happen based on questions that the family would ask or how it would how it would go some so sometimes it to heather's point or her story a while ago
sometimes or most of the time the individual that is being served will be able to lead that conversation into something greater as a wrapparound service and sometimes it's just we're just there to drop off the need to help protect or serve those families so that so that they can the crisis doesn't continue so let me let me
Speaker 169
1:31:12
make sure I understand. So number one, there
Representative Hope Duke
Unverified
1:31:15
any church, any denomination, any affiliation can be a part of the care portal. so it is what we would say is a a
Speaker 184
1:31:25
Christian congregation I don't know if that helps you there's a there's a what
Speaker 166
1:31:30
yes statement of faith that Careportal has that we have to operate underneath in order to onboard churches now all churches can be some sort of community responder but the faith the organization puts out this statement of faith and those are the ones that have to be the ones that deliver the needs to our to those families ok so do you have any concern that if you mean you're
Representative Hope Duke
Unverified
1:31:50
already taking some money, if you get additional money that there
might become a little bit more restrictions in the sense of no you can't do that or a school district that may have concerns one way or the other on how you look how you look at that and I I do still have a little bit of question on and so I think I think you should have the freedom to do what you want that's why I would be hesitant if I were in your shoes to take any money because if you want to use your churches to come in and wrap around and you talked earlier about coming alongside home and which I agree that's you know I was not called to foster but I believe I was called to help some of the families around me that were
called to at least God hasn't called me yet. He may still but so so it sounded like you want them to build a relationship to help sustain them and so the logic dictates there that if that happens obviously they're going to be building a relationship within that so then that comes my other question of how what does that look like with your foster childrengain, I'm all on your team. I'm just trying to make sure because I'm kind of like what's what could go wrong and what does this look like where you could potentially lose your freedoms or open doors
to things that you don't necessarily want to open the door to as you are
Speaker 175
1:33:04
independent yeah there's so Careporttal realizes that and so our
Speaker 166
1:33:08
agreement is with the state through DCfS is that our church has become a volunteer of the state through a form that they would fill out so that it's they're entering the the situation as a as a volunteer rather than a church member now they have to they have to release their information through the DCfS
worker and or 100 families family advocate they have to say is it ok if I get a church involved and so because of the release of information and the importance of keeping those stories private and those that information private the release happens and then the church gets it in Care portal or gets the need coming to them in Careporttal and before they are before they respond or or directly go to that family they're volunteers of the state I don't know if that would if that helps you any or if
Speaker 165
1:33:56
I'm I'm probably didn't answer your question so I I apologizepresentativeke I so if
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
1:34:00
you don't mind you might get offline with them to finish up any more questions we've got a full agenda we haven't got to yet. we've got to be out of this room at a certain time. so if you don't mind reaching to them offline and they're going to be here for a little bit of happenance and some more of your questions but I need to get
one more person and get on to some other things onto the agenda so would like to have an
Representative Hope Duke
Unverified
1:34:17
answer from DCfS as far as the foster kid children is I'm happy to get offline with them on on and if I have any more detail on that one DCfS will be up
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
1:34:24
here shortly on other parts of the agenda you're happy to answer ask that question when they get up here umpresentative Barnes
Representative Glenn Barnes
Unverified
1:34:41
Thank you chair thank you all for your commitment and what you're doing. I was wonderingpresentative Duke I believe was kind of right where I was wanting to know how is it sustainable if you're in goal is not to get them to connect with a church. how do you sustain those people who may need help over and over again and are you having trouble with churches that want to make this part of the great commission work that they've already been commissioned to do
how you how do they stop from trying to integrate those people into their churches. Great question they
Speaker 184
1:35:19
our end goal is that ultimately there is a relationship built yes sir so that what happens is the the
Speaker 166
1:35:25
the tangible need that is there in front of them that the church is meeting it just breaks down a barrier, right? and from that point it is it becomes I guess you would say organic, right? We would tell because the churches don't want to be involved with this unless they
have the opportunity to to do more right that's their ultimate heart to see the least of these or however you want to present that these these marginalized families so we would never tell and this is why it's set up this way that again we believe that the local church has the opportunity to impact this crisis or this poverty foster care or whatever it might be on a high high high level right and so meet the need first right but see how your tra how the traction happens post the need
so we would never tell the church and don't tell the church right not to be con continue to engage but what we would tell the church is you're not there specifically just to push your faith on this family, right but you are there and you can you can read the situation we'll train them to do so right through whether it be a prayer or another need or whatever it might be you can see how that goes. Sometimes it it it goes very well in in these families are continued to wrap around them so you see that there's a other services that are that are happening naturally
with this family and sometimes it's just there like we're just there to meet the need, right? We just meet the need and then we're out the door. Well with the reforms that are
Representative Glenn Barnes
Unverified
1:36:54
being taking place right now. I would like to say it man we need this probably gonna need this across the state because churches are looking for ways to get involved but how to do it they don't quite understand how to do it and that separation that they're trying to keep as well as be involved I think you give em a platform in order to be able to get involved and really be able to use the
resources in a way that can be beneficial. thank you so much thank you for your comments thank youpresentative Barnes
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
1:37:22
again colleagues we had this meeting today because we had lots of questions from colleagues so this is not by any means the end of the conversation. this
is just the beginning because I want of us to be a little bit more aware of what's going on and how we can all work together to make it successful. so thank you for your questions thank you
guys for being here today without objections colleagues we're gonna move on to item we have some folks that are out of state that are here on Zoom to answer some questions for us so we're going to move down to item F real quick which is the
approval of proposed Georgia Center for Opportunitytract and Jill is gonna come down fromblR to explain that doesn't take some questions so this shouldn't take just a few minutes but I want you to get this done and then we'll go back to DCfS who's here and thank you for your for your patience with us And as Jill's coming forward I remind you guys that this is a very full subcommittee not only are we talking about everything DCfS we're also talkingdhS we're also talking about workforce and what can we do in Arkansas to get the main people that we have that are currently not working as adults in Arkansas how can we
get them a meaningful job and get them to work so that's the other part of this committee's work and
Speaker 217
1:38:27
Jill we'll give it to you on that madam thank you madam Chair. Jill Thayeryer, Bureau of Legislative Research. under adam F you should all have in your packets a draft consultant services agreement this agreement is pursuant to the motion that was adopted by the subcommittee at your last meeting and it is for a contract
between the bureau and the Georgia Center for Opportunity and I believe there should be representatives of that entity joining us by teams. give us just a minute we want to get the folks here from Georgia to thank you all so much for your
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
1:39:01
patience. we just want to kind ofway, we've all been gone for
a couple of weeks trying to get updated with colleagues what
we're doing. So Jill's going to bring forth the contract that we have with you guys and specifically what are we trying to do for our subcommittee and in regards to workforce and so that we can move forward and the limited time that we have to get this project completed and get legislation ready for next session so if you guys will say what data what you've done in the past and what can we expect out of the fulfillment of this contract? Wonderful. can you all hear us? We can thank you all right wonderful thank you for having us and we were
inspired to hear about hang on just briefly just briefly just tell us who you are we're in a committee meeting so I just need to tell
Senator Breanne Davis
Unverified
1:40:01
us who you are real quick for the record before you get speaking. thank you. um'm Rachelerkley and these are our colleagues Les forwardd andRay Packer we are with the Georgia Center for Opportunity and then our subproject called the alliance for Opportunity all the same entity but a multistate coalition working on reforming social services and workforce
Speaker 224
1:40:21
services to help people rise from poverty into work. OKjill thank
Speaker 217
1:40:29
youpresentative Bentley so just briefly I'll go over a few of the provisions of the contract and then the Georgia Center for Opportunitypresentatives can talk to you more about the scope of work if you have questions about those and this contract is related to actct 145 that was passed during the last general assembly. which assigned to
this subcommittee a study of issues related to the reform of the state's workforce and social services there is a requirement under that act that this subcommittee complete a report that includes recommendations and any related draft legislation by october 1st of 2026 and that would be submitted to the legislative council. this entity will be it's my understanding assisting you with gathering the data and analyzing data from the various agencies to get you started on that on that study.
so the contract is for a six month term it would begin if it is approved by the legislative council this Friday and would end January31st,2026. there is a provision for an extension there for an additional6 months if you decide that you need the continued assistance of this entity the total contract maximum contract amount is55,000 dollars and as we always do with our contracts and we have a maxx contract amount and then the
entity bills us for actual hours worked there are fees or hourly rates included on the last page of attachment A so they would bill us at those rates as well as for their actual expenses incurred related to travel or or other issues everything else that's in here is our is pretty much our standard language I will say that if this committee decides to recommend moving forward with this contract it would then need to go in front of the executive
subcommittee and then the legislative council in order to approve the bureau entering this contract and I'd be happy to take any questions. Representative beatty thank you madam chairir. I guess my questions are maybe more
Representative Howard M. Beaty, Jr.
Unverified
1:42:46
for the Georgia Center for Opportunity if if there's an appropriate time perfectly fine they're here to answer questions so well I would just like maybe to hear from them how they became involved in this in this
project and to present the information we're looking at today certainly yes thank you for having
Senator Breanne Davis
Unverified
1:43:08
us. so we have been examining different states around the country seeing what they have done to help people leave poverty and get into work and and in this work we
worked closely with the state of Louisiana on a similar task force kind of like your study
subcommittee has formed via legislation we worked closely with Louisiana in their process to both pull pull the the lid off of what their programs are accomplishing in their state and then how the individual goes through different programs we worked for a year with the state of Louisiana based off of audits that they're legislative auditor produced so when you're at a chairperson's met
with Louisiana to hear how they accomplished what they accomplished so at the end of Louisiana's task forcece they established some new functions and structures that allowed the welfare and workforce systems to work better together to serve the people of their state the folks in Louisiana let them know that an audit of what was currently happening in their programs was crucial to to reforming their programs so your your chair
chairpersons met with Louisiana and realized that this kind of audit would really help your efforts there in Arkansas and the the legislative auditor in Arkansas it's our understanding doesn't have the broad authorities that the legislative auditor has by a constitution in Louisiana and so an outside third party entity which is common in states can come in and do this kind of program out com e assessment and integration or nonintegration type of
assessment and reached out to us after our work in multiple states on this and the folks on our team have a broad amount of experience at the state level and the federal level understanding these programs and how they should function at their highest and how they should be communicating with each other andpresentativeateleave's ok I'm gonna step in and
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
1:45:26
say that we want something transformative to happen out of the subcommittee Arkansas has over a
million people right now that are adults that are not working. so we have
a very one of the lowest work petition work participation rates in the nation in Arkansas we're spending millions of dollars but we have actually no idea what is our return on investment wire people still not working and so as we looked we had helped Senator English and I had hoped that audit here could do it and thatblR could do the work that they did in Louisiana but unfortunately we don't have that capacity here with our blr or our audit to do the work they did in Louisiana because we need a third party output to see what is the actually outcomes what's the return on investment and what do we actually getting
for actual jobs at the end of the day when we give we owe millions of dollars where the jobs are actually being created we've got really good opportunity right now with our work requirements for for snap and for medicaid so we want those waivers to be effective we want actually people to get out of poverty and I know all of you can go in your districts and see that there are families that have been in poverty not for a year but for generations so how can we get these families to break the cycle and actually get a good job in their community and so that's why we reached out because we have a limited time
we have a year right to get this going so we can get some good legislation moving forward to actually get the return on investment what is actually outcomes of each one of these agencies across the state ruled that this is the only way that we could do it in the time manner that we had and that's why we reached out to this group that's shown to do it before and do a good job.
I hope that helps I should have said that before I had them ask the questions but if you have another question for thempresentative beatty
Representative Howard M. Beaty, Jr.
Unverified
1:47:03
help yourself that just wanted for for maybe members that that had not been involved in these discussions to understand where they came from and and why we're
hearing this information today so thank you madam chair thank
Representative Stephen Meeks
Unverified
1:47:17
you uhpresentative meeks thank you madam chairir. you answered my my first question was just your background and expertise to be able to do this
it sounds like you're well qualified. the only other question that I have is y'all are located in the state of Georgia are you going to in order to kind of learn where we're at does that mean you're going to be coming to our state spending time in our state, getting to know our people and our systems so that you can really dig into
this deep? Is this something you're going to be doing mostly from Georgia so kind of walk us through how you're going to get to know Arkansas to make an Arkansas centric report force. that's a very good
Speaker 6
1:47:56
question. we're actually located throughout the country soRay Packer
Senator Breanne Davis
Unverified
1:47:59
here is in Pennsylvania Les Fort and I are in Virginia lesss is served on the board of social services here in Virginia.Ray worked in the administration in Pennsylvania so we've seen
different systems up close as well I should mention but we will be conducting first virtual interviews with folks from the different agencies to ask them and and let them lead you are exactly right that local knowledge is incredibly important so we'll be asking and interviewing virtually to save on cost initially and then we will go spend we're planning you know3 days to a week where we're just dividing and conquering we have a bigger team than this
that will go and sit down with every part of your administration so from social services caseworkers all the way up to the administrative side sitting down with folks in person as well and it's our hope that we can get access to some individuals to see how they are experiencing going through your system All right. Thank you. Senator Gilmore thank you madam chair and I think you answered my first
Senator Ben Gilmore
Unverified
1:49:13
question was, how did we come to know about this group and it sounds like through the conversations in Louisiana and y'all reached out to them so that answered that I guess then my question is to the organization you're working various states what what states have you worked
Speaker 6
1:49:34
in specifically? yes soRay and EricRandolph who's not on this call actually worked in Arkansas in 2013 and
Senator Breanne Davis
Unverified
1:49:40
helped produce a a report in Arkansas
they worked in the state of pennsylvania Les Ford works closely with Virginia we've worked with Texas, Utah designing kind of a tanf pilot along these lines let's see Les and ray what states am I leaving out we're working currently in Mississippi West Virginia do y'all have some other states that I'm missing or did I get them all? North Carolina as well
Senator Ben Gilmore
Unverified
1:50:17
in all similar work I presume to what you foresee here in Arkansas and so what what has that work I mean just I understand it's a loaded question so you may not be able to give as much detail in the time we have but what has that worked brought forth what what fruit have we seen or have you seen from that I
Senator Breanne Davis
Unverified
1:50:38
think Louisiana is the greatest example and now I I will preface that Louisiana had many years of audits
and you know a year per program on
their audits and went very in depth on program outcomes but I think that we can accomplish something similar even with a shorter timeline here so they audited their programs and then they met as a task forcece committee similar to what you all have and then at the end of that year they produced a report that showed you know how many offices does each program have? what do administrative costs versus service costs look like what kind of outcomes are we getting?
how many people are getting jobs after they go through we owe a training etc. so that there was a a clear picture of what needs to be fixed including on data integration and and the casework flow and at the end of that that report put forward that for example Snap and Medicaid eligibility needs to happen in the same place and this is really relevant to the one big beautiful bill work requirements that data being in the same
place being important in Louisiana they are in in their reports and out of the audit said that all of the casework needs to be colocated so that when someone comes in they're able to access the workforce services when they're coming in for the social services so all that was put forward in the report and then the legislature passed enacting legislation this year so this this summer they passed in the
legislature and that's all coming to fruition inoctober firstt I believe the the system officially integrates and so you know obviously we don't have outcomes yet but the the goal is that all of this will be
Speaker 245
1:52:29
measured to have outcomes which are helping people to get into work and lives of self sufficiency
Senator Breanne Davis
Unverified
1:52:34
when able thank you lest you want to have anything yeah I will mention that a part of our team is an individual named Mason Bishop. he's not able
Speaker 247
1:52:53
muted myself excuse me but he is part of our team and he began this auditing and task forcece work in Utah over 30 years ago and so when we're looking at the long term ramifications of a careful audit and a movement towards a workforce system we've been able to see those long term results in Utah and of course everyone mentions Uta is a different state than other states but we've seen their snap population dip well below
the national average their labor force participation rate above the national average and we've throughout the COID when everyone was home they Utah was the state that recovered first in returning to work and never slipping below their projections and so over the long term with a careful audit and looking at how to best integrate our workforce and safety net systems when you're looking decades out we're able to prove this and so mason Bishop who's part of this team led that work in the nine0s as well.
Senator Ben Gilmore
Unverified
1:53:57
OK, you're doneen Gilmore? oh sorry. sorry and I I turned the mic off too soon. thank you madam chairir for the follow up. So I presume you've looked at Arkansas already to an extent. I mean maybe not into the weeds but you you know enough about what we do currently to I presume predict some outcomes that need to happen and predict some changes that that need to lead to those outcomes right? so can you give us an example of some of those things? I don't believeenator Gilmo ever
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
1:54:29
received a bit of data from us yet so umm be hard for them to we've we've asked we've asked agencies what
their timeline would be to gather the data to get to them but they've not received a a bit of data from so yeah sorry then I'll withdraw that question then you have another
Speaker 252
1:54:41
follow before I move on I'm good thank you thank you Representativeladyman thank
Representative Jack Ladyman
Unverified
1:54:51
you madam chair thank y'all for being here and presenting this to us very interesting thanks Jill for your work on this contract. you know I believe the best
thing that we can do as a body is to give someone a a living wage job and to me we need to do anything that we can to move that ball forward and to get this million people in Arkansas employed so for that reason madam chairir I I would move that we recommend to move this contract on to the executive subcommittee for a vote Senator Bryant do you want your question answered before we
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
1:55:27
take this vote. I I'm gonna hold your
recommendation for just a minute. I'm gonna let Senator Bryant ask his question and we'll come right back to youpresentativeladyman thank you madam chair I guess
Senator Joshua Bryant
Unverified
1:55:41
my question goes back to you said that like in Louisiana studies done you have the reports you got the information then you you're working on enacting legislation to achieve the results. During your timeline or during the process that you're gonna work in Arkansas who who is assisting I'm sure BLR to a point but are you unpacking the rules and
statutes that are preventing these changes from occurring? is that something that happens hand in hand with the report that we have a product at the end or are we just going to have a bunch of reports then we got to figure it out because for me when we when we spent money on a bunch of reports that's great but if it takes two years with the turnover of this body and the turnover of staff we're really just throwing money away to feel like we're doing something when we're not so I was just curious as far as the enacting legislation or rule changes that we're going to ensure our agencies are following is that a
product of the end of this be or is it something that we still have
Senator Breanne Davis
Unverified
1:56:41
to work on Yes, we will certainly put concrete recommendations that then you are
subcommittee when you're meeting per per the legislation that was passed over the coming year can kind of address with recommendations but we will also ensure looking at statute including federal statute and and that is something that our team brings
to the table is understanding what the federal restrictions are on on many of these funds as these are largely federal programs down that come down to the state level. so we will provide that statutory analysis and what outcomes we think your task force should be driving towards ra or less anything to add to that think that covers it Rachel guess I'll ask
Senator Joshua Bryant
Unverified
1:57:36
Miss Thayer as far as they're producing recommendations they're producing supposed outcomes why can't we work hand in hand to say as soon as we extract that data we start drafting pose legislation or proposed rule changes that we we turn into the agency to the executive branch start their process versus here's a packet this body is disbanded because we're going to start the next general assembly. new members no clue and then we're back to square one. Senator Bryant so absolutely
Speaker 217
1:58:07
defer to the decision of the subcommittee on how you want to proceed with your study. I think that my understanding of what will happen with this this entity is similar to some other consultants we've hired as they're going to analyze the data for you from all of the different agencies Kate Steele has already been reaching out to those entities and we the bureau are holding that data until a contract is in place and then we would release it to them and then you're going to get a report back from them and
recommendations in January and you will have the you know the remainder of next year to bring all the entities in and and conduct your study and come up with your legislative recommendations and the bureau will be here each step of the way with you to work on a draft legislation proposed rule changes and and anything else that y'all want to do. OK. I'll accept that answer and madam chairir I just cautioned the body that we
Senator Joshua Bryant
Unverified
1:58:58
got to have an output we got to have a product on this not just a study with report. thank you.
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
1:59:09
I appreciate that I just think that it's impossible for us as a body to get the data we need without having a return on investment and what the data is showing for us to really do something transformative we're gonna need indepth study and I think it's exactly what we get with this group so I will come
back to Representativeladyman and your sorrypresentative beatty you I'll let you in
Representative Howard M. Beaty, Jr.
Unverified
1:59:30
there thank you madam chairir. I I guess kind of follow up on what Senator Gilmore had asked earlier I know he was asking specifically related Arkansas what actionable items may be
would come from from your study and your report but I I'll be specific you talked about some of that in your your discussion about your work in other states when you were answering my question earlier. could you provide us with just some bullet point successes that you've had that other states have had from implementation and review of the report s that you prepared as well as maybe some action items out of those reports that we could we could look at here and in in Arkansas that are probably going to be the same action items that we're gonna need to implement here in the state
so could you could you identify a few of those in each of the states that you
Senator Breanne Davis
Unverified
2:00:20
performed work less do you want to kind of walk through again some of those Utah is the state that has done the most implementation that we have
outcomes umlouisiana just finished the end of their process and are implementing it starting now so we don't know the outcomes yet but you know some of those recommendations are are how how eligibility
happens so again we haven't looked yet at that that system or done those interviews about how eligibility happens there but certainly that will be an outcome and it's largely going to be helpful in your implementation of the one big beautiful bill and all of that bill requires of state so that that is something that federal legislation is going to demand of all states and so hopefully our recommendations will help you streamline that process in that compliance that
you'll have to do anyway with that bill but less you want to talk about some of the outcomes that youtah saw as a result and maybe we can expect to see here yeah I'll I'll
Speaker 247
2:01:26
point out a couple of the processed pieces that Louisiana really zeroed in on which a huge one is their snap eligibility and how it's completely separate from their workforce systems and so especially in light of the one big beautiful bills implementation uhjanuary 12027
with work requirements etc and many of the eligibility checks. I anticipate that that will be something we zero in on. I can't say for certain without actually examining the data and actually examining how eligibility functions and how it's integrated into workforce but as you're talking about a million individuals who aren't connected to work ensuring that when they come for assistance that they have a seamless integgra integration into your state employment and training systems and I assume there are a variety of
employment and training systems that that individual might be eligible for. We will be closely looking at that interaction to ensure that it is seamless and more importantly effective in the Louis ian a audit the Louisiana auditor did a close examination of their weoa programs one of the shocking conclusions was that the individuals who found work after going through those workforce programs actually were paid less than they were before they went through those programs so we will be looking at that
kind of outcome data as well. Our primary purpose is to pull out to the surface what is the current reality and what isn't working and then the recommendations will be where do you move to in order to better integrate to get better outcomes and like I mentioned before, Utah's integration was30 years ago but the primary outcomes that have been shown over 30 years are labor force participation theres was lower than the US average
before but it dropped even lower than they had a higher excuse me they had a higher labor force participation than the US average and it has continued to increase above and they're enrollment in key safety net programs particularly Snap is one of the lowest in the nation and so enrollment and self sufficiency are key outcomes for us as well so those will be the things we'll be aiming towards in both the Louisiana and
Speaker 266
2:03:41
Arkansas projects. and just I I'll say at a high
Senator Breanne Davis
Unverified
2:03:47
level something that came out in Louisiana that it should be successful in Utah is we use the word colocating but basically that means that you're your different programs on the workforce side and the welfare side of the house are co located in the same office so when an individual comes for help they're not then told get back on on the bus or back in your car and go to a different office if you want workforce training. those services will all be there and you'll be
handed to a caseworker or keep the same caseworker and then behind the scenes someone's helping you find what workforce training program is best for you instead of sending you out to a totally different system where the caseworkers don't talk to each other etc. which it sounds like on the private sector side restore hopepe was doing that we heard from earlier something like that but for all of the government programs it's something that's likely to come out but again we have to see you know what what in your system is currently talking to each other and what
Speaker 268
2:04:48
is not. thank you appreciate the answer. thank you ok
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
2:04:54
so we'll go back to Representative Leman. I want to quickly say that Utah again has been the number one in rich states poor states for over a decade and I want us to definitely head that direction here in Arkansas. I think this will help us andpresentativeladyman I will go back
Representative Jack Ladyman
Unverified
2:05:09
to you thank you madam chairir Well I I appreciate Senator Bryant's comment and his question about outcomes because we do need outcomes that are executable and many times we don't get that
so that's that's an important question that we we need to answer and also you talk about Utah I was just at a meeting last week in Montana and I heard again how good Utah is and they are number one as madam chair said in a lot of areas in labor in a number of labor categories Arkansas is number4 so we keep chasing them so this is one area we're not close and maybe we can catch them if we do this but madam chairir I would again
repeat my motion to move this forward to the executive committee for a vote. get a of yes I said motion and a second all those in
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
2:06:01
favor those opposed thank you we'll move this forward to executive committee thank you for your time and thank you for those waiting to present further on our agenda. thank you all very much. it's really important part of what we're getting accomplished. with that we will move back up to itemd the discussion of
baby me with Cassie Cochran andrtie Sellers from department of healthalth if you guys will acknowledge
yourselves for the record and you can proceed Good morning Kasey
Cochker in Arkansas pull it just a little bit closers that better
Speaker 272
2:07:02
Thanks yeah good morning Kasey Coker in Arkansas Department of Health deputy director of public health programs. r
Speaker 273
2:07:09
ie Sellers Department of Health I'm the division director for healthalvancement. so this morning we
Speaker 274
2:07:14
just want to give an overview of the wick baby and me programme that we offer in some of our local health units through the WI
program in the state this program was launched in 2018 in collaboration with DHSl Arkansas Children'srustund and University of Arkansas idsouth? ument and also it's administered through the division of Children and Family Services. so currently we use a parent support mentor type program. there are6 modules in this program we
advertise and recruit participants through ourI program momm needs to be in the third trimester or have a baby one month old and then the modules are one on one with the parent support mentor they are interactive and so it gives the parent support mentor and the participant time to connect and provide the resources they need also allows that parent support ment
or to refer if there's other resources identified as a need for that mom and new baby. at the end of each session the participant is provided a supply of diapers and wipes at the end of the module that they learned about so some of the module titles are safele selfcare routines positive guidance and development. so momma is aware of how babies should be progressing and if
there's questions or confusion or need for additional resources that's when the parent support ment or can step in and assist mom and new baby at that point just a couple of other facts about this program the arent support mentors are trained through the idsouth training academy so they are educated on how to interact and how to share the information in the modules and also connect individuals to more resources if
needed. Currently we have this available in 18 local health unit wic clinics and in 2025 we've had333 participants and since the program started they've helped over5,000 families. the locations of the program were selected due to child abuse rates and the foster care numbers so just a quick overview of the program we're happy to take any questions you may have
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
2:10:01
so just real quick so what would it take for us to get this in all of our health departments where we have a wake clinics
Speaker 274
2:10:09
so of course it goes back to funding and I'm gonna letrtie Sellers talk about that so this
Speaker 273
2:10:16
is not considered a core program or requirement for wi funding so that funding's not allowed to be used for this. so all of the funding is the funding that we get from DHS so we would have to rely on DHS to provide us additional funding in order to spread to other counties
Speaker 282
2:10:33
through the Arkansas childrenldren's Trustund. anybody else have
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
2:10:38
any any questions here? Representative meeks thank you just a quick question can
Representative Stephen Meeks
Unverified
2:10:44
you tell us the kind of outcomes you're seeing from this program the benefits that the the new mothers are are getting and the account of the return on the investment if you will that we're that we're making in these new families. Surerty would you like to address the outcomes?
Speaker 273
2:11:05
having a evaluation done. there was one done in 23. it was a little bit hard to decipher because of COVID some of those numbers so we're actually expected to have another one and it's been two years so hoping it will come out what we do know is that from our parents' remarks and anecdotally, you know they do feel like they are better parents that their patience is there they really focus on structured play and parent interaction to build some of that bond and all of our moms you know for the most part really felt that it has been
beneficial and like preparing them to be a better parent and one of the main goals of this was to reduce child abuse before it ever happens. so we feel like on that side from the from what we hear from our moms that it is successful and that's
Speaker 149
2:11:50
what we hope our evaluation will find. thank you Representative C Thank you madam
Representative Cindy Crawford
Unverified
2:11:57
chairir. Good morning ladies. and I may be in the wrong lane on this so
my concern is which I guess we're gonna address at some point I think we have an ISp withpresentativeoughug what do you run into with these moms who fall off the cliff of the money where they lose their benefits because maybe they make a little bit too much money. does this go into this at all? do you see this
Speaker 274
2:12:39
this program really does not address that type of need they can connect the participant to additional resources in the community but this is more focused on mom and baby and caring for baby and the correct development stages of the infant. So you have someone there to make sure they
Representative Cindy Crawford
Unverified
2:12:59
have enough excuse me a formula and enough food. So through the WI programme those nutrition
Speaker 274
2:13:10
assessments and needs are assessed and if there's a need for more resources than those connections can be made through the WI program. Thank you yes ma'am p re s ent ative n ne t
Representative Denise Jones Ennett
Unverified
2:13:26
t thank you chairwoman. I have a question for you good afternoon with the program how many programs are in the delta area. OK so we currently have
Speaker 274
2:13:45
From Jefferson County over about 13 sites and how many do you have here
Speaker 289
2:13:50
in Pulaski County? Pulaski County we have
Speaker 274
2:13:52
one at our health unit in Plasky central. I have one more question if you certainly you can
Representative Denise Jones Ennett
Unverified
2:14:01
so after this program is over and I'm assuming you're doing a survey or just see how the program was and how you can better make how you can make the program better. Is there an exit survey
Speaker 274
2:14:18
so there's assessments before the modules and then after the modules to assess current knowledge and then knowledge gained after the educational module with the arent support mentor and so that's kind of the assessment that we're using individually with moms and babies. OK one more questioner so with that do
Representative Denise Jones Ennett
Unverified
2:14:38
you is there any type of support after they get off of that is it just after you're done with this it's it's
over with is it somebody that may reach out to them like after a couple of months or so and say hey just checking in and seeing how you're doing is there something like that in the program or once they've finished the program it's done I'm gonna letrtie address that so
Speaker 292
2:15:04
a lot of our parents support mentors do establish some relationships
Speaker 273
2:15:08
so that the program is over they are there as a resource should they need to come back. A lot of our moms will finish this program before they are finished with eligibility for wi for their
infant soick also is there as a resource should they need anything for them community or or additional help or anything like that right thank you thank you
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
2:15:27
ladies thank you so much for presenting I appreciate that thank you OK colleagueleagues next on our agenda is an update from the
reimbursement rates under Living Choices with uhjanet mann and a we have a couple of things we want to address with DHS and Representative Duke if you want to ask some questions with DHS about we talked about with Ke Porter you're welcome to while they're up here at the table OK?
OK, Secretary manci please recognize yourself for the record and we'll present your
Speaker 294
2:16:05
report. yes ma'am thank you good morning or
Speaker 295
2:16:08
actually good afternoon just a little bit closer to you than ike I'm sorry we've had a
Speaker 294
2:16:14
good afternoon ummjanet manndHS thank you for this. So I'm here today to just update you quickly on the assisted living letter. The letter is in your packet it's exhibit E and I would just highlight
that we have concluded the cost study report in in accordance with Act 198 of2023 so those results will be shared with y'all shortly. We they are under consideration by executive leadership and will be confirmed upon approval. the other item I would highlight highlight is there has been no change of ownership or closures from the previous month of August31st,2025. with that I'll take questions
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
2:17:01
any questions from the committee would you have some questions if it's ok Representative Duke had a couple of questions about about Careporttal if you want to bring anybody else up to the table with you to answer that that would be just fine. thank you
Speaker 297
2:17:14
I would like to bring DCfS director Tiffanyright up to the table please and directorrifield acknowledge yourself too for the record
Speaker 299
2:17:32
good morning Tiffany Wright, director for the division of Children and Family Services OK Representative Duke you're welcome. thank
Representative Hope Duke
Unverified
2:17:41
you madam chairir. thank you both. thank you for allowing me to ask my question now and but thank you for your work as well and what you did in this space too do you need me to repeat it or do you ok so my question was in that carol portal piece when you have these groups that are coming and wrapping around and again, I'm totally supportive of that. I think that's a great innovative way to help get the church involved. but when you have children in the care of
foster care how does that work if say you know there is one coming wrapping around that may be a different faith from what that family that they've been removed from but hoping to reunite with. how does that work
Speaker 299
2:18:20
in that instance in particular? so specifically as it relates to Care portal this is a prevention tool so you won't find Careportal overarching involved with foster kids specifically
we try to gear it more towards that upstream approach of prevention of foster care if there is again that's a conversationdCFs is having with the family if it's a foster family or relative and they're not wanting faith-based involvement or support then we would respect that wish of that family and not force involvement with Careporttal or Arkansas Family alliance
Speaker 301
2:18:56
which make clear I mean I think that they would do better if they had
Representative Hope Duke
Unverified
2:19:04
some support, but obviously people have different faiths and different reasons for the choices that they have made. so is that is that limited with like Arkansas does it look different in different states because they did notice when I got on there that Oklahoma does have like some current needs for foster children. So I guess it's just each state sets its own guardrails? Yes thank you thank you ma'am thank you ok Representative garner
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
2:19:30
had another question topresentative Ggarner asks you thank you madam chair and I'll
Representative Denise Garner
Unverified
2:19:35
try to make this quick but I've had several requests from dentists that after after we passed the reimbursement bill and the rules are still in promulgation I guess it was supposed to go into effect September 1st thank you madam chair and I'll try to make this quick but I've had several requests from dentists that after after we passed the reimbursement bill and the
Speaker 294
2:19:51
rules are still in promulgation I guess it was supposed to go into effect September 1st's the statute that you that y'all passed did have an effective date of 91 so we have put the new rates out for public comment as one of the first steps of promulgation we did that to preserve that 91 date so that
we can retro back. So after we finish public comment I believe it's around 10:15 we will promulgate the whole rule and we will be sending it to Cms shortly so that we can preserve that date. I have been recently asked about the timeline of that we've been working through that timeline and trying to get it done as quickly as possible. I can't tell you how longcms will take with that approval. they do have 90 days on a state plan amendment. they do have the ability to take it
off the clock I don't know that that will happen. I don't know that that won't happen so we are trying to work that through the process but we are trying to also preserve the 91 retroactive date. Great thank you. I guess do you have
Representative Denise Garner
Unverified
2:20:51
something that you could give to us so that we can make sure that our dentists have that information? do you have a we we were asked for that this morning so it is it is being I have already sent a text while we've been here
Speaker 297
2:21:03
to get that a work process so we'll get that information out to them I think there are a lot of folks that
Representative Denise Garner
Unverified
2:21:13
are are certainly s trying to stay in business. yes ma'am. well and we have had sure that we keep those
Speaker 303
2:21:20
dentists certainly and we have had communications with the dental association we've tried to keep them
Speaker 294
2:21:25
in online or you know try to keep them updated on what we are doing and they've been involved with stakeholder feedback and they asked some of the initial questions that you've asked also great if you'll just keep let us keep our
Representative Denise Garner
Unverified
2:21:39
constituents posted that would be great. yes ma'am thank you're welcome
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
2:21:45
thank you all so much. I appreciate you being here today. We have we'll see you next month. I think we have our county service is gonna be here next month. So college you'll see we
sent an email out with umpresentative Beck had a template put out with finances for shared services that's an email that was sent to you so
if you have any questions you can reach out to DHS on that but we're trying to make sure that we are in depth study on how much money we're spending where the money's going I've asked umblr this cartwright to give us a list of all the money spent on
DHS and each agency you guys can have that as well I know it's a lot going on this committee. I appreciate your time today whenever over two hours. thank you so much for your involvement yeah we'll be here
Thursday just for remind the committee we'll be here Thursday for workforce and we're hearing some more Senator English don't you remind
Senator Jane English
Unverified
2:22:36
us what we're going to be hearing on Thursday. thank you we've invited the folks from Utah to be on Zoom to make a presentation about how they got started with all this and and looking at the
effects it's having today all the different programs and how they've got it organized so I'm looking forward to that should be a lively discussion and give us a much better idea of what we're looking at for ourselves for the future With that we adjourned thank you all very much.
Agenda
A. Call to Order
B. Overview of Restore Hope Arkansas [Exhibit B] 1. Paul Chapman, Executive Director, Restore Hope Arkansas 2. Janet Camp, Restore Hope Arkansas
C. Presentation on Arkansas Family Alliance and CarePortal [Exhibits C1-C4] 1. Matt Whitson, Executive Director, Arkansas Family Alliance 2. Heather Sanders, Director of Development, Arkansas Family Alliance
D. Discussion of Baby and Me Program 1. Cassie Cochran, Deputy Director, Public Health Programs, Arkansas Department of Health (ADH) 2. Cristy Sellers, Director, Division of Health Advancement, ADH
E. Update of Reimbursement Rates Under the Living Choices Assisted Living Waiver Pursuant to Act 213 [Exhibit E]
F. Approval of Proposed Georgia Center for Opportunity Contract [Exhibits F1-F2]
G. Discussion of Recommendations by Committee
H. Other Business
I. Adjournment
Documents
| Title | Type | Pages | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Agenda — ALC - HOSPITAL, MEDICAID, & DEVELOPMENTAL DISABILITIES STUDY SUBCOMMITTEE, Sep 22, 2025 | Agenda | 1 | Official source ↗ |
| Exhibit B- Restore Hope Arkansas | Exhibit | 10 | Official source ↗ |
| Exhibit C1- CarePortal Brochure | Exhibit | 2 | Official source ↗ |
| Exhibit C2- Arkansas Local Vision Casting | Exhibit | 4 | Official source ↗ |
| Exhibit C3- Care Portal Dashboard | Exhibit | 1 | Official source ↗ |
| Exhibit C4- ARFA 5 Year Expansion | Exhibit | 1 needs OCR | Official source ↗ |
| Exhibit E- Assisted Living Report August 2025 | Exhibit | 1 | Official source ↗ |
| Exhibit F1- GCO Contract | Exhibit | 6 | Official source ↗ |
| Exhibit F2- GCO Scope of Services and Fees | Exhibit | 7 | Official source ↗ |
Speakers
Senator Breanne Davis
Unverified
Speaker 6
Speaker 16
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
Speaker 28
Speaker 35
Speaker 37
Speaker 38
Speaker 42
Speaker 45
Speaker 53
Speaker 57
Representative Cindy Crawford
Unverified
Speaker 50
Senator Jane English
Unverified
Senator Dan Sullivan
Unverified
Speaker 69
Speaker 75
Speaker 48
Representative R. Scott Richardson
Unverified
Speaker 99
Representative Matt Brown
Unverified
Speaker 111
Representative Les Warren
Unverified
Senator Fredrick J. Love
Unverified
Speaker 119
Representative Denise Garner
Unverified
Speaker 94
Speaker 33
Representative Jessie McGruder
Unverified
Speaker 154
Speaker 157
Speaker 166
Speaker 168
Speaker 173
Speaker 179
Speaker 172
Speaker 184
Speaker 191
Speaker 192
Speaker 165
Representative Hope Duke
Unverified
Speaker 169
Speaker 175
Representative Glenn Barnes
Unverified
Speaker 217
Speaker 224
Representative Howard M. Beaty, Jr.
Unverified
Representative Stephen Meeks
Unverified
Senator Ben Gilmore
Unverified
Speaker 245
Speaker 247
Speaker 252
Representative Jack Ladyman
Unverified
Senator Joshua Bryant
Unverified
Speaker 266
Speaker 268
Speaker 272
Speaker 273
Speaker 274
Speaker 282
Speaker 281
Speaker 149
Representative Denise Jones Ennett
Unverified
Speaker 289
Speaker 292
Speaker 294
Speaker 295
Speaker 297
Speaker 299
Speaker 301
Speaker 303