Video link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DkcMW7ubTM
Hello, I'm Judy Strand, I'm the Chief Executive Officer at Metropolitan Family Service, MFS.
Involvement in Successful Families 2020 was such a positive experience for us at MFS five years ago when we conceived this. Our culturally specific partners SEI, IRCO, Latino Network and NAYA had been meeting to think about how could we work together as a collective and bring to bear what all of us understood about the community and improve services to students and outcomes for students in the context of the families and communities in which they are from.
We were invited as the culturally responsive organization since we serve a number of different cultures and since we those of us who run MFS are not from a specific cultural community, other than a white community like myself, and it was very humbling to be invited to come to the table.
There was a sense of urgency in all of us to stand up and support cultural identity particularly within these school districts where there had been rapid changes over time and where the culture of the school community had not caught up with the diversity that is now present so really the core of the work to me was the cultural identity piece and the welcoming that we were able to provide by infusing our direct service teams into high-need school districts, and by working in partnership with the school districts about changes that they envisioned as well so that we could work together in that regard.
So, to see a whole United Way actually align around truly what the client needs are was a really new thing and I felt like it there was also a willingness to risk and to try something new.
What I value about United Way's partnership is really a willingness to understand that the Provider Community should have a voice in the direction that we're going.