Nassau County’s “No Wrong Door”

For many years residents of Nassau County in need of health and human services support encountered a fractured public system of uncoordinated programs, many in dilapidated buildings in critical need of repair.  In 2003, bolstered by a real estate consolidation plan devised by the County Executive to help ease the county’s fiscal crisis, an initiative was birthed to create a true health and human services system that would utilize technology and the co-location of eight different agencies in one building to re-invent how residents of the county accessed and received needed services.  

The initiative, entitled “No Wrong Door” seeks to implement policies and practices that have at their core the beliefs that each client, whether individual or family, has strengths and is worthy of respect.  The approach then becomes that of a client-worker partnership that has self-sufficiency as its goal.  Add to the new strengths-based culture the capacity to identify multi-dimensional problems and effectively address them, and you create an efficiency that has been sorely lacking.  In addition, where previously clients may have had to travel to several different buildings in locations around Nassau County, they now are able to deal with most problems in one location.

While a building was selected and funding was located to provide a “state of the art” facility with the technology needed to create the communication and tracking systems needed, the optimal culture change they seek cannot be realized without intensive staff development.   Early in the process a staff development committee formed that includes all the relevant county commissioners and DSS staff.  Its goal was to identify and implement the training needed and the evaluation required to successfully make the transition from a fragmented “silo” mentality health and human service delivery system, to a client-based service integration model.  To support this transition, the Rauch Foundation provided a grant of $67,000 over 18 months to support staff development and the evaluation of how effective the process used had been.