How Community Action Agencies Are Transforming Rural America | Rob & Jennifer Olsen, OACAC

0:00Hello everyone, and welcome to the Fortell podcast. I'm joined by Jennifer Olson at OACAC in Missouri. Jennifer, thanks so much for coming on the podcast. >> Oh, thanks for inviting us. >> And you're just back from vacation, which we've been talking about, which should be fun, but we're going to talk about community action. Now, you joined, I think, OACAC in 2008. So, I'd love to hear about your journey, and then kind of like how you became executive director, and also maybe some of the changes that have happened over those years. >> Right. So, I started my journey in social services in 1999. So, it's been a minute. And I first started working um with folks with disabilities returning to work. So, you know, I've got a disability, what can I

0:43do, you know, now that this is my life. And so, I did that for about 7 years. And then my mother got ill, and I had to travel to go take care of her. So, I had to leave that job, which I really loved, but I did meet my husband there, so that that was a plus. So, I took care of my mom, she ended up passing away. And I came back, and I'm like, "Okay, I had a pretty high-level job at my last job." And I'm like, "I just need something where I'm just giving back to people again. I just want to connect with the people that we serve." So, I applied for a job as a case manager at OACAC. And so, I was a case manager for folks that are living in poverty, and we would help them with any kind of self-sufficiency need that they had. So, that's what I really loved about OACAC and community action from the beginning.

1:27Before, I was just focused on employment, but here I could be focused on employment, child care, housing, citizenship issues, like anything that would help contribute to somebody's self-sufficiency. And I did the case management work for about 5 months, and then a supervisory position came open. So, the way our community action agency was structured at that time is each county had a supervisor, and they would sort of facilitate services. So, they would decide what was best for that community. And that that's the thing with community action, right? Like we're super hyper local. So, what we needed in Green County, which is a little bit more urban where I was the supervisor, was far different than what we needed in Dade County, which is one of our most rural

2:09counties in our service area. And so, I supervised our Green County center for it all meshes together but a while, and then they're like, "Oh, well, we need somebody out in Polk County, which is a little bit more rural county." So, I supervised both of those counties at the same time for quite a while um until I eventually became the CSBG director. So, CSBG, Community Services Block Grant. And they're sort of the the head of all of those 10 counties and deciding what all of the 10 counties are going to do. And so, I directed our CSBG program for a few years, and our executive director, Carl Rosenkrans, who had been there for decades, uh decided he was going to retire. He This had been the only job he'd ever had. He had grown our agency

2:53from the beginnings of community action into a seven-agency program, 10 counties. I think our first budget, I think it was around 4 million, and when he left it was around 32 million. So, uh we really really grew uh under his leadership. He decided to retire, and uh they did a round of hiring, didn't find anybody that they'd like. I did not apply. Um and then the board reached out to me and said, "Hey, he's getting ready to leave. He really wants to retire. Can you Can you be an interim?" And so, I was interim for a little while uh until I officially applied, and and here I am today. And that was about uh 3 and 1/2 years ago that I became the executive director.

3:35So. >> No, I love that. And cuz cuz I've been to your offices in Springfield and talked to the team, and you know, they've talked about, you know, frankly, 10 counties is a is a big big area, right? And so, for people who haven't been to sort of Southwest Missouri, tell me like tell me what the reality is for some of the families you're trying to serve. >> Right. So, uh when I Springfield, I think is the third largest city in Missouri, right? So, it's considered a little bit more urban. We do have a bus system. It's not the best bus system. We have a bus system, but all of our other counties have no transportation, no public transportation, and we're a very car-dependent community. So, it can take like our farthest service location is

4:19about an hour and a half drive from Springfield. So, transportation is a huge barrier to the people that we are serving. And then additionally, uh affordable housing. So, like a lot of these rural communities, you don't have apartment complexes. You don't have um Section 8 landlords that will accept our voucher. Uh you don't have affordable housing units. You have a lot of like single independent homes maybe owned by one or two people. And so, there's not a lot of rental units out there for people. So, and then jobs, right? Like so, Springfield is sort of the hub for the jobs. Well, if you are an hour and a half away and you have no vehicle, you can't get to Springfield for the good job. You may have to get the minimum wage job at the gas station in the small community in which you live. So, uh those are some

5:02major struggles. We have communities who have no child care options. So, child care is a huge issue. We're working with a very small community called Billings, Missouri right now. And they operate on a four-day school week. So, a lot of our rural schools operate four days. Well, there are no child care providers for that one day that they're not in school. They go to school Tuesday through Friday. So, we're working with them to start a Wildcat Camp, a camp so that parents can drop off their kids on that Monday, and they can look at other job options. So, if your if your kid has no child care for Monday, it's really limited on where you can work if you can only work Tuesday through Thursday because there's there's nobody to take care of your kids. So, it's like an economic issue, but it's also an educational issue for the kids. And it also will help that community

5:46grow so they can attract young families to the community because there are options for you for work and for child care for that four-day school week. >> Yeah, that's really interesting. And just as a sort of a side, so one of the things that you know this about community action, especially what you guys do. You do everything from Head Start when it just assists us to housing, you know, you do lots of different things. One of the things we started working on in rural communities in Kentucky and Tennessee is actually transportation. So, but this is more kind of a dial-a-ride for medical services, but you know, we're we're kind of sliding in the AI to take all the calls on different times and therefore they're able to run the services cheaper cuz the dispatch service is therefore cheaper, but I hadn't appreciated just this sort of how difficult it was to get

6:28around in some rural parts in in more middle America for sure. >> Absolutely. Yeah. >> Yeah. Yeah. And then tell me about I think cuz when I met some of the team and then I think when we talked, you know, you you kind of changed some of the ways that you were thinking about delivering CSBGs to the more pure neighborhood centers. So, I'd love to just hear about that journey and cuz cuz that's one of the things that a lot of other community action agencies are thinking about, too. >> Yeah, so probably history of our agency, we've had one service center in each of our 10 counties for our CSBG program. through that center, we would provide intake assessment and referral, life skills classes, case management, and then we would initiate community projects for that community. Last year,

7:10we went through a restructuring. And it sort of started with COVID. Like with COVID when COVID happened, we uh when nobody was going anywhere, we were delivering food on doorsteps, we were still trying to meet people. It was the early days of Zoom, but it's before Zoom was like a regular word, but we we knew about Zoom, so we were using Zoom with people when we could. Um so, COVID happened and we're like, "Wow, well, a lot of people aren't coming into our centers anymore, even post-COVID, right? Like they this is a new reality that uh people expect digital services, especially when we think about younger generations, right? Like Like they don't want to come in and take time to sit down for an appointment. They're going to expect you to fill out an online form and to meet with you like we're meeting today. Uh so we restructured our services in CSBG last year.

7:54And we created three outreach centers that are sort of central outreach center that would serve our central counties, a northern outreach center that would serve our northern counties, and a southern outreach center that would serve our southern counties. It was a hard move because our communities were used to a physical location in each of those places. But making this change allowed us to look at our budget and put more money into direct services. So like before we were spending a lot of money on administration. We were spending money on the rent for those places, the maintenance, the supplies. And now we're able to have a pot of funds that we can provide some emergency services for people in each of those counties. So more is going back into the counties. And when we're providing our services,

8:35we can we tell all of our services can be provided in person. We can go to your home and meet you. We can meet you at a community location. We can do it online. So we're just trying to meet people where they're at. And it's been They've been really receptive to it now that we are about a year into it. >> Yeah, I understand that. Do you like talking about sort of young people just cuz you mentioned it? One of the things that we've been So one of our customers in Tennessee was has has a similar They have I think 14 counties. It's it's pretty rural again. One of the things that they said they were struggling with is actually kind of the budget to hire people in each one of the counties essentially. And so is is hiring young people to social services, let's say, challenging in Missouri? >> Yes, absolutely.

9:18Um especially in the nonprofit world, right? Like cuz our wages cannot compete with private sector. We do try to at OACAC we try to bulk up on soft benefits. Uh we try to make sure that we have the most robust 403b, right? Like we match at the percentage that the biggest percentage we can. We may try to make sure that our health insurance is really, really good. We implemented a winter break, a paid week at wintertime where people can have that week off and not use any of their vacation leave. We have a very robust annual leave and sick leave program. So, that's we try to make up for it in that way. And this change with CSBG did allow us to increase our wages. It is really important to me. We are an anti-poverty

10:00organization and we should not be paying poverty wages to people. So, we need to really think about how we can pay people a living wage to do the work that they're trying to do. >> And then across all of your programs, cuz as I mentioned, you do have a lot of different Right. So, what is quite interesting >> I think I I think it froze up for a a minute there. >> Let me let me ask you again. Did you did you Yeah. So, uh Yeah, I was basically saying Do you So, it might be it might be sort of almost like picking between your children, but do you if you were having to say which of which one of the programs makes the biggest impact in getting people out of poverty or in your community, what would it be? >> That is really hard. It is like picking

10:42my children. I appreciate the flexibility and the uh the response to the local needs that CSBG has, right? Like so, I feel like that's our core. I think they I I do think they all make it make an impact. So, we have Section 8 program that provides people affordable housing. When you have affordable housing, you can do a lot of other things. You know, we have a family planning program that provides health care services to people who are uninsured and that's super important. But, CSBG is sort of the core of that and it can kind of do any of the work that the others are doing, right? Like it can touch on child care. It can touch on education. It can touch on housing or um energy assistance, you know, teaching people to to take some efficient steps in their home. So, I do think of that as

11:24the core, but I yeah, I think they're all needed and impactful. >> Yeah. And what would you if you went back in time, what advice would you give yourself that you now [clears throat] know and is as an executive director when you started the job? >> I think I would say when I when I was in CSBG to be a little bit more proactive in learning about our other programs because we were very siloed. So like some of the people I was served I was serving may have benefited from some of the other programs that we have here and I didn't know enough to maybe provide that. We've worked really hard to to tear down those silos though. We're not there but we we're working on it. >> Yeah. Yeah. Well, and that's because someone comes in and this is obviously the thing we think about a lot. Like someone comes in the front door and

12:05says, "I need some help with Head Start." But actually they could get support somewhere else as well. >> Yes. Right. So I need help with Head Start but also I haven't had a pap smear in 5 years and I'm barely making my rent. So yeah, like really treating the whole person that comes in. That that's the goal. >> Yeah. And then just on a slightly different topic, I remember you when we were sort of conversing I remember you were doing it sort of there was a data migration or some technology thing happening. How do you think about like all the what are the things that you see your teams doing that you kind of makes you want to pull your hair out in terms of repetitive stuff that you'd like technology to just kind of sort out for you? >> Our fiscal operations are still paper dependent a lot of them. I mean, we're

12:48doing a lot of stuff in in our accounting software but there are still processes that require somebody to take a piece of paper from one person to the other person and so I am really looking for some efficiency with that. I think that any technological advances that we do is really us being good stewards of our funds, right? So like like we should not be spending our time if somebody isn't expert in say family planning, we should not spend have them spending their time doing these paper fiscal operations, right? They should be serving people and providing health care. So it really is an extension of our mission to look at efficient ways to do our business. >> Yeah, and to see that. I see that. I mean cuz we're always you know, we we look at things in like from a technology

13:30lens, right? So, we're interested in are there repetitive tasks that are transactional that don't need a person, right? Cuz we know community action is very important when you have like you're face-to-face with someone or you're someone's going through a crisis, you want a person developing that. But then, the reality is there's a bunch of repetitives, which I'm going to call the boring stuff, which just needs to get done, which is probably we think less useful from a a person perspective, right? >> But uh Like the the thing I'm I'm interested in it also is just from a from your perspective, you've you've obviously, you know, especially when you were face-to-face with people all the time, you know, in those counties, is there one story or one person that stands out where, you know,

14:13okay, I was able to do something for them and it really changed their life? Do you remember a person, a specific one? >> Uh well, we have had a recent story. So, we started It was not funded through any federal funds, but we've got some private funds to start an advocacy cohort, so to teach teach people how to be advocates in in the healthcare space. And so, we had a participant who lived in a very small rural town. And so, each of the participants that went through could do a capstone project at the end, right? So, some did like table-ing events where they gave out information. Excuse me. Some talked to legislators, like state legislators. Well, this person actually ran for a board of alderman in their small little community and won, like against an

14:56incumbent. And so, to to equip somebody with the tools to be a voice for their community, well, that's huge to me. Like like that's just like the tip of the iceberg for all kinds of other things. And I think that people we serve often don't have a voice. If you think about people living in poverty, so like if you have food stamps, TANF, whatever, you have to tell everybody your business. If you have Section 8, you have to tell people who's in your home, who's not in your home. If you have a change in job, they have to give out their information all the time. They don't have a voice in their own lives so so broadly. And so to give somebody a voice, I think it's just like that is community. Excuse me. >> I don't know if you can hear me, but I

15:39think it froze again. >> Exactly. >> Sorry, I think you could froze up again. I didn't get that. >> I'm sorry. I don't know why I don't know why. This is not very good in the podcast, is it? I was No, I was just saying that and we will edit that, don't worry. I was just saying that your story about like people making changes so you said giving people a voice really resonates with me cuz and as you said, you started in sort of disability services, right? And my the reason we got into this cuz my son is autistic and non-speaking. And like the idea of giving him a voice is a really interesting thing for us actually. And so we we love that as an idea and we we sort of think that that's like one of the most important parts of getting anyone out of poverty, giving them a chance, giving them a voice is is

16:22the And and there's probably like America doesn't have a great social safety net in comparison to Europe which is also where I'm from, but it's interesting where you have pockets of people trying to do that. >> Right. Right. Yeah. I do. I think it's just the president of it's of anything that they can accomplish, right? Like a voice. Like because when I have a voice then when I want to get a job, like I'm I'm a better interviewee or I, you know, advocate for things or speak up on the on on the job site. Like the project that we were talking about um a while ago, we didn't get the grant that we had talked with you guys about about helping those living in poverty uh learn about the AI space, right? So that they can

17:03be leaders within their workplace and and grow with the workplace. I think that's really important. >> Yeah, absolutely. Do you Do you find like Do you have a team that's trying to help people find work, find jobs? >> Yeah, that's so that's mostly done through our CSBG team. >> That's in the CSBG team. What what are the things that like helps people like cuz obviously poverty's like multi-dimensional, right? So like what when when they're sitting down with someone, how are they mostly trying to get them, you know, into work or into housing? What what are the things they're trying to do? >> So, I think unwinding everything is the first thing that they're trying to do because like you're saying it's multi-dimensional. I come in and I want a job, but I don't

17:46have any child care plans, right? Or, you know, my rent is is is increasing and I don't know how I'm going to make next month's rent. So, I think for us like what we do is we do some goal setting with them. They lead that process, but we need to unwind each of those domains first and we need to celebrate small small successes. So, we break it down into smaller tasks with them and you know, and when they apply for maybe state child care, like let's celebrate that. Like that's a step towards this this is a jump ball that you have. I think they just come in a lot of times very overwhelmed by all of it at once. I mean, it's hard work to >> end poverty, you know. >> Yeah. Yeah, for sure cuz you're in a like crisis survival mindset, right?

18:29Okay, and you've seen you guys have seen this. You've seen good case managers and you've seen probably not such good case managers, right? What are the things that the good ones are doing and what are the things that you can get them to do more of? >> Um good case managers are curious about the people that they are serving. >> They actually care about them, right? Yeah. >> Yes, some natural empathy and I've often said like you can teach anybody like the steps to be a case manager or the paperwork, but you can't really teach people to connect with other people. I think some people really do have that innate ability to connect. I mean, we do provide training on you know, what it's like to live in poverty. We provide all that, but some people just have like a very natural ability to connect. The ones that I've seen that really are not

19:13the best case managers are ones that have boundary issues. So, I'm bringing my situation into your situation all the time. And that's not good for the people that we're serving. It's it's it's not healthy. Or or ones who have sort of a predisposition like I really care about senior citizens or I really care about single mothers. They don't see the broad population that we're serving. >> Right. Okay, I understand. That's interesting. And tell me if you would have like go 20 years in the future, right? So, you know, 20 years is a long time. 10 years is a long time. 20 years is a long long How do you imagine like What do you imagine a community action agency of the future being like? Cuz I I see poverty's going to exist. So, you

19:57know, cuz you know, community action has been going on for 60 years, right? I think. For a long time, for sure. What do you like What could you imagine that, you know, what what's it happening in Springfield at that time? >> That's an interesting question. I would hope in 20 years that we will have developed a community that takes care of one another. Like so, like community action cuz we can do community projects. That we will have educated our communities so they understand what poverty is. They will see these people as their neighbors and not as an other. And that there will be, yes, us doing our work, but there will also be others others lifting that up, too. So, cuz we can't do it all on our own. So, I don't know. We've seen that a little bit. So,

20:40a long time ago, we used to be the only ones that were providing school supplies for people for kids to go back to school, right? Like parents can't afford the backpack and all the things. Almost every community now has either their school district or local churches or other nonprofits doing that. So, we were able to step away and focus our efforts somewhere else. And so, that's that's what I see. It's like bit by bit. So, that school supply thing, check. The community's taken that on. I just want to check down the list with all the other things. No, that's pretty great. That's really great. And well, Jennifer, thanks so much for coming on. I really appreciate it. It was really nice of you. And I'm hoping you come back to Springfield one day and and see you as well. Yeah. But no, thanks so much for coming on. >> Yeah, nice chatting with you. Thank you. >> I've just stopped recording. So,

21:24thanks so much. It was really cool. I really appreciate it. >> Yeah, I appreciate you chatting with me. I I like talking about our work, so I appreciate the opportunity. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, yeah, well, you're super passionate about it and your team's lovely as well. So, >> All right. Well, we'll be in touch when we're our heads >> When you're ready. Are you in Are you going to St. Louis for the national thing? >> Yeah, yeah, we've got a few people going, too. Yeah. >> Okay. I'll see you there, hopefully. >> Are you guys going there? >> Yeah, yeah, we're going to be there. I don't know if we're going to sponsor anything. I think we're just going to go um cuz we we're sponsoring like lots of other ones. So, I think we're just going to be there. Yeah. >> Okay. All right, I hope to see you. >> Okay. Thanks. Good luck. See you. Bye. >> Bye.