Network of a Social Care Organization: Cafcass
http://www.theguardian.com/social-care-network-cafcass-partner-zone/2015/sep/07/meeting-the-growing-diversity-needs-of-todays-children-and-families
This article discusses how an organization in Great Britian is trying to meet the diverse, expanding needs of underpriviledged children. Cafcass, a social care organization in Britian, works to help and care for children “who have been displaced through war or persecution.” The children who are aided by Cafcass come from a wide range of environments and have potentially experienced “honour based violence, gang culture, autism, child trafficking, and/or sexual exploitation”; for this reason, it is vital that Cafcass staff are able to understand the background and needs of each child to know how to best help them. In order to accomplish this, Cafcass has recently developed a new Diversity Ambassador program that rearranges and improves the structure of the organization by creating a stronger network of ambassadors and staff.
As the article implies, Cafcass was originally organized in a network where the organization was the central node and all of the Cafcass social workers were nodes directly connected to the central node. Then, nodes representing children would be directly connected to each of the social workers. Under this type of model, Cafcass social workers were simply trying to help children in any way they could, but, as the article implies, they were not particularly specialized in any one background or one issue. This likely means that Cafcass workers did not have very strong ties to the company as they lacked a specialized purpose; furthermore, the children would also lack strong ties to such workers who may not understand their background and needs. As a result, this network model would largely be filled with weak ties, between Cafcass and its worker and its workers and the children.
Under the Diversity Ambassador program, however, around 20 diversity ambassadors are selected “from practice, corporate and business support roles, each of whom is committed to promoting diversity within their regions and applying national learning in a way that reflects local needs.” These diversity ambassadors specialize in understanding the backgrounds and needs of children from different regions. This way the strategy and learning endorsed by Cafcass is more relevant to both the social workers and the children. As the article implies, Cafcass’ new network model under the Diversity Ambassador program is one where the organization is again the central node. However, this time the diversity ambassadors, who each specialize in a certain background, are directly connected to the central node while the social workers, who want to specialize in the background, are directly connected to the respective diversity ambassador. Finally, the group of children from said background are all directly connected to the social worker. As a result, this model would have very strong ties between Cafcass and diversity ambassadors, diversity ambassadors and social workers, and social workers and children because now all of them are categorized into specialized clusters. This arrangement allows ambassadors, social workers, and children to relate more easily and become more closely connected. Furthermore, because there would be so many strong ties in this model, there would be multiple instances of Strong Triadic Closure, either between ambassadors, social workers, or children.
Cafcass’ new approach to use Diversity Ambassadors to help children has helped the organization to create an incredibly strong network with largely strong ties between all nodes and edges. It has helped establish a closely connected network with Strong Triadic closure. Furthermore, through this approach, “Cafcass has also formed effective partnerships with a number of agencies to ensure its social workers are benefiting from the latest research and thinking.” In this way, Cafcass has rearranged its internal structure in order to make a stronger, closer, and more effective network capable of aiding children in need.