Call it family support. Call it network intervention. You might even call it taking care of neighbors. Whatever you call it, recognize that, in the patch context, community social work is not made up of discrete units of service. This leads patch team members to describe Patch in distinctive terms.
Patch is a way of thinking.
The current Patch team includes CPS workers, income maintenance staff, assessors, family development specialists, Head Start teachers, family support workers, home visiting nurses, an Americorps worker, a greeter, and an office manager. The team has moved from the church basement where it began to the Brownstone, where it has become a part of the fabric of the family resource center being established there. Patch has grown in other ways as well. This describes the tendency of large scale change processes to ignore the neat sequence of steps prescribed by a rational implementation paradigm. The unruly progress of systems change describes the loosely coupled way reform initiatives hang together, generally complementing one another, enjoying progress over time, tackling some barriers and minimizing others, always probing for opportunities to improve the service system for families.