Organizational merger and cultural change for better outcomes: the first five years of the New York State Office of Children and Family Services.

Since its creation, New York State Office of Children and Family Services (OCFS) has used child and family development research to bridge the chasm between child welfare and juvenile justice policy and practice. OCFS's major challenges have been to help the staff and stakeholders of the merged child welfare and juvenile justice agencies develop a common culture and design new financial and programmatic infrastructures to promote better outcomes for children and families. Research now substantiates the long-held suspicion that a strong overlap exists between the child welfare and juvenile justice populations. Nevertheless, the usually separate systems that care for abused and neglected youth adjudicated for antisocial behavior continue to evolve along independent paths motivated by significantly different organizational cultures and operating philosophies. Most states thus far have not formally integrated these functions, with a few notable exceptions, such as Tennessee and Rhode Island. This article outlines the steps taken by the New York State Office of Children and Family Services (OCFS) since its creation in 1998 to use accumulated knowledge about child and family development to bridge the chasm between child welfare and juvenile justice policy and practice. This has produced an increasingly integrated, effective, and efficient range of services for children, youth, and families. OCFS's creation out of the services component (as contrasted with income maintenance) of the former Department of Social Services and the state's juvenile justice agency responded to a growing recognition of the interrelatedness of today's social problems. This recognition resulted in the state providing the financial and administrative support necessary for successful integration of these previously separate service systems. From the beginning, the overarching tenet guiding this endeavor has been that social services best address children's needs in the context of families, and families' needs in the context of communities, whether conventional wisdom defines the problem as an abusive parent or a delinquent youth. Achieving these ends has required OCFS to develop new organizational, financial, and programmatic infrastructures in concert with its key stakeholders. Without a doubt, the biggest challenge has been to create a new organizational culture that promotes the achievement of the new agency's mandates. For any hope of success, this new culture must be based on the common philosophical ground shared by the committed staff of the two merging agencies. Child welfare practitioners, faced with child abuse or neglect situations, understandably see the child's caregiver as responsible for the problem. In contrast, juvenile justice practitioners implement court-mandated controls and sanctions against adjudicated youth. Although each group may intellectually embrace explanations such as that abusive childhoods create either abusive caregivers or delinquents, the systems function largely as if these other causes were beyond their responsibility. For child welfare, the primary responsibility is for child safety. For juvenile justice, it is public safety from the adjudicated youth. These responsibilities are powerful and largely inconsistent philosophical perspectives. OCFS had to mitigate this issue to achieve its mandates. A second fundamental cultural difference between merging staffs is less general but characteristic of states like New York, which have county-based rather than state-administered social service systems. In New York, the state funds, supports, and oversees services delivered by county departments and contracted nonprofit agencies. It does not deliver social services directly, except for operating the child abuse hotline and New York State Adoption Service. Thus, few staff have operational responsibility for child welfare services. In contrast, the vast majority of juvenile justice staff are involved in the operation of secure, limited secure, and nonsecure facilities, as well as community-based postresidential services for adjudicated youth. …