With over 25 years of experience in non-profit work, Pulse Wellness works with many organizions, including Cascade Aids Project, Youth Villages, Community Partners for Affordable Housing, Home Forward, Catholic Charities.
We’re available to consult with your organization to:
- Align programing with the needs of the people to be served and calibrate those services toward better program outcomes
- Develop intensive staff training on trauma informed practice, boundary setting, program delivery and techniques for serving varying populations
- Supervise/coach a team (or one staff person) toward the goals needed
by the agency - Survey constituents, make meaning of the knowledge gathered, connect programming to the needs of the people served
- Set measurements and tighten up tracking of outcomes to ensure best practices with program delivery
- Create logic models and program deliverables that are realistic and
show/prove success
Resident Services
The role of Resident Services is to serve residents in housing communities in order for them to thrive in their communities and be successful in their housing. The intersection of housing and service has been our passion as community social workers. With support services and community engagement activities, people succeed and maintain their housing while also increasing their quality of life.
Resident Services programming works with people throughout the life cycle and with people with varying mental and physical abilities and backgrounds from all over the world. Supportive housing provides programing that increases the ability to succeed in housing, school, work and play. Identifying the precise population that will be served informs the structuring of programs and the design of the building. Developing a building takes many experts to do it well, and when an agency develops housing for people who are elderly, disabled and/or formerly homeless, there are many moving parts.
Our supervising therapist, Rosanne Marmor, LCSW, has extensive experience with Resident Services and can help your organization in this role.
During Roseanne’s time at REACH CDC, she collaborated with a team from many disciplines to develop affordable housing and resident programs for Ritzdorf Court Apartments, Station Place Tower and Bud Clark Commons.
At Home Forward, Rosanne worked on initiatives like Aging in Place. Along with Portland State University’s Institute on Aging, we developed a plan for how to build on the programming already in the buildings. Our team also identified small universal design changes that accommodated varied ages, sizes and physical abilities in their living spaces. A cornerstone program of Aging in Place is the Congregate Housing Services Program (CHSP). The CHSP aims to provide needed housekeeping, meals, case management and other services for those who are elderly and disabled. Rosanne managed the program for Home Forward by increasing partnerships and collaborating with Impact Northwest, the agency that administers these services. As the contract administrator, she managed the HUD financed program and how the funds were allocated and used for the people served.
Throughout the years of her work with REACH and Home Forward, Rosanne was one of many people who partnered with the Health and Housing Collaborative to bring medical services to apartment communities that house some of the most vulnerable in our city. Her role was to plan with the collaborative and then bring back the information and align REACH and then Home Forward with the priorities related to the collaborative. By surveying residents and learning about their needs within their homes we were able to create a clinic that provided ways to keep people healthy and housed.
Program Development, Implementation & Metrics
Designing programs that meet the needs of your clients while within the tight budgetary constrictions of the agency are difficult. Need always outweigh the funding provided and the culture of “do more with less” begins to settle in and stunt amazing work. By interviewing staff, clients and community members, Pulse Wellness will design programs, implement feasible benchmarks and help vulnerable people in Oregon have access to programs that work for them.
New and existing programs are increasingly asked to provide logic models and success measures for the work they do in our community. We can work with your staff to review new and existing programs and attach logic models and outcomes to the work in order to increase staff motivation, focus on strengths and promote success to funders and your Board (Youth$ave, Aging at Home, etc).
Throughout our careers, we have developed and implemented programs that give people the space and safety they need to thrive. Financial stability has been a cornerstone of the programming we have helped to create. REACH CDC’s Youth$ave program was created over a year and half using community input. The program provides financial education for people 9-18 years old. Young people save money and then have their money matched so that they can purchase something education, athletic or artistic. Perfecting the curriculum and measuring outcomes made the program the success that it is today. Youth$ave has also been the springboard for other financial literacy programs that we created for parents and those on fixed incomes.
Additionally, we are passionate about helping children feel dirt beneath their feet or hear the ocean for the first time. In doing so, they begin to respect and connect with the environment in new ways. Pulse Wellness designed and managed summer camps that encourage these experiences for inner city youth. Photography, art, hiking, bike building, ropes courses and sitting by the duck pond laughing and talking allow young people to just know fun and be uninhibited; to be a child. Volunteers of America and Home Forward had a partnership for many years that focused on drug prevention for young people. During that partnership we created Kids and Home in The Wild. We used a concentric circle model to get kids out into nature by beginning with neighborhood parks, city parks and then local state parks up to an overnight.
Meeting & Team Facilitation
Outsider help for a retreat or special meeting can make all the difference for planning and team decision-making. Ensuring that staffs’ precious time isn’t wasted and a final action plan is completed makes meetings worth the time. It makes a tremendous difference to have the whole team—including management—participating in activities, planning and team connection together.
We can work with you to design a meaningful (and fun!) time for staff that will highlight strengths of the team and provide useful planning for the future. We have helped many organizations strengthen their strategic planning aligning the board and staff for all day retreats. Our work with the Confluence Center is an example of this work. Through careful planning with board members we held a successful strategic planning meeting that set the tone for the next few years of their work.
We have also facilitated meetings for organizations when a crisis has arisen and they need someone to come in and help staff manage the vicarious trauma. An important component of effective meetings is strong facilitation. We have developed a training that specifically assists teams in learning the skills of facilitation so that people are able to strengthen their own organizational meeting structure and have useful and fun meetings.
Manager, Direct Service Staff or Team Development
Our work centers on the outcomes, plans, evaluation tools and systems needed for staff to be productive, excited and successful at work. The menu of services can vary greatly based on the agency. We can work with one staff person or a team to provide assistance and guidance to get the most out of each employee or each program. For six months in 2017, we learned about the staff needs and resident needs of the people served at Catholic Charities and then designed a tool to help prioritize their work for them. As they learn from their residents (based on five simple questions), they can realign services as they see themes. We were also able to develop a training plan for their staff and create and offer the trainings in order for them to increase their success measures for keeping people successfully housed.
