Laserfiche Solution Contributed By: Joe Rocko, Director of Residential and Community Services, New Beginning Children’s Homes
New Beginning Children’s Homes (NBCH), located in Arkansas, works with children in foster care. Originally founded by a single family who fostered and would, later on, adopt a sibling group of four, NBCH strives to keep siblings together and helps to unify those children that have been separated in the foster care system. The organization works to provide long-term family style living to children until a permanent situation is identified, whether through adoption, reunification, or aging out of the foster care system.
NBCH strives to meet the child where they are. The organization partners with Absolute Physical Therapy to provide additional services if needed, such as speech therapy, physical therapy, occupational therapy, or mental health services.
In addition, NBCH is Better Beginnings Certified, which allows the organization to provide an onsite Children’s Learning Academy for kids between the ages of six weeks through preschool, as well as an after-school program for school-aged children. This is made possible through working with Arkansas Early Learning and Head Start. This program not only serves foster care children but low-income families in the community as well.
“Laserfiche Cloud has really increased our accountability and efficiency. By next year, our goal is to have five percent of all Arkansas foster care children in our care,” says Rocko.
Laserfiche Cloud helps to enable NBCH to place more children faster. While it used to take nine to 12 months to place a child into a new foster family’s home, it now takes only one to two months.
Automating the child intake process at New Beginning Children’s Homes with Laserfiche Forms has resulted in the following benefits:
- The time to open a brand new foster home and place a child has been reduced from nine to 12 months to two months. This has resulted in more homes opening up to serve children, and more children being placed.
- The organization is always compliant with regular audits since all of the information is available in a central location.
- Laserfiche Forms reporting tools allow staff members to get an overall view of the placement process for each child, easily identifying bottlenecks. In addition, staff members can run reports to view a child’s behavioral log over time, to identify any patterns or issues and adjust accordingly.
- Most of all, this automation has resulted in efficiency and accountability. Unnecessary delays have been considerably reduced, and individuals are responsible for their tasks.