Posted on publiccola.com:
Just got back from city hall, where city council members interrogated Human Services Department director Dannette Smith (appointed by Mayor Mike McGinn last June) over her plans to reorganize HSD, eliminating the division director who oversaw the city’s domestic violence and sexual assault prevention programs (a story PubliCola broke in January).
At times, it would have been hard for an outsider dropping in on the meeting to divine that Smith was talking about actual victims of domestic violence and sexual assault. The people involved got lost in a thicket of jargon: “Integrative approach,” “silos,” “data integrity,” “cross-pollination,” and “product delivery” were just a few of the bureaucratic terms Smith came back to repeatedly to describe the reorganization. Domestic violence and sexual assault prevention would, as Smith put it this afternoon, be “weave[d] and integrate[d]” into all aspects of the two new divisions, including family support centers, immigrant and refugee services, school-based programs, and early childhood programs.
But, basically, the change boils down to a new organizational chart that eliminates three divisions (Youth Development & Achievement, Early Learning & Family Support, and Domestic Violence & Sexual Assault Prevention) and replaces them with two (Youth and Family Empowerment and Community Support and Self-Sufficiency) while consolidating a lot of bureaucratic work and data management under HSD’s deputy director.
Domestic violence prevention is now relegated to a subsection of HSD’s organizational structure, under Community Support and Self-Sufficiency.
