Something in the AIRS

Nine Lessons in I&R I Learned from Someone Else

Publish Date: 11/12/2019

November 1996, I reported for my first day of “real” work after graduating with my master’s degree. Overwhelmed with meeting new people and learning names, my executive director sat down and explained one of my first tasks would be to develop a plan to either cut expenses from the budget or raise new dollars in order for us to keep funding our small I&R program. I&R would not be my exclusive focus at the agency, but she felt it was a good starting point for me.

image

That’s the way she said it: I&R. No explanation. No context for the acronym. She continued by saying that I&R Midland was a phone line where people could call for almost anything. Our agency had a Rolodex (yes, I said Rolodex!) of community services where we could refer someone for assistance. She waved in the general direction of several small books on a bookcase in my office and said, “You’ll learn more there.” Those small books were the Journal of the Alliance of Information and Referral Systems when AIRS still produced it. 

Lesson One: I&R may be nebulous in the beginning. My introduction to information and referral provided no mention of the tremendous value to the community. No reason why someone would trust us to answer difficult life questions. No explanation of how we knew which programs existed in the city/county. I&R Midland had been placed with Casa de Amigos by United Way of Midland about three years before I joined the agency. Transitional funding had been exhausted and it was now Casa’s responsibility to operate it. A program report in the middle of my desk designated I&R Midland as a high priority, although I did not understand the criteria which the board used to make this determination.

Lesson Two: Opportunities may look like something else. About two weeks later, I received an invitation in the mail, addressed to my predecessor. No one who is hired at an agency begins to receive mail in their own name two weeks later. The envelope contained an invitation to a meeting in Austin, TX to discuss information and referral in my local community and the formation of a statewide I&R network (eventually). Not fully understanding I&R or how my community would benefit from it, I could not envision a statewide network. That concept proved too elusive for me to grasp for many months. 

Lesson Three: The I&R profession may operate in the shadows of human services. I joined the meeting, quickly amazed and astounded at the vast knowledge in this profession I learned little about in my initial weeks on the job. What unfolded over the next three to four months was a “crash-course” in I&R and how it reaches people of every walk of life. My agency’s executive director was skeptical about an operating statewide network, yet I soon believed in the power of this hidden profession and its ability to change the lives of Texans. 

image

Lesson Four: Yes, Virginia. There is I&R software. At one of the early meetings, I heard references to several I&R programs, one of which my agency had purchased, yet not yet turned on. My colleagues told me that priority one was to put that Rolodex in the drawer and computerize our resources. Priority two? Use the software to look up resources and record information about the callers we served. 

Lesson Five: Report what the I&R hears from callers. As I learned more, I began to pay more attention to the conversations about reports to agencies and the community and other stakeholders. What in the world was reported and why? I turned once again to those who had worked in the field and endlessly picked their brains on any level of reporting they were doing in their agencies/communities and how I could do this same type of work back at home. I collected reports of any type and studied them closely. I looked at the elements being reported and decided my program needed to be more intentional about the information it collected from callers and what it provided to callers. 

My beginning report efforts were embarrassingly rudimentary as I look back now. I garnered feedback from other agencies, the community and my colleagues and began to implement changes to make these reports more effective for those who needed them. Of all the things I did up until that point, refining what we collected and how we reported it was the most difficult, yet it made the most visible difference to our stakeholders. 

Lesson Six: Train your I&R staff. The more I learned, the more I began to see training as a strong element our program would need if it were to grow. I&R Midland had one full-time I&R specialist and myself. That was it. How do you train yourself and one other person when you don’t know what you don’t know? I’d heard about a mysterious ABC’s of I&R (now renamed the AIRS I&R Training Manual) and that it held the secrets to I&R life. (Well, maybe not every secret, but those that counted most). The baby Texas I&R Network met monthly for 18 months (yes – 18 months!), and I used every opportunity over dinner, in a hotel lobby or on a plane ride to/from Austin to ask anyone who would talk to me about training programs.

image

Lesson Seven: Collaborate with others. At some point in the first year, I started to envision our small program contributing in the community, collaborating in ways it never considered before then. I turned back to my circle of peers for even more advice. Many of those who attended the I&R Network meetings in Austin were from cities much larger than mine. With my city’s reduced size and significantly smaller caller base in mind, I asked how I could scale back collaborations to develop traction, learn some best practices and then try again with a new initiative.

Lesson Eight: Branch out where the service is needed. The more I learned and the more the Texas I&R Network developed, I realized my agency needed to serve more than one county. There was a barely functioning I&R in a neighboring community, but nothing else formal existed. Informal I&R took place everywhere: from the county judge’s offices to community action agencies and beyond. Not one organization served the 17-county Permian Basin region in a formal way. There was no money in it. Many organizations felt no incentive to do work without compensation in other areas. It took grit, work, and much explanation to convince Casa’s board of directors that our small one-county program had to grow up and branch out to the other 16 counties. Those citizens deserved the same level of service provided to those in Midland.

Lesson Nine: Scale up the work and focus on standards: Fast forward to November 2002, six years later, when our small regional I&R changed our 10-digit phone number to 211. I trained five employees that month, whereas before, I’d only trained one additional person. I still had the program’s first I&R specialist and added one additional one once the program grew to necessitate the need of another full-time specialist. I pulled out that training plan I developed and scaled it for a larger staff. The work of my training mentors finally paid off as we moved forward. 

Up until this point, I had not fully implemented the AIRS Standards with the program.  With a highly visible service, the agency could no longer afford to work without the standards. Accreditation was the framework I needed at the beginning of my career, yet I had reversed the process, primarily out of necessity. My agency built a recognizable regional service for information and referral with little support and funding out of a small concept and a Rolodex. It was time to apply the AIRS Standards in full instead of piecemeal. 

Before I completed the accreditation process for I&R Permian Basin, I took a position with United Way of Greater Houston’s 211 Texas/United Way Helpline. My first task in my new role was to go through reaccreditation. I leaned heavily on some of those same mentors who first guided me on my career path. Houston was big league and I had been operating in the minor leagues for years. It was time to sharpen my game. (Couldn’t resist the baseball analogy given the success of our Astros!)

Here are my takeaways for anyone starting, growing or continuing your I&R journey. 

image

Talk to each other. Collaborate with other I&R programs and professionals. Ask questions. Ask again. Ask again and again until you feel the answers make sense for you personally and the agency and people your I&R program serves.

In our increasingly digital world, it may seem easier to send an email or a comment on the AIRS Networker and ask for others to help you out or to offer a suggestion. Yes, this works. Yes, it is helpful. Remember, though, that the telephone call, the meeting or the networking at a conference contains immense value. Even as the human voice can provide hope to the caller in need, the voice of a colleague can ground your ideas into plans that will transform the work you seek to accomplish. 

Share what you’ve learned. Don’t share it only with your agency and local leaders, but with other I&R’s at every opportunity. In many of my AIRS workshops over the years, I often say that I have rarely had an original idea. Instead, I infused the ideas of others into my work to fit the needs of the agency and the lives of those who contacted us for help.  

Step out of your comfort zone and present at a statewide or national AIRS conference. Somewhere in each audience is the younger version of me who is waiting to soak up any insights you are willing to impart. A comment or reference to where someone can learn more can provide more guidance to the “new” professional than you know. New professionals join the I&R field, not only after school, but after valuable years working in other fields. Everything in that previous career can bring a transformative thought into the profession if it is nurtured.  

The future of I&R requires those of us who are in the field impart any kernel of knowledge to others who will continue this work after we are finally able to pry ourselves away from the phones, keyboards and databases to settle into retirement. One day, I may reach out via text, chat, email, phone – or maybe a channel I don’t yet foresee – and need the expertise of the I&R specialist on the other end. I hope that everything that specialist knows was shared with him/her by someone else. In fact, I’m depending on it.