I do not believe that you have to limit programming or funding to a specific population.  It is possible to be all-inclusive.  Through my experience, I found that communities can have an extremely limited budget and limited human resources/roles available, but yet, there is a way to efficiently serve the needs of any town.

I was running a program for at-risk youth when this concept began to reveal itself. In this position, I was a single resource with no budget beyond my salary, but I had access to all the other primary resources in town and could collaborate with county resources – schools, police, social services, mental health, hospitals, courts, etc.  I had relationships with the youth, their parents/guardians, policymakers, etc.  It became very clear that to maximize the network of connections, I just needed to broaden my expertise beyond just issues related to the at-risk population.  If I could manage to gather enough knowledge to properly helm what all of the services had to contribute, we could successfully have an all-encompassing program.

As situations revealed themselves I was able to capitalize on the knowledge and experience of all of the professionals who were available to me.  We were able to develop programs and services that uniquely blended the skills provided by these different services.  When determining a path of intervention within the social, mental health, justice services or schools, we were able to request the input of all other professionals that either were already involved with a child or family or, who should be, to ensure that the decisions not only were truly the best, but did not duplicate efforts.  This also led to decisions that were financially the best in terms of community resources, good for every agency involved and most importantly, for the individual person or family.  Additionally, operating in a system like this, it allows for communities to more easily address unaccounted special needs, health concerns, etc., that may come up for either an individual or segment of the population, as the network of people involved in the community can often provide assistance faster than reaching out to a large national charity.

I realize for some, this just seems too idealistic and simplistic to be possible, but it truly is the most effective solution for communities and my goal is to write about our journey, the programming and our learnings in the articles you will find in this category to help other interested communities.