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PrintLunch With - Director, Child Protection Coalition
Lynn Sossamon
Date: Dec. 7, 2009
Time: 11:45 a.m.
Place: Rick’s Café Americain
It never pays to think you know it all about Tulsa. It is continually full of new stories to tell. So it was when, late last year, I attended an open house at the Department of Human Services, which was showing off brightly remodeled — and privately funded — family visitation rooms. It’s no secret that children must be removed from their homes because of abuse and neglect, and these cheerful rooms are there to help families reconnect under supervision.
Lynn Sossamon, who invited me to the event, is a longtime friend who has spent much of her career in fund raising. And since much of my past and present has involved working with nonprofits, we’ve always had a connection, even if we go long periods without seeing each other. I wasn’t surprised to see her at DHS; I just assumed she’d helped lead donors to a good cause. What I hadn’t grasped was why. In May 2006, after six months of prodding by our mutual buddy Claudette Selph, Sossamon became director of the Tulsa County Child Protection Coalition.
This intriguing entity is six years old, with 13 founding organizations and six affiliates, all components of the child protection business. The coalition’s mission: to make the child protection system work better by getting community agencies and services to communicate. What a concept! Instead of adding yet another organization to plug some perceived gap, assure that what we have runs effectively.
Sossamon has been organizing monthly meetings, creating training sessions and setting up bus tours of shelters, the courthouse and the Department of Human Services — activities that have agency leaders, judges, police and related groups getting to know one another and collaborating better on new ways of approaching problems. And things are happening on several fronts.
One of several system improvements she cited is a new “front-door protocol” that the coalition has been working on for several years. Think for a moment about how traumatic a domestic disturbance, or a life of neglect, is to a child. Yet being taken away from the only home and adults they know and put in a shelter with strangers can be equally devastating.
Previously, an endangered child was sent directly from his or her home to a shelter. Now, child protection workers are on call 24/7. They come to the home and do a safety assessment, Sossamon told me, to first decide whether the home is safe, then, if not, can Grandma or the neighbors take the child?
“If they can find a placement right away, they never have to go to a shelter,” she says. “If they do have to go, everything’s expedited because somebody (a child protection worker) is on the way.”
Even if the child goes to a shelter, protection workers will continue an intense search for someone to take the child so he or she doesn’t have to go into state custody. The payoff? Since August 2007, caseloads, generally, have fallen 30 percent.
I’m no expert, but I’d think that in itself would likely transfer to better supervision of each family’s situation.
“These people have the hardest jobs in the whole world,” Sossamon says of those in the child protection community.
Isn’t Tulsa County fortunate to have people who have enough courage and caring in their hearts to do the work?
