Developing and Sustaining Relationships through Virtual Service Delivery
In a January 7, 2021 presentation for Be Strong Families’ “Staying Strong and Positive for Ourselves and Our Children” webinar series, Eva Rivera joined us from Brazelton Touchpoints Center to reflect on her organization’s journey in virtual service delivery in support of children and families after the March 2020 lockdown. What were the strategies for building and sustaining relationships among professionals to serve these families? What were the lessons learned? In an informative webinar, Eva shared those experiences with webinar attendees.
Brazelton Touchpoints Center is a nonprofit organization whose vision for over 20 years is for all children to grow up to be adults who can cope with adversity, strengthen their communities, constructively participate in civic life, steward our planet’s resources, and experience the joy of nurturing the next generation to be prepared to do the same. To do this, they have collaborated with partners to establish sustainable, low-cost, low-tech interventions that propel children’s development and strengthen relationships among parents, families, caregivers, providers, and communities. Eva is the Professional Development Program Manager & National Facilitator at Brazelton Touchpoints Center, bringing 15 years of experience in social work, home visiting and early childhood education.
In this webinar, Eva highlighted the need for virtual services in the world we live in right now, both professionally and personally. When the lockdown happened in March 2020, the service field for supporting children and families needed help transitioning their goals to an online world. Brazelton Touchpoints Center’s Virtual Service Delivery (VSD) webinar project was created as a way to respond to, supplement, and support the needs of the field after the lockdown. The VSD timeline began in April of 2020 with the collaborative effort of the Rapid Response Virtual Home Visiting series project, a series of webinars developed by professionals across the nation and across program models. These webinars covered a host of timely, essential topics, and you can take a look at one of them below.
What were the lessons learned in the creation and implementation of the VSD webinar project? Eva highlighted three main points:
Providers appreciated having a virtual community where they could come together and join with other like-minded professionals. Brazelton Touchpoints Center wanted to highlight and raise the voices of professionals who under other circumstances may not have had the opportunity to share their stories and experiences.
Featuring a practitioner “voices from the field” in addition to subject matter experts created a conversational format. Brazelton Touchpoints Center wanted those conversations to be relatable and take advantage of online access in a time when many of us don’t travel or leave our homes like in past years.
The COVID era requires adaptation to rapidly changing needs and real-time feedback. Their topics have evolved over time in response to the needs of the field. They also incorporated a Q&A section to connect with their audience and panelists in an informal way that allowed them to be vulnerable together.
These VSD webinars are continuing into 2021, and you can register and join upcoming ones to join this learning community! On January 13, they will begin a short series titled “Exploring the Pandemic’s Impact on Providers’ Well-Being”. They also have strengths-based family engagement webinars that encourage learning how to cultivate a strengths-based mindset in work with families, and offer a webinar series on supporting mental health!
You can view the full webinar recording, and join us for upcoming webinars whenever your schedule allows. If you or your colleagues would like to host a webinar with us, contact us.