Service Connector Caseload Crunch

By: Jeff Kelly LowensteinZeola Miller’s bright smile illuminates her face, but the mention of her workload as a case manager for the city’s Service Connector program can make that grin freeze.

On a typical day, Miller said she drives dozens of miles across the city’s South Side, going door-to-door to meet with some of the 60 families on her caseload. After returning to the office, she hits the phones to connect with the families she did not see, fills out notes about her visits and attends staff meetings.

“It can be pretty overwhelming to reach [families] and meet all their needs,” said Miller, a tall, elegantly dressed woman who has worked for the past year at Universal Family Connection, a nonprofit in the Auburn Gresham community area designed to meet the needs of youth in crisis.

Through the Chicago Housing Authority’s Service Connector program, case managers like Miller help relocated public housing residents transition to their new communities. And many of them have caseloads similar to Miller’s, The Chicago Reporter has found.

Seven of the 10 agencies involved with the program shared their caseload information with the Reporter. Six of those seven agencies reported family-tocase manager ratios of at least 55-to-1.

CHA spokesman Bryan Zises said that the CHA “shoots for” a 55-to-1 ratio. In the future, the program will focus more closely on connecting families to housing and work rather than to other services, he said.

“The more you could reduce the caseload, the better service you could provide because many of the residents required a great deal of service,” said Rita Fry, independent monitor of the CHA’s Plan for Transformation. “Less is better than more.”

In a 2002 story about the Service Connector program, “Staffing Shortage Hits CHA Families,” The Reporter’s Brian J. Rogal quoted Amy Rynell, director of the Mid-America Institute on Poverty. Rynell said a reasonable ratio of client families to case managers was 35-to-1.

The institute is a division of the Heartland Alliance, a human rights organization that provides housing and health care to poor Chicagoans.

Rynell said she was unsure how applicable the 35-to-1 ratio was in 2007 compared with when she wrote the report.

In Rogers Park, Housing Opportunities for Women works with CHA families living in that community area. Tom Wetzel, director of the organization’s Service Connector program, explained that he has two case managers assisting more than 100 CHA families in the community. The workers cover an area of about two square miles.

That caseload and geographic focus has allowed the workers to concentrate on building trust with and meeting the needs of their client families, Wetzel said.

“We found a ton of resistance, [but] a lot of that experience is in the past,” Wetzel said. He said the combination of persistence and follow through has broken down some of those barriers, and word-of-mouth about the agency’s work has helped, too.

Wetzel also said that about twothirds of the families already lived in Rogers Park, with about one-third being new arrivals who, in some cases, moved to the area when large developments like the Robert Taylor Homes were knocked down.

The West Englewood United Organization has also witnessed resistance, but the agency handles many more families and covers a much larger area.

West Englewood has 15 case managers for 837 CHA families, about 56 families per case manager. The agency works in nine South Side and Southwest Side community areas between 31st and 79th streets from State Street to Harlem Avenue—an area equal to roughly 40 square miles or 20 times the size of Rogers Park.

Some residents are skeptical that the services described by case managers will actually materialize, said Clara Kirk, West Englewood’s founder, president and chief executive officer. “They say, ‘I don’t need your help, I haven’t had it in all this time, [and the programs] are not going to work.’“

Kirk said West Englewood’s case managers and supervisors go door-todoor connecting with mothers to “motivate them to go to school and make sure the children are in school.” Most clients want the help, she said.

With 1,100 families for its 21 case managers—about a 52-to-1 ratio—the Service Connector program at Heartland Alliance also has a substantial caseload. The agency works with families from six developments: Madden Park, Ida B. Wells, Dearborn Homes, Washington Park Homes, Lake Park Crescent and Oakwood Shores.

Program Manager Rafiah Maxie praises the case managers she supervises but acknowledges that she “would love to have a clone or two of them.”

“They have a unique ability to manage what is going on with each resident,” Maxie said of her caseworkers.

Maxie explained the agency also has case managers with a smaller load of about 30 families who operate under a different model of service provision. These case managers are experimenting with a more intensive approach in which they try to interact weekly with all involved family members. The other case managers, with the larger workloads, try to meet with every head of household at least one time per month.

Maxie believes the new approach, which is part of a collaboration with Susan Popkin of the Urban Institute, will pay dividends for the residents.

In either case, the job can be intense and sometimes leave case managers emotionally depleted, Maxie said. “Burnout is very real.”