‘Mender of broken homes’: The history of Oakland Family Services' Prevention programs
As Oakland Family Services celebrates our 100th anniversary, we are looking back at how our Prevention, Education and Treatment programs have evolved over the years. This blog post is the first in a series of three and explores how our Prevention programs have developed and changed over time.
From the very beginning, Oakland Family Services has been dedicated to serving and protecting children at risk of neglect and abuse. Prevention services that give children safe and secure homes have been at the heart of our mission since the agency was founded in Pontiac in 1921 as the Michigan Children’s Aid Society Oakland Branch.
The Michigan Children’s Aid Society originated in St. Joseph, Mich., and its founders believed that every child had a right grow up with the love of a family. The Oakland branch was one of many throughout the state that helped pioneer foster care in Michigan as we know it today by aiming to heal families struggling with issues like illness and other difficulties that kept them from providing safe homes for their children.
Just as reunification of biological families is the primary goal of the agency’s foster care services today, reunification was also the focus of the Michigan Children’s Aid Society Oakland Branch, with adoptive homes being sought only when children were orphaned or when parents were unable to resolve the issues that kept them from providing a safe home.
“The ‘broken’ homes to which the society finds its work directed are those in which illness, unemployment or martial strife have struck, leaving in their wake families split by the unforeseen,” reads a 1939 article in the Pontiac Daily Press. “Responding with all facilities at their command, officers of the society seek to mend the domiciles, holding together the broken parts, as it were, until they have become welded once again into the happy family that was once there.”
Elsewhere in Oakland County, Royal Oak Family Services and the Family Service Center for Pontiac, Bloomfield and Birmingham had begun providing financial resources, clothing aid and family visiting services. These two agencies would merge in 1950 to become Family Services of Oakland County, which would later merge with the Children’s Aid Society Oakland Branch in 1972.
The combined agency’s name was changed to Oakland Family Services in 1984, the same year the current Pontiac location on Orchard Lake Road was purchased. Through all of these changes, prevention of child abuse and neglect remained a core focus of the agency, with foster care and adoption services continuing to this day and various programs emerging over the years to support at-risk children and families.
One important addition was the Fussy Baby program, a one-of-a-kind home-visiting service that launched in 1992 and is still running 29 years later. Available at no cost to families, the program supports families with infants and toddlers who have regulatory or behavioral difficulties like trouble eating, sleeping or calming down.
A major shift began around 2008, when funding changes and the economic downturn resulted in program cuts at Oakland Family Services and in the community, said Natalie Marchione, vice president of Quality and Planning. Oakland Family Services’ Dynamic Dads and Infant Mental Health programs were two casualties of funding cuts.
“All at the same time, there was a lot of funding that went away, yet it was becoming more and more clear that doing more early childhood and preventative services made sense,” said Marchione, who has worked at the agency since 1996.
A board task force was formed to conduct an environmental scan of Oakland County, identify gaps in services and come up with solutions.
“We looked at what programs were available in the county for early childhood, who was doing them, how many people did they serve, what was the population they were serving, how many people were left unserved and what programs closed,” Marchione explained.
Results showed that families in Oakland County were hugely underserved — there were many children who needed early childhood services but weren’t receiving them. With this knowledge, it was decided that Early Childhood Services would be one of the agency’s most important focuses moving forward.
“One of the things that has happened over the years at the agency is we became a lot more focused on using evidence-based programming, programs that have proven to be effective through multiple research studies,” Marchione said.
Two other evidence-based services that fall under the Prevention umbrella are Early On and Parents as Teachers.
Early On is a developmental screening and intervention program for children 0-3 years old that the agency has offered through a contract with Oakland Schools for approximately 15 years. Parents as Teachers was launched in 2010 and helps children at risk for school failure, abuse and neglect by involving families with children age 0-6 in activities that encourage language, social and emotional development. In 2019, Oakland Family Services was recognized by the Parents as Teachers National Center as a Blue Ribbon Affiliate, making it one of the top-performing affiliates within the organization’s international network.
A more recent addition to the agency’s Prevention lineup is Before 3 to Succeed, which launched in 2013 and aims to route families to an assessment that helps to identify potential developmental delays, and in the case they exist, connects children to key services. Its other goal is to educate parents and caregivers of children age 0-3 about the importance of brain development in young children and how they can help encourage their children’s growth.
“From the earliest beginnings of Oakland Family Services, the focus was on helping children,” Marchione said. “They are our most vulnerable, but also our best investment for a brighter future.”
Click here to read about the history of Oakland Family Services’ Education programs, or click here to read about the history of our Treatment programs.
