Chair Stevens questions Fair Futures targets and utilization metrics
Stevens asks about specific targets and benchmarks for Fair Futures. Mendez details targets of 4,800 for FY27, 5,000+ for FY28, and 5,400 for FY29, with current data showing 4,300 youth served, 87% in care, and two-thirds of eligible youth reached. Stevens raises concerns about inconsistent information sharing with youth.
What are some of the targets around, because I know you spoke about the different target areas around the fair futures.
What are those different target areas?
And also thinking about, I know as the commissioner is coming in and you're saying you're going to talk with them, do you guys have benchmarks of triggers like, okay, we see that you're increasing and so how do we then
you know, have that turnaround and just go over the targets.
Sure.
So for fiscal year 27, the target would be about 4,800.
For fiscal year 28, we
want to be at 5,000, a little over 5,000, and again in fiscal year 29 at that 5,400.
We are in regular conversation with the Center for Fair Futures because they do a lot of the training and help the agencies implement the model.
They have a database.
Our data team is able to look at data.
And what we really do want to focus on now as we're moving into this second piece of the expansion is setting up some metrics and holding agencies accountable.
We were able to pull some data, and so we're able to say that right now, there's about 4,300 young people involved with Fair Futures this fiscal year so far.
It looks like, I don't want to jinx anything, that we might be on track to surpass what we did last year, but 87% of those kids are in care, 13% are...
No longer in care and we're reaching them.
And then we know about two thirds of young people that are eligible are getting fair futures.
So how do we make that number?
How do we get to 75%?
How do we get to 80%?
And I think that's working with the Center for Fair Futures and also the agencies and having specific metrics that we can touch base on.
We have a team in the Office of Youth Safety and Success.
So we were gonna have a conversation and kind of co-design that with the providers so that we can make sure everyone is reaching these targets that we've outlined.
Yeah, and I would love for us to continue to think about what that looks like even around the targets because, again, and thank you guys for coming to Shadow Day for our foster care youth here.
Thank you for having us.
Yeah, they were really excited.
to have you guys in the information, but even some of that, and I'm not sure, they didn't ask you guys a lot of questions, but some of the conversations I had with them in passing, there's still a big inconsistency of what information is being shared according to agencies.
And so definitely want to make sure that we're working on that, especially with a program like this and how do we reach those targets?
Because if young people don't know, they don't know.