MINNESOTA

REGIONAL PERFORMANCE MEETINGS

Goal: To improve initial and ongoing compliance with child support orders, and prevent cases from accruing support arrears, all of which ensure that children get the consistent financial support to which they are entitled.

Description: The Federal Reports and Compliance Unit facilitated nine regional performance meetings across the State in June and July 2006. The focus of the meetings was how to improve collection of current support and reduce child support arrears. State regional performance advisors presented information on the factors that impact collections, and described how collections impact various areas of child support enforcement.

The meetings started with a Power Point presentation which highlighted the importance of collections and documentation in all three areas and reviewed the distinctions and similarities among the following three areas:

• the data reliability audit
• the five Federal performance measures
• self-assessment

Materials describing promising practices related to collections were distributed to the attendees. These materials were gathered from Minnesota counties and those published by OCSE in the monthly newsletter. Reports available to track collections performance at the worker, team, county, and State level were highlighted along with a goal setting tool that can be used by all involved in collections from the worker to the State.

The afternoon portion of the meetings was devoted to a facilitated discussion among the regional county attendees. This gave county line workers an opportunity to share what approaches work best in their experience and to learn about a new or different way of accomplishing better collections from their caseload.

Results: The feedback we received from attendees indicated the afternoon portion of the meeting was found to be very valuable. The evaluations showed that participants learned more about resources available to them that may help improve collections and that they learned new strategies from other counties that they would be able to try when they returned to the office.

Location: Nine regional performance meetings were held across the State, which were attended by county child support workers and supervisors and facilitated by State staff.

Funding: Regular IV-D funds were used in combination with State and county funds for staff time which was the only cost for this project.

Replication Advice:

• Allow plenty of time for peer-to-peer discussion
• Keep meeting structure informal
• Limit the number of meeting attendees
• Summarize the peer-to-peer meeting discussions and share the information with all counties

Contact:

Kristen Brolsma

Regional Performance Consultant

Child Support Enforcement Division

Phone: 651-431-4573

Email: Kristen.brolsma@state.mn.us