About Community Services and Volunteer Program (CSVP)

What does Community Services and Volunteer Program do?
Collaboration Activities
Accomplishments

What does the Community Services and Volunteer Program do?

• Recruits and places interns and volunteers in child support field offices across the State.
• Trains hospital and clinic staff, as well as midwives, community-based organizations staff, and child support field office staff, in the Acknowledgement of Paternity.
• Gives presentations to community groups, civic organizations, and parents about how the Child Support System works.
• Displays Child Support exhibits at conferences.
• Teaches young people about the legal rights and responsibilities of parenting.
• Develops cooperative efforts in local communities to provide better customer service.
• Works with advocacy groups to provide child support information to special populations, including young fathers, incarerated parents, and Head Start parents.

Collaboration activities

The CSVP staff works closely with community-based organizations, schools, medical facilities, and other state and local agencies to develop ways to provide better service to customers. For example, it provides child support information and Acknowledgment of Paternity (AOP) training to Head Start programs and school-based parenting programs, so when young parents need child support services, they will better understand the child support process. It works with the Texas Workforce Commission and the 28 Local Workforce Development Boards around the state, referring parents who need employment assistance to local service providers. The Community Services and Volunteer Program collaborates with a number of fatherhood programs around the state, ensuring that fathers will receive good information about child support legal issues as they learn to be good parents to their children both financially and emotionally. The CSVP staff visits prisons to educate incarcerated parents about child support issues, in order that inmates will know what should be done upon their release.

Our accomplishments during State Fiscal Year 2008:

• Recruited 751 Interns and Volunteers who contributed 84,133.50 hours to the Field Offices across the state. Those hours accounted for an equivalent savings for FY 2008 of $1,350,342.68.
• There were 3,411 persons certified in the Acknowledgment of Paternity (AOP) in FY 2008, including hospital personnel, Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) law librarians, county clerks, birthing center and clinic personnel, midwives, Child Support field staff and community-based organization representatives.