The Bay Area Social Services Consortium (BASSC) is an agency-university-foundation partnership that promotes social service research, training, and policy development to respond to changes in public social services in the San Francisco Bay Area.
BASSC has an ongoing investment in analyzing current public policies, seeking alternatives to existing public policies, and deriving lessons learned from public policy implementation. Recent policy implementation activities have resulted in a compilation of case studies that capture the promising and innovative programs and practices that have emerged from welfare reform. The primary purpose of the case studies is to share the experiences across BASSC counties, the state of California, and the nation.
Another BASSC objective is to present social welfare policy issue to the public in a form that is easily accessible to opinion leaders and members of the media. In the context of debates about the CalWORKS legislation in 1996 (California's approach to welfare reform), BASSC published Social Welfare at a Crossroads in the form of a media packet for the press and a monograph for elected officials. A similar effort addressing the service redesign issues confronting the child welfare system, has resulted in a publication that is being distributed during the summer of 2002 to opinion leaders and the media throughout California.
The multiple challenges facing the county directors led to a continuous stream of BASSC policy reports as well as four policy groups that assist in policy development. Most of the BASSC policy analyses and implementation discussions and reports are in its three primary service delivery areas: child welfare, adult and aging, and welfare to work. These three areas have policy groups comprised of senior managers from each of the Bay Area counties who meet on a regular basis and advise the BASSC directors through periodic reports. A fourth group, the Bay Area Human Resources Policy Group emerged during the implementation of welfare reform from the concern around managing scare human resources.
Overview