 Welcome to Insight, produced in partnership with Lakeland Public Television, serving North Central Minnesota. Today we are chatting with Pine Riverbacker's Family Center's Leslie Bouchonville and Pillager Family Center's Betty Doss. They have generously agreed to share some of their experience with us. I'd like to thank you both for joining us today. Thank you. Thank you. So the services that you provide are so essential and so difficult to provide. Talk about the kinds of services that you provide to citizens in this area. We are often referred to as the hub, probably a 30 or 40-mile radius, you know, and it could be more, but we do the food shelf, we have a food shelf, we have the WIC clinics and the public health clinics that folks from our area can't get to the county seat to have those and we do some outreach for that as folks come into the Family Center. We can, we have a relationship with them so we can inform them of what's available. Not everyone knows what kind of services that are even out there sometimes. We also do a lot of prevention work in Pine River. We have a couple or one coalition and then we employ a regional prevention coordinator that serves certain counties. We do a home visiting program jointly with two other Family Centers. So the Pine River back as Family Center is providing support in a number of different ways. You're talking about food security, you're talking about prevention, prevention meaning trying to intervene before there is a crisis. To avoid a crisis, to finesse that you are providing physical and mental health referral services and counseling. So and you cover a very broad geographic area. Yes, we do. And so let's talk about Pillager Family Center, how does Pillager approach the services that you provide? Yes, Pillager is located 60 miles from Walker which is Cass County's county seat and where a lot of county services are provided. So 20 years ago when the Pillager Family Center started it was the county and community members thought let's open up a Family Center in the Pillager area so people didn't have to travel that 60 miles because that's a burden for a lot of families whether it's having a reliable car or just gas money to get to Walker and back. So they decided let's open up a Family Center where we can offer these services locally. So Pillager was the first Family Center to open with this thought process in mind and then it has evolved over the 20 years to we also offer the local food shelf in our facility and we find that that's a great way to connect with people when they come in to ask for help for food. We can also connect them to other services such as do they know about the SNAP program offered through the county if they're coming in consistently for food. Maybe they should apply for SNAP and we have those application forms available. Maybe they need to talk to somebody in veteran services so we can refer them to those services just depending on what the family's needs are. It's a great place to start building relationships and then seeing what families need and try and help them with whatever that need is. So let's talk about the definition of family, of being a Family Center. What do you have in common in terms of how you look at your clientele? Who are your clients and how do you first meet your clients? How do you encounter your clients when they first come into contact with your organizations? Leslie, do you want to start? Sure. I think it's taken like we've been around for 21 years so it's taken a while for people to understand you know what what we are as a family center and what we have there. I mean we do some outreach but we just don't have the staffing to do as much as we'd like. You can't be out on the road all the time if you're also serving people and you can't afford to fund people who are out there doing that that type of outreach. So it took a little while for people to get to know and when they come in what are they first encounter? People come in for lots of different reasons. We do you know we will do faxing for them. A lot of people who work in the community fax their time cards. You know we are a resource so people ask where they can find this or where they can find that or we also partner with community resource connection right here in Bemidji to do the Minsher navigation. Right. And so that that was a huge need. I mean we were a large void. Cass Coney was a void. I mean there was no one to do that so when we know that we have the need we step up and say what can our staff do? What skills do we have here? Who wants to do it? So it's really a needs driven approach right? You look at your community and you say what do you need? I think that's the beauty of family centers because we're each our own 501c3. We each have our own board of directors so we can identify the needs in our community and either we we create a program to meet that need or we partner with another program to meet that need. So you adopt a program that somebody else has already developed to meet that need and you apply it to your community. Yeah and then we don't duplicate service either because we're such a small community we try and do a lot of things to meet needs of families and we want to do them well we don't want to do them just to do them but it is community driven and I think that's been true since that we started since we started is that it's based on the needs of the community that determine where our programs are and we concentrate on that family support those family support kind of services basic needs. What do you say to to those and you you hear this argument sometimes at the state level and certainly you hear it on the on the federal level where where people assert that services like yours are not really necessary. If you just eliminated them eliminated the funding for them saved the money quote unquote of those services then those communities would just trundle along they'd be fine people would figure out other solutions. What do you say to to to that type of thinking. Well I would I would challenge that definitely we we have we know that what research says and one of the programs we do is home visiting so we get with the mom prenatally and we work with the mom to their to the child three years old. Those are targeted home visits and we know the dollars we're going to save if we can stay in there and connect that mom teach that mom help that mom support her through depression or whatever she's experiencing so that child can get into the school system ready to learn. Well let's talk about about the the impact of not doing that if you're not providing prenatal care then that also means that a certain number of new mothers are going to end up in the emergency room or in acute care. So there's actually a bell curve that you can look at and you can say well over there this this group of people we don't we can't predict who they will be but we know this group of people will be much larger and and end up absorbing a lot more resource right at at that end of crisis than if we are doing some prevent or identification identification of special needs both Betty and I know if we can get in visiting early the earlier way identify a child that may have special needs and the earlier you can start addressing that the less cost there is down the road. It's such a good point we are beginning to discover that what used to be called special needs is just they're just different learning attributes they're just different attributes and in particular it's very difficult to individually address those different attributes particularly if you never figure out what they are in a particular child and so if you don't do that early identification how can you actually ensure that those issues do not become issues by by how you interact with that child on the educational side or or or in terms of of other types of care you were going to well and I think a lot of learning happens or doesn't happen when even prenatally we're learning how much brain development is happening prenatally right and then in those first three years of of life how important connecting synapses in your brain and how important that is for a child to be successful later on in life if those things aren't happening then there there could be special needs or different learning but why not give them the best that they can have early to because we know research tells us that brain development is is critical during those first three years it's such a good point because you bring up the the prenatal issue which attaches to nutrition and your food shelf program so and there's an awareness of balanced nutrition and the the effect of balanced nutrition on prenatal development and then you also have the issue of self-medicating which can lead into drug dependency but even in the early stages of self-medication to deal with various forms of distress pressure physical pain that can the consumption of those drugs which seems to the the person who's consuming it to be just it just me well it affects a child's development it affects a child's DNA formation in those early years and so bringing that knowledge no you know you think that it's innocuous it is an innocuous i think i think there are so many so many ways that that relationship with the family and that trust that we can build up in a smaller setting we don't have the label as a county or somebody that could be a threat take the child away that's not what we're about the police or child protective services and and there are i mean there are families out there that have that view that that that could happen so for us to go in and work with that family and build up the trust sometimes it takes a long time to do that but once you're there it is amazing the results that you will see what does the future hold for your organizations do you feel like you're going to be expanding or shifting your your services do you have particular challenges that you that you'd like to highlight doing a few things well and not spreading ourselves real thin trying to do everything so i think we've really focused on a few areas early childhood is is something that we find important and that we're good at helping provide that service collaborating with the school collaborating with the county and providing services related that to that we are good in delivering the basic needs support in our community with the again collaborating with the churches collaborating with the school and community members they that's one other funding source we have is donations from from community members in the prime river area it's kind of been we've gone through a lot of strategic planning and the most recent one probably a two or three years ago was that you know we are a hub so we can do those things but we still partner and then we had some programs three or four bigger programs that we needed to maintain and keep them going and i was keeping our eye out for ways that we can sustain those well thank you so much for sharing the work of pine river back us and pillager family centers leslie bushonville beddy dos thank you very much for your service to the community and thank you so much for your insights