Hiring Prevention Navigators

About this recommendation

Someone who can help families navigate and engage in prevention services can be a unique and relatively new role to child welfare. This play includes suggestions from multiple jurisdictions who currently employ prevention navigators.

How to do this

• What should you look for in a prevention navigator?

  • Experience in community navigation.
  • Multiple jurisdictions report that people with more life experience have more success. It is harder for newer employees to compartmentalize conversations, so they can experience a heavier burden.

• What does success look like?

  • Flexibility parents don’t keep business hours. Navigators need to be available during odd hours, with the boundaries/backup to avoid being on-call 24/7. Encourage navigators to respond quickly, but make it clear they don’t have to respond immediately.
  • Focus A dedicated navigator is able to learn and succeed more readily than someone who also has to wear multiple other hats. Jurisdictions that originally had navigators juggling multiple roles reported increased success when navigation became their sole job.

• How do you measure performance?

  • Look at engagement rates, such as how many contacts they made, and how many people responded.
  • Track last contact dates and who they’ve closed out. For a new program, you may need to hire the best possible navigators you can upfront, give them some freedom to reach out / pull back as they feel appropriate, and then set standards from there.
  • Understand that reaching out endlessly is not the goal; typically, 60 days of no response is a cut-off for closing a case (with a case by case ability for a navigator to keep it open longer).
  • Track engagement with families over time; a person might not be ready today, but it’s still a positive if they reach back out in a few month