Indirect Service
As much as I love working with people directly, my introverted personality has always made me lean more towards indirect services where I can serve people without directly interacting with them. I never thought that a desk job would be particularly fun, but being around people drains my energy quickly, so through high school I always thought I would end up with a desk job just for the sake of conserving energy. My first work experience as a food service worker at the Evergreen State Fair confirmed my belief that indirect services were right up my alley. I worked at the fair for two summers, and I loved my supervisors, but I did not love working with all the customers. Customers were cranky and rude; they yelled at their children, and spoke in a demeaning manner to myself and other employees. With no one else in my booth, I was working alone with customers and I quickly became agitated. After two summers of working in a hot metal caramel apple stand with customers who treated myself and peers in a demeaning manner, I decided that direct service was not for me.
My first internship in the Human Services program was as a Junior Intern at The INN University Ministries. The INN is a student-run and lead ministry near campus. I had been attending The INN for almost two years, and I decided I wanted to be part of the bigger picture. The INN has three full-time interns year round, and I got the pleasure of working along-side them. It was my first time feeling like I was really part of a team, and I loved it. At this internship, I got my first real experience with indirect services; indirect services are a lot of behind the scenes coordinating, and it requires a great deal of cooperation, patience, and skill. My job was to help coordinate and plan Collide. Collide is a quarterly event The INN puts on where women of all ages are invited to come and collide with Jesus and his teachings. Each event had a new theme; there were discussions, presentations, small groups, activities, and food. I was put in charge of creating the PowerPoint, organizing the small groups, putting up directional signs, creating sign-up sheets for workshops, and creating sign-in sheets for the event. Most of my days were spent on the office computer making various fliers, spread sheets, and filtering through those that were registered for the event. I was able to attend one of the meetings where the speakers, and everyone else in charge of planning the various parts of the event were discussing progress they had made. Never before had I planned such a big event, and I was overwhelmed with the amount of work and the number of people it took to make sure the event went as planned.
Another part of my internship at The INN was to help prepare our Tuesday night worships. I worked on creating PowerPoints and setting up the lighting, and was in charge of operating these things during the night. As a student attending The INN, I had not realized how much work went into every night; as a person behind the scenes, I realized how much coordination and cooperation it took to pull off. When one person was not able to make it, there was a lot of scrambling around trying to make up for lost work.
The same quarter I was working at The INN, I was also taking Case Management and Human Services (HSP 345). In this class, I began to see how direct services and indirect services can happen at the same time. Case management, although it requires meeting with clients, also requires a lot of paperwork. Organization is key in case management; case managers must be able to keep each case individual and separate, they have to be aware of services in the community that could be of use to clients, they must collaborate with a team in order to provide needed services to a client, and they must be accountable for monetary benefits that might come through for their clients or cases. In class, we were able to play the role of a case manager in order to learn how to take case notes. In this exercise, we were in groups of three where one student was the “client”, one was the “case manager” and one was an observer. As the case manager, I learned more about how direct service and indirect service works together. Although the intake interview process is strictly direct service, there are other components of case management that are indirect service. After the interview process, there is a series of paperwork and case notes to write, and in some cases you must do some outside research to find resources for your clients.
At the end of the quarter, we were given an assignment where we wrote a full intervention report. We were told to choose a client, real or fictional, and create a full intervention report for them. This is where I saw the indirect service portion of case management. I chose to look at an individual who had been on My Strange Addictions (a reality TV show on TLC). The woman I chose was addicted to body building, and those around her were worried about her. She had traded her drug addiction for body building, and it was seemingly out of control. The only information I had on this case was what the 15 minute episode contained. I then had to put together a profile of her and research different intervention methods and treatment centers. It took a lot of time and work to find the best solution for the case I was handling. None of the work I did in this assignment was direct service; I was learning how to improve an individual’s life without coming into contact with them, and through this I learned many things. On one hand, it was easier to build a completely unbiased intervention report knowing that I would not have to interact with the client; I knew I would not have to worry about offending the individual, while in the role-playing assignment I did both the interviewing and the resource searching. This assignment was also difficult in that it was completely indirect service and I did not have the ability to ask the client more details about their situation. This struggle taught me the importance of in-depth research when finding the best solution to a client’s problem.
In the summer quarter between my junior and senior year, I took Research Methods where we were taught how to effectively research a topic and write a research paper. I chose to research mental illness in adolescents and the effect of therapeutic services. This was a form of indirect services; I was learning about a demographic of people and building a way of serving their needs without actually meeting or talking with them directly. I got all my information from other research papers and studies I found and from that information built my research proposal. Although there was a lot of work put into this assignment, and it was frustrating at times because I could not get information directly from any participants, it was one that I enjoyed. On one hand, I was not completely sure I was getting accurate information since I could not work directly with people, but on the other hand, this allowed me to look more into all the treatment options and not be biased by my interactions and relationships with people.
My most challenging experience with indirect services was during Program Planning and Evaluation (HSP 485). Our first assignment was to create a logic model for a program we wanted to create, which we would use to create a program plan. A logic model is a tool used to determine the effectiveness of a program and what inputs and outputs need to be included in order for the program to succeed. In practice, creating this logic model and program plan was simple. However, for the rest of the quarter we were to pick a pre-existing program and evaluate it. My group chose to evaluate Shuksan Family Community Night. Shuksan Middle School puts this event on every year, and their hope is to achieve four things: to help students integrate, educate them on important topics, to connect families with the community and the school, and to connect parents with each other. This program has been successful in attaining their goals in the past. My group decided that in order to evaluate the effectiveness of the program for the teens attending, we would use surveys to see how much they learned and what they enjoyed and/or what they did not enjoy (we did this with a workshop evaluation and an overall event evaluation). This task was purely indirect service; we were to develop the surveys, analyze the data, and create the evaluation report without direct contact. It became difficult for multiple reasons. This was my first time doing an evaluation, and I found it difficult to do so without having direct contact with the attendees, but the expected attendance was too high to realistically talk to each individual. I found indirect service difficult in this way; I felt as if we were unable to get the most accurate data because we were not able to talk to the attendees. Some of the surveys that were filled out were ambiguous and difficult to input into our data tables. Looking through them while doing data entry made me realize that it would have been helpful to be there with the attendees in order to clarify any questions they might have had; even just the experience of being at the event could have helped my team to understand some of the responses on the surveys. The other things that I felt were difficult in this process were the group work and our time frame.
Collaboration is a key element in indirect services, especially in evaluation, because you have to make sure your product (our surveys) were clear enough to understand, but also got to the point of what data we were trying to obtain. With different ideas within the group, this task became difficult and time consuming. We also had a short time frame in which we were able to analyze the data and build an evaluation report from it. When in a time crunch, the assignment becomes daunting and difficult to complete. We finished the evaluation report with no time to spare, and our instructor was not particularly pleased. I had a chance to talk to her after our presentation and realized that it had never occurred to me that this evaluation report was bigger than just an assignment for a class. We were doing a service for somebody; we had failed to do it to the best of our ability and although we were not directly affecting the students and the program, we were making it difficult for the program director to do her job. I learned that in indirect service, it is extremely important to keep in mind those that you are performing your tasks for. I may not be directly affecting someone, but I am only a few degrees away from them and my work can create a domino effect, for better or worse.
My first internship in the Human Services program was as a Junior Intern at The INN University Ministries. The INN is a student-run and lead ministry near campus. I had been attending The INN for almost two years, and I decided I wanted to be part of the bigger picture. The INN has three full-time interns year round, and I got the pleasure of working along-side them. It was my first time feeling like I was really part of a team, and I loved it. At this internship, I got my first real experience with indirect services; indirect services are a lot of behind the scenes coordinating, and it requires a great deal of cooperation, patience, and skill. My job was to help coordinate and plan Collide. Collide is a quarterly event The INN puts on where women of all ages are invited to come and collide with Jesus and his teachings. Each event had a new theme; there were discussions, presentations, small groups, activities, and food. I was put in charge of creating the PowerPoint, organizing the small groups, putting up directional signs, creating sign-up sheets for workshops, and creating sign-in sheets for the event. Most of my days were spent on the office computer making various fliers, spread sheets, and filtering through those that were registered for the event. I was able to attend one of the meetings where the speakers, and everyone else in charge of planning the various parts of the event were discussing progress they had made. Never before had I planned such a big event, and I was overwhelmed with the amount of work and the number of people it took to make sure the event went as planned.
Another part of my internship at The INN was to help prepare our Tuesday night worships. I worked on creating PowerPoints and setting up the lighting, and was in charge of operating these things during the night. As a student attending The INN, I had not realized how much work went into every night; as a person behind the scenes, I realized how much coordination and cooperation it took to pull off. When one person was not able to make it, there was a lot of scrambling around trying to make up for lost work.
The same quarter I was working at The INN, I was also taking Case Management and Human Services (HSP 345). In this class, I began to see how direct services and indirect services can happen at the same time. Case management, although it requires meeting with clients, also requires a lot of paperwork. Organization is key in case management; case managers must be able to keep each case individual and separate, they have to be aware of services in the community that could be of use to clients, they must collaborate with a team in order to provide needed services to a client, and they must be accountable for monetary benefits that might come through for their clients or cases. In class, we were able to play the role of a case manager in order to learn how to take case notes. In this exercise, we were in groups of three where one student was the “client”, one was the “case manager” and one was an observer. As the case manager, I learned more about how direct service and indirect service works together. Although the intake interview process is strictly direct service, there are other components of case management that are indirect service. After the interview process, there is a series of paperwork and case notes to write, and in some cases you must do some outside research to find resources for your clients.
At the end of the quarter, we were given an assignment where we wrote a full intervention report. We were told to choose a client, real or fictional, and create a full intervention report for them. This is where I saw the indirect service portion of case management. I chose to look at an individual who had been on My Strange Addictions (a reality TV show on TLC). The woman I chose was addicted to body building, and those around her were worried about her. She had traded her drug addiction for body building, and it was seemingly out of control. The only information I had on this case was what the 15 minute episode contained. I then had to put together a profile of her and research different intervention methods and treatment centers. It took a lot of time and work to find the best solution for the case I was handling. None of the work I did in this assignment was direct service; I was learning how to improve an individual’s life without coming into contact with them, and through this I learned many things. On one hand, it was easier to build a completely unbiased intervention report knowing that I would not have to interact with the client; I knew I would not have to worry about offending the individual, while in the role-playing assignment I did both the interviewing and the resource searching. This assignment was also difficult in that it was completely indirect service and I did not have the ability to ask the client more details about their situation. This struggle taught me the importance of in-depth research when finding the best solution to a client’s problem.
In the summer quarter between my junior and senior year, I took Research Methods where we were taught how to effectively research a topic and write a research paper. I chose to research mental illness in adolescents and the effect of therapeutic services. This was a form of indirect services; I was learning about a demographic of people and building a way of serving their needs without actually meeting or talking with them directly. I got all my information from other research papers and studies I found and from that information built my research proposal. Although there was a lot of work put into this assignment, and it was frustrating at times because I could not get information directly from any participants, it was one that I enjoyed. On one hand, I was not completely sure I was getting accurate information since I could not work directly with people, but on the other hand, this allowed me to look more into all the treatment options and not be biased by my interactions and relationships with people.
My most challenging experience with indirect services was during Program Planning and Evaluation (HSP 485). Our first assignment was to create a logic model for a program we wanted to create, which we would use to create a program plan. A logic model is a tool used to determine the effectiveness of a program and what inputs and outputs need to be included in order for the program to succeed. In practice, creating this logic model and program plan was simple. However, for the rest of the quarter we were to pick a pre-existing program and evaluate it. My group chose to evaluate Shuksan Family Community Night. Shuksan Middle School puts this event on every year, and their hope is to achieve four things: to help students integrate, educate them on important topics, to connect families with the community and the school, and to connect parents with each other. This program has been successful in attaining their goals in the past. My group decided that in order to evaluate the effectiveness of the program for the teens attending, we would use surveys to see how much they learned and what they enjoyed and/or what they did not enjoy (we did this with a workshop evaluation and an overall event evaluation). This task was purely indirect service; we were to develop the surveys, analyze the data, and create the evaluation report without direct contact. It became difficult for multiple reasons. This was my first time doing an evaluation, and I found it difficult to do so without having direct contact with the attendees, but the expected attendance was too high to realistically talk to each individual. I found indirect service difficult in this way; I felt as if we were unable to get the most accurate data because we were not able to talk to the attendees. Some of the surveys that were filled out were ambiguous and difficult to input into our data tables. Looking through them while doing data entry made me realize that it would have been helpful to be there with the attendees in order to clarify any questions they might have had; even just the experience of being at the event could have helped my team to understand some of the responses on the surveys. The other things that I felt were difficult in this process were the group work and our time frame.
Collaboration is a key element in indirect services, especially in evaluation, because you have to make sure your product (our surveys) were clear enough to understand, but also got to the point of what data we were trying to obtain. With different ideas within the group, this task became difficult and time consuming. We also had a short time frame in which we were able to analyze the data and build an evaluation report from it. When in a time crunch, the assignment becomes daunting and difficult to complete. We finished the evaluation report with no time to spare, and our instructor was not particularly pleased. I had a chance to talk to her after our presentation and realized that it had never occurred to me that this evaluation report was bigger than just an assignment for a class. We were doing a service for somebody; we had failed to do it to the best of our ability and although we were not directly affecting the students and the program, we were making it difficult for the program director to do her job. I learned that in indirect service, it is extremely important to keep in mind those that you are performing your tasks for. I may not be directly affecting someone, but I am only a few degrees away from them and my work can create a domino effect, for better or worse.