impacting the community through relationships

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By Abby Glaser
​Encompass Community Advocate

In preparation for the 20th Anniversary Celebration of Encompass on September 17, 3 pm at Grace Evangelical Lutheran Church, blog posts this month will focus on historical elements and highlights. 

In today’s post I would like to talk about the impact of Encompass on the Springfield community! While I haven’t been here since the beginning, I have been here for almost 13 years! As the community advocate, I interact the most with the many other organizations we partner with in order to best serve the families I work with!  

In case you aren’t aware, as a community advocate, I work with families in crisis. This often means things like substance abuse, domestic violence, trauma or child welfare intervention are involved. The families I serve often have a myriad of complicated barriers that need addressed. Helping them achieve healthy relationships and mental health is only a piece of the puzzle. Without collaboration from many other organizations, I would not be able to help them.  

​As you learned in last week’s blog post, Encompass was originally founded and funded due to Clark County having a divorce rate well over the national average. We quickly found that marital relationships were only the tip of the iceberg. Over the years we’ve added relationship skills for individuals, advocacy, parenting skills, and workplace skills, serving over 70,000 people to date!  Along with that we expand every year the organizations and churches we work in partnership with in order to ensure that no client falls through the cracks. Because of those ongoing partnerships, we can often address every barrier a family or individual may face. Through our grant funding and donors, we are one of the only agencies in the area that can offer all of those services at no cost! To my knowledge, I am the only community advocate in Springfield who does what I do! It’s a unique opportunity afforded by extensive community partnerships. In a typical advocacy case, I will often work with an average of 3 to 5 other agencies to serve all of their needs. It can be easy to look at numbers and data to determine impact. But in my opinion the evidence is the vast network of collaboration that we get to be a part of! Every new partnership we form increases our ability to better our community by bettering families. Imagine what we will see in the next 20 years?