CMCA Leadership Team

The CMCA Leadership Team is made up of our program directors that are directly supervised by me. Specifically, the following staff are members of the Leadership Team:

Angela Hirsch – Community Services Director
Anita Sanderson – Finance Director
Chris Macy – IT Director
Dianna Moore – Economic Development Director
Joyce Davis – Employment and Training Director
Julie Kratzer – HR Director
Mernell King – Early Childhood Director

This team meets every first and third Tuesday of the month to discuss the CMCA’s progress and challenges, to work on our own professional development, to plan, and soon to work on the transformation plan implementation. At our last meeting we agreed to share highlights of our meetings with all staff in an effort to increase communication and give you a sense of where we are trying to go as an agency. I won’t share every detail of these meetings but I will give you a sense of the topics we are covering. If you are particularly interested in a topic, please follow up with your supervisor or the nearest leadership team member. We are trying to minimize discrepancies in the information you get so please let me know if you get any mixed messages. I’ll also post these notes to my blog to increase our transparency for a broader audience. I hope that having more information about our agency helps to empower and support your efforts so that when you take advantage of leadership opportunities at CMCA or in your community you have a fuller knowledge of our agency’s purpose.

Tuesday, May 6

The two main topics for discussion were the Family Development Credential and the agency Indirect Rate.

Members of the LT attended training in April to learn more about the Family Development Credential (FDC). This certification is a strength-based case management training course that challenges case managers to think more comprehensively about their caseload. CMCA tried to implement this credential several years ago but it was during the period of significant leadership turnover and it went basically unsupported until it fell apart. Now we have a team that is committed to implementing this credential at CMCA and will support its implementation. In June, 6 staff (3 Head Start, 2 county staff, and 1 staff from Employment and Training) will attend intensive training to prepare to deliver the course. FDC is a 90 clock hour course that will be conducted over the twelve month period starting in October. Participants will gain new case management skills that will give them more tools to help our clients define and attain their own success. Participants will build a portfolio throughout the course, be tested, and graded to achieve their certification. We are exploring options with MU to receive college credit from the Department of Human Development and Family Studies. We are also planning to make the training available to our community partners to support their case management capacity. During the first year we expect to certify only a small handful of our staff but as we build capacity more and more staff will be expected to participate. Eventually the Family Development Credential will be a required qualification for CMCA case workers.

Like most Community Action Agencies and other organizations with federal contracts, CMCA adheres to an Indirect Rate to pay for administrative costs. Each year we apply to a federal office in Dallas, Texas to get a determination of our rate based on actual administrative costs. At CMCA each program pays 15.2% of the cost of salaries and benefits into the “indirect pool” to pay for our administration. Our administration includes my salary, the HR and IT departments, and the entire accounting function of CMCA. Basically, the administration (paid out of the indirect pool) supports all agency wide functions to make sure employees are paid and have systems in place that enable you to do your work. Our administration is pretty lean as we currently operate at less than 7% of the agency’s overall budget. The discussion that ensued from Anita’s presentation on our indirect rate consisted of a consideration of how we will cost allocate cross-functional programmatic and administrative responsibilities as we begin to implement our transformation plan. Those answers will have to evolve as we get into that process because this is relatively unchartered territory!

Next LT meeting scheduled for May 20.