Featured note
Continuity for an agency that cannot pause
Most continuity plans are written for organizations that can stop for a few days. An agency with children in placement cannot, and that changes the plan.
Read the note →CARES Practice Notes
What is actually breaking, what actually works, and how to build systems that hold.
Practice writing for people who run organizations. No thought leadership, no trend pieces. Specific problems, specific fixes, and the templates to go with them — most of them free on the Open Shelf.
Published so far
Find the problem you are working on.
If two people left tomorrow, what would stop?
Succession is three different questions wearing one name, and the dependency is almost never only the executive director.
Supervision that can be evidenced
Every agency can say supervision happens. Far fewer can show what it consisted of, that it reached every worker, or that anyone read the documentation.
What happens to your license if you merge
A license is issued to an entity, and an entity that ceases to exist can take its license with it. That is why a merger is often better as an affiliation.
What a grant writer cannot do for you
A proposal is a claim about what an organization can do. Buying the writing wins awards and leaves the organization no better able to deliver them.
What an RFA file has to prove
Almost every gap in an approval file is not a thing that failed to happen. It is a thing that happened and left no trace anybody can find.
Access before evidence is the finding you cannot argue with
There is no version of the facts that helps. The dates are in the system logs, the clearance date is on the document, and if the first precedes the second the finding writes itself.
Reading a licensing report without panicking
Three unrelated findings are noise. The same finding three times is a system that does not work. The first read tells you which one you have.
The rate stopped covering the cost. Here is how to prove it.
Costs move every year and the rate moves rarely. Nothing announces the crossover, which is why the organizations that get a rate reconsidered are the ones who can show their arithmetic.
What one resignation actually costs
Retention costs money too, and it gets weighed against a turnover cost nobody has calculated. That is a known cost against an unknown one, and known costs lose.
You have backups. Have you ever restored one?
A backup is a job that reports on itself. A restore is a file, opened, containing what it should. Organizations discover the difference on the worst possible day.
What an underwriter actually reads
In a market this tight, your submission is competing for capacity. Most organizations send a late application and five years of loss runs — and nothing else.
Cost allocation that survives a monitoring visit
The finding is almost never that the split was unreasonable. It is that the split cannot be evidenced.
“The motion passed” is not a record
Minutes are read years later, by someone who was not in the room, looking for four things. Most minutes contain none of them.
What we write about
- the mechanics of compliance evidence
- cost allocation that survives a monitoring visit
- what minutes have to record and why
- onboarding gates in regulated settings
- what an underwriting submission should contain
- designing quality assurance that closes the loop
- buying software in a regulated environment without regretting it
- and what we have learned from engagements that did not work