Staff Presented, Attended and Received Awards at annual CCBH Conference

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The ICAN team had a great showing earlier this year at the Best Practices and Workforce Development Training - presented by NYS Coalition for Children's Behavioral Health and NYS Office of Mental Health in Saratoga Springs.

Congratulations to Tim Williams and Jaclyn Adolfi, who received Employee of the Year awards!


Our teams presented on three topics:

Screen Time and the Silent Struggle: How Digital Overload Affects Mental Well-being in Youth
Jeremy Butler and Jimsak Daoreuang

In this interactive presentation, we explored the impact that social media and as Best Selling Author, Jonathan Haidt, puts it in his book “The Anxious Generation", how “the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness”.  We discussed the current trends and how tech companies use behavioral and psychological techniques to hack our brains and make us habitual users of technology that is having adverse impacts on our mental health and especially the mental health of children and young adults.

One participant came up after the presentation and shared that he’d been "coming to conferences for almost 40 years and this was one of the best that he had ever attended”.  Another participant raved that “everybody needs to attend this workshop!” While another spoke candidly about the struggles her child has had related to social media and how she plans to use what she learned in the workshop to better support her daughter and make some “necessary changes”.  

DIY DEI
Anasa Sinegal, Kristen Rasmussen, Anita Taylor and Macaul Zuk

Holding space for DEI can be intimidating for so many reasons: we don’t want to get it wrong, there’s DEI fatigue, the country’s extremely divided right now and as human services professionals, our advocacy and the daily grind in the helping professions may leave us exhausted. This panel consisted of four ICAN employees who work in four vastly different roles in the organization, but whose collaboration on diversity and equity demonstrates how measurable outcomes can be achieved when we collaborate and work outside of silos. Each spoke to how their particular role is assisting the agency in serving diverse clients more equitably.

Blueprints for Building a High-Performance Culture
Gina Dier, Matt Buono, Jeremy Butler and Jimsak Daoreuang

Presenters laid out the “blueprint” for how ICAN has worked to intentionally build a work culture that puts our staff first in an effort to maximize output for the children and families that we serve. We discussed the need for having a strategic plan and how we intentionally have prioritized our culture as our top priority in that plan.  Then we spoke to some of the uniqueness of how we choose to operate and how that’s led to exceptional growth, increased impact and better rates of recruitment and retention among our staff.  From a “family first” work culture, to a diverse array of flexible scheduling and a multitude of other high impact offerings, ICAN has continued to be an innovator which has helped us to be recognized as the best place to work over the past 3 years.

One participant came up after the workshop and thanked us for sharing and said, “I’ve been trying to convince my team to invest in some of these strategies and you just gave me the firepower we need to make it happen!”

This statewide learning and networking event offers children’s behavioral health professionals the opportunity to share information, gain knowledge, and exchange ideas to better serve New York’s children and families.