Justin Braun

Justin is an Administrative Aide at the Human Services department and participated in the 2021 and 2022 annual Human Services Department mentorship program as a mentee. As part of the evaluation process Justin submitted a suggestion to offer a monthly Mentee Support Group throughout the mentorship period for increased support and demystification of the mentorship experience. Justin offered to develop, implement, and facilitate these support groups on top of his own participation in the 2022 Mentorships and his work supporting IT.

The support group Justin created was helpful in providing mentees with a voice to articulate what they wanted to learn and better guide their mentorships. Justin not only maintained the support group through the year, but he also participated in the evaluation process and made changes based on feedback to meet the Human Services Department’s cultural goals around continuous process improvement. Thanks to Justin, this mentee support group will be a standard part of the mentorship program going forward.

Stevi Harrison

Stevi is a Senior Social Worker with Human Services. Stevi works with multiple youth who are involved with our juvenile probation system, and she collaborates with both dependency and probation court, providing them with updates, and even attends weekly hearings on one of her cases.

Stevi is involved in multiple committees within Family and Children’s Services and is a member of the Design Team and a work group geared towards recruitment and retention for resource parents, and she is actively working to help implement Safety Organized Practice (SOP). Stevi is deeply committed to the youth on her caseload, one example being the case of a youth that she supported as he transitioned into adulthood, helped him to obtain gender affirming care, and facilitated him re‐establishing a relationship with his father who lives out of state. Stevi continues to serve the families on her case load, support people around her, actively work to improve the division, and is a shining example of resilience.

IT Desktop Team

Adam Papier, Kelly Beach, Patrick Blue, and Todd Estabrooks

The IT Desktop Team has been responsible for deploying hardware to the Human Services Department’s remote staff, maintaining hardware needs, and deploying docking stations for over 500 employees. On top of their overwhelming daily responsibilities, which they all manage effectively while providing excellent customer service, the IT Desktop Team has also stepped up to handle numerous ergonomic sit/stand accommodation installation requests which have increased heavily in the last year due to a loss of staffing in our facilities unit. This Team took the initiative to learn how to do sit/stand accommodation installations, how to install them most effectively and safely in a way that benefitted staff safety, time, and need, and still allowed them to complete their daily desktop assignments. The IT Desktop Team has streamlined this process, saving the Human Services Department both time and money and ensuring a better working environment for our HSD staff.