Dear friends,

Hamilton County’s Department of Job and Family Services is trying to rouse a celebratory spirit during very tough times this holiday season.  

This is a difficult time for all of us and the saddest point in my professional career. We have announced the elimination of approximately 350 positions by the end of next year. This will occur through retirement, attrition and layoffs.    

Many of our fellow employees, good, hard-working people, have left us over the past few weeks. Others will leave in the near future. We are all deeply affected and hurting as a result. Our financial troubles and the uncertainty of who stays and who will leave us have taken their toll. It is understandable we may not be in a celebratory mood.  

There is no blame in our situation. We are the victims of a tough economy. Those who are leaving HCJFS are not doing so because of their performance, but because our budget must be balanced and the agency must prepare for financial stability in the years to come. We will emerge from this with a focus on our mandates and we will achieve more with less. As we have done more than 60 years, we will be someone you can count on in 2009 and years to come.  

And, despite the turmoil, we have had a very successful 2008.  

Our top accomplishments include a high-publicity foster care recruitment campaign that made people feel good about JFS and foster parents; the successful launch of a child welfare information system that brought praise around the state; a new library initiative that drew national attention by making it easier for our clients to interact with us; and a quickly mobilized effort to deliver assistance to more than 30,000 local victims of the windstorm.  

We also launched new programs to help dropouts drop back in, to help foster children succeed in school, to help low-income women deliver healthy babies and to assist child care operators in preparing children for early educational success. We embarked on a new agency-wide strategic plan, set a record on paternity establishment, kept pace with last year’s record number of adoptions and implemented a whole new way of serving our public assistance individuals and families who visit our downtown office.  

All the while, we protected children and the elderly, collected millions of dollars in child support and delivered on our mandate of providing support to the needy. We treated hundreds of thousands of children and families with respect and compassion. 

None of the above would have been possible without help from the community, especially those providers who work so closely with us. I feel extremely honored and fortunate to work with so many who care so much about this county’s families and children.  

Please enjoy your upcoming long weekends and vacations. I wish you and your families all the best. Thank you, again, for making our community a better place to work and live.  

Sincerely,

Moira