Listen for Good : Closing the Loop on Round 2

In 2016, Palomar was nominated by The Inasmuch Foundation for a Listen for Good grant. The grant provided funding to collect feedback in 2018 and 2019.

“Listen for Good (L4G) is a Fund for Shared Insight initiative dedicated to building the practice of listening to the people we seek to help, especially those whose voices are least heard. … L4G is focused on applying a semi-standard survey instrument — which includes using the Net Promoter System (NPS®) employed widely in customer feedback circles — to the nonprofit client context.”

This grant provided funds (contributed both from the Fund for Shared Insight and the nominating organization (The Inasmuch Foundation) to improve Palomar’s ability to collect feedback from our clients in order to improve services provided and overall client satisfaction.

An important component of the L4G program is “Closing the Loop” — a step wherein we share our findings with our clients and the community at large. We want you to know that we have listened to your feedback, and we want you to know where and how we are working to address areas for improvement. Our findings are below:

Here's what our clients told us:

Hint: hover over the purple boxes to read more!

They want more mental health services

Palomar has 5 therapists on site: one full-time crisis intervention therapist, one full-time therapist from A Chance to Change, one full-time therapist from YWCA OKC, one part-time therapist from Sunbeam, and one part-time therapist interning with Palomar through a partnership with the Oklahoma Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse. Our liason from ODMHSAS has developed a robust referral network and has been able to identify providers in the community who are specially trained and have experience working with trauma survivors and may be able to meet clients’ needs closer to home. In addition to individual therapy, our partners provide a variety of support groups & classes.

While the therapists on-site work very hard to meet the needs of our clients, there simply aren’t enough of them to meet current demand. Several of our partner agencies also offer support groups and educational classes to provide additional mental health support, although we recognize that additional support groups and expanded hours of availability are often needed.

The specific needs mentioned in this round of surveys were: longer hours, more support groups (therapist, advocate, or peer-led), and general mental health assistance. 43% of survey respondents requested more mental health services and assistance.

While our partnership with ODMHSAS to improve the integration of services with Community Mental Health service providers has been extremely effective, we still would like to see a larger presence of mental health services available at Palomar. When space allows, our goal is to develop a therapy incubator to expand services available on site. We are also planning to add additional group rooms so more support groups can happen simultaneously. We are also looking at options for expanding hours of availability for clients.

If you or someone you know is a licensed counselor or therapist and would like to donate services to clients in need on a pro-bono or sliding fee scale or become a part of our insurance-based provider network, please click here.

They want more job skills & employment

Currently our partner YWCA OKC provides an Economic Empowerment program. Their EEP helps clients get back on their feet financially by providing one-on-one career planning, resume building, job searching, interview preparation, and money management classes. To support clients in their job search, we invite our clients to bring their children to our Children’s Sanctuary for short-term child care if they need to go to a job interview.

Job skills and employment have emerged as a large need within the community of clients we serve through our feedback collection. Palomar currently does not have providers on-site who specifically work with clients on job skills and job placement, and the YWCA’s Economic Empowerment Program has limited resources.

Many of our clients are in need of an immediate source of income, as well as a long-term career and financial plan. Financial abuse comes in many forms, and we find our clients have often been unable to work due to the abuse, had limited access to money, or had large debts incurred in their name. In addition to financial burdens, some survivors, especially survivors of human trafficking, may have acquired criminal convictions on behalf of their abusers, making traditional employment difficult in some places.

To address this need, Palomar has a long-term vision for an economic empowerment micro-enterprises -- a program designed to start small businesses and train survivors in marketable skills for long-term financial independence and stability. We are proud to announce that our first economic empowerment program is Ctrl+Shift Code School -- a full-time, full-stack code school to teach survivors to be software and web developers.

They want more self-confidence building

While we believe every service provider in the building makes it a priority to help clients reframe their experiences and rebuild their self-confidence, we recognize that no one program has had a specific program with those goals in mind.

Through the L4G surveys, we learned that clients are seeking enhanced self-confidence and self-esteem rebuilding after trauma.

Of the 16 services/support options we asked clients about, 37% said they needed more support and services pertaining to self-confidence building, only slightly lower than the 43% who selected mental health services and 43% who said they needed job skills and employment services. This information is useful as we continue to develop partnerships and bring on service providers to meet the needs of our clients.

We are excited to announce a new program provided by the HALO Project called Making Sense of Your Worth. This two-phase program will provide survivors with the answers they seek about what happened, as well as the step-by-step process to healing and gaining positive self-worth. Phase two of the program (optional) also offers new parenting strategies aimed at helping children heal and develop their own positive self-worth.

Other things we learned:

Overall, we learned that Palomar clients are very satisfied with the services they have been receiving.

Our Net Promoter Score (NPS) for this round of surveys was 85, up from 75 in our last round of surveys.

The nationwide benchmark for all L4G participants was a 62 by comparison.

When asked what Palomar was good at, clients used phrases like: "helping people" "listening" "providing support" "being knowledgeable" "explaining options" "making you feel safe" "making you feel comfortable"

Additionally, 15 of 120 respondents stated that Palomar was good at "Everything."

Other areas where we can improve:

When asked what we could do better, one third of respondents said "Nothing."

The most common requests were for additional service providers and longer hours of operation.

Here's how we did it:

Surveys were collected at Palomar through a variety of methods, including: links on the computers in our computer lab, an iPad at the front of the building for clients to use as they are leaving, paper surveys, and in some cases, client interviews. Surveys were provided in English and Spanish. However, the collection method did not appear to dramatically alter the content of the responses. While data was initially analyzed when we received 120 responses, we have left the survey collector open for now.

To see the complete results, click here.

Thank you to all the brave survivors who shared their experience with us. We hear you and strive to provide the best services possible.