The Aging Disability Resource Center located in the Northside Town Center on Northport Drive is the hub of services provided by the  Disability and Aging Services Division.

“I think it is one of our crown jewels of the department,” Iheukumere said about the center. “They serve anyone who is elderly or disabled who is looking for resources or a place to start to connect to resources. A lot of times, that is the door that people walk through to get that started. We also have senior meals that we serve. We serve thousands of meals a day throughout Dane County to seniors in partnership with our senior focal points. We have great partners who prepare those meals. We are trying to keep our elderly engaged socially and healthy. We’re trying to keep the lives of our folks who are disabled or are elders stable.”

The last major service division in DCHS is the Behavioral Health Division.

“Probably a good portion of our dollars are invested in mental health support and stability,” Iheukumere said. “We have a Behavioral Health Resource Center that we developed several years ago. We are developing a crisis continuum. We have great partners like Journey Mental Health and Anesis that support our crisis network to help people who are in crisis and need mental health support. We offer urgent care and recovery support. We connect people to mental health services through our resource center and Comprehensive Community Services through our network of partners in that area.”

Iheukumere emphasized that DCHS is primarily an administrative agency that does provide some direct services. But the majority of service it provides to tens of thousands of people is through the dozens of purchase-of-service agencies spread throughout Dane County.

“One thing about Dane County, we know that people actually move to Dane County because of our human services safety net, which isn’t just human services,” Iheukumere observed. “It includes our contracted partners. There is a real solid and capable web of partners whom we work alongside of like our Comprehensive Community Services, CCS, partners. We have our community center partners. We have partners in every space you can imagine. They do great work. They deliver great services and serve a ton of people.”

As the demographics of the people DCHS serves each year evolves — reflecting the change in the broader community —  so too has DCHS has worked to evolve so that it reflects and is able to effectively serve its customers.

“We’ve been on a journey for several years now, since I started in 2019,” Iheukumere said. “We have been intentional about centering our work and priorities each year on our five-year strategic plan, which we call ‘Vision Next.’ We’re in the middle of it right now. The current plan ends in 2026. But one of the things that we did when we built that plan is that we had tons of interviews and engaged our staff and got feedback from key stakeholders in the community, customers, etc. to find out from them what they wanted from Human Services. What do they want to see? What do they think we should be prioritizing? How do we work alongside them?”

One of the results has been people having better language access to the department.

“The language access coordinator, I am proud to say, I advocated for in my first budget as interim director last year and we now have on board thanks to Executive Parisi and the county board for seeing the need and the relevance of the position,” Iheukumere said. “For years, we did not have a language access coordinator. We did not have an apparatus that addressed people whose first language is not English. How do they navigate this big government infrastructure like Human Services and access services if we don’t have a consistent practice and policies in how we address language? So we now have the county’s first language access coordinator who works as a part of our communications team and is diligently working to build a framework for our language access in the department. I’m really excited about that.

Language access is just one component of the department’s work in diversity, equity and social justice.

“If you look at our website, you’ll see our Vision, Mission, and Values,” Iheukumere said. “One of the things that we centered is diversity and equity and racial justice. We are intentional about calling that out. That is something that my predecessor Shawn Tessman felt was critical. Our staff thought that was critical and elevated that as part of our value as a department, but also our vision and mission. How that shows up is that internally we are on this journey to be transformative in terms of how we work, what our work culture is, being intentional about thinking about things like racism and racial justice and how that shows up in our work and how are we intentional about calling it out.”

And the leadership for it begins at the top of the department.

“We’re doing work around trying to be more communicative and transparent as a leadership team, not just me and my colleagues at the level I am at, but also my middle managers and my staff, being more intentional about communicating,” Iheukumere said. “I do what I call a Managers and Supervisors Round Table with all of my manager and supervisors every other month. In Human Services, we have about 85-90 supervisors and managers in the department. I’ve invited people from the community to speak about the cultural observances. My mantra that I always say to my staff and team is that I want everyone to feel like they can bring their full self to work. That is something that people have not always felt. And so I feel that if we are going to spend the time that we do at work doing the work that we do, especially in Human Services, we need to be fully human. We need to be able to acknowledge our humanity in our spaces. We are on a journey. We certainly are not perfect. We certainly have a lot of work to do. But we are centering racial justice and equity and diversity as part of our core values.”

If DCHS is to be effective in its work, it has to be imbued with the principles of equity, diversity and social justice. Astra Iheukumere is leading the way.