St. Louis County Children’s Service Fund

Emily Koenig, Executive Director

$83,998,841 FULL TIME EQUIVALENTS

ADOPTED FY23 BUDGET

25.5

Fund Mission

The mission of the Children’s Service Fund (CSF) is to improve the lives of children, youth, and families in St. Louis County by strategically investing in the creation and maintenance of an integrated system of care that delivers effective and quality mental health and substance use treatment services.

Budget Overview

The 2023 adopted budget for CSF is $83,998,841, an increase of $28,016,946 or 50.0 percent from the 2022 adjusted budget of $55,981,895. Personnel costs comprise 3.0 percent of the budget for 27 positions (25.5 full time equivalents). Programmatic investments in the community account for the remaining 97.0 percent of the budget.

Significant Changes

The 2023 adopted budget includes an increase of $28.0 million for the Children’s Service Fund to provide sufficient appropriation authority to accommodate an overlap in grant funding cycles.

Core Business Functions

The St. Louis County Children’s Service Fund is responsible for:

→ Strategic investments of sales tax revenue

→ Ensuring accountability of sales tax revenue through programmatic and financial reviews of funded agencies

→ Evaluating service gaps through community needs assessments, data analysis, and stakeholder engagement

→ Developing strategic partnerships with other agencies

→ Supporting non‐profit agencies through capacity building and technical assistance

Strategic Priorities And Performance Metrics

Late in 2018, CSF began to develop a comprehensive three‐year strategic plan, incorporating internal and external stakeholder feedback at key points. CSF’s plan is ambitious and represents a major shift towards reconnecting with the community, use of data to drive decision‐making, elevating awareness of children’s issues and further aligning with other regional entities to ensure community impact is maximized and moving toward equitable service provision in schools and throughout the region. Starting January 1, 2020, the CSF staff and board started working through tactics to achieve the objectives and goals presented below.

Though the COVID‐19 pandemic hindered CSF’s ability to begin work on several planned initiatives as the organization was called to shift to disaster response and relief, key discussions continued to take place. CSF looks forward to 2023 to resume key activities that will help the organization fulfill key objectives and move the strategic plan forward. Below, find the overarching strategic priorities of CSF.

 Leadership: Champion a community‐level children’s behavioral health investment and policy agenda grounded in a population health approach with equity as a central tenet (HS – Reduce Health Disparities)

 Impact: Develop, adapt, and promote an impact framework that supports regular assessment of performance results and informs improvement opportunities (O – Improve Effectiveness)

 Community: Cultivate a climate of trust, transparency, coordination, partnership, and inclusivity with stakeholders (O – Rebuild Pride and Optimism)

 Alignment: Align with existing initiatives and promote operational practices that maximize existing resources and introduce efficiency (O – Ensure Services are Efficient and Responsible)

 Internal Capacity Building: Strengthen CSF’s organizational infrastructure to enable the organization to serve as a leader in child and youth behavioral health (O – Improve Effectiveness)

A key component of CSF’s 2020‐2023 strategic plan is enhancing CSF’s operational efficiency which includes the development of key organizational performance measures. Compared to other county departments, CSF is a relatively young organization. Previously developed performance measures are no longer relevant as key processes, procedures, and policies have evolved over time in addition to the adoption adopting of a new strategic plan.

In addition to key organizational performance measures, in 2019 CSF adopted new standardized outcomes to measure the impact of our funded partners in alignment with St. Louis MHB and United Way of Greater St. Louis with the goal of showing regional impact of services for children and youth. Below is a list of outcomes from CSF’s funded partners.