Human Services Contracting A Public Solutions Handbook

The federal government has been dependent on the nonprofit sector to provide human service delivery for decades. This relationship or transactional activity has become a complicated proposition for policymakers, taxpayers, and service providers at the state and local levels, as the funding for health and human services continued to grow despite economic declines. This book lays out the challenges and opportunities to better understand how to assess human services delivery and judge the appropriate rate of return on public investment for good & services delivered. This text should be required in all fiscal management courses for human service professionals.

David Rudder, Springfield College, USA

Co-editors Robert Shick and Lawrence Martin have made a seminal contribution to the literature on human services contracting in terms of its history, current state, and future evolution. The range of innovative contracting policy and practice examples utilized by various chapter authors is national (e.g., Colorado, Kansas, Massachusetts, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, and Utah), as well as international (e.g., Canada and the Netherlands) in scope. Moreover, in-depth case examples of contracting for specialized human services such as child welfare, mental health, and work force development services, helps to make the challenges and rewards of contracting accessible, informative, and thought-provoking.

Karun K. Singh, Rutgers University, USA