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Welcome to the CareTogetherCMS wiki, the primary technical documentation for CareTogether. This main page is intended as an introduction for a general audience, while other wiki pages are focused on specific technical topics and primarily intended for developers.
The CareTogether system is built to address the following scenario. Understanding the terminology defined here will help in understanding the common language used in the code and documentation. Note that not all organizations using CareTogether will necessarily use some or all of this terminology.
An organization using CareTogether is a nonprofit whose mission involves bringing volunteer families and partnering families together in community. This basic premise, which is grounded in the biblical concept of φιλοξενία (philoxenia - love of strangers), allows helping others to shift from transactional exchanges to transformational relationships. CareTogether exists to enable the logistics and professional support that nonprofit organizations provide to biblical hospitality ministries. These logistics will vary depending on the policies of each organization, and sometimes even by location (e.g., a particular chapter, church, etc.) within an organization. However, they will all follow a fundamental structure of bringing families (and individuals within families) together in supervised arrangements in response to referrals. In addition, volunteers need to be approved for one or more volunteer roles (which can be family roles or individual roles) before they can be assigned to serve in the corresponding volunteer function for a particular arrangement.
Note that, within CareTogether, both organizations and locations are sometimes informally referred to as tenants (of the system) for convenience.
A family, or various individuals within a family, may be involved with the CareTogether system from both a partnering (requesting help) and a volunteering (providing help) perspective. However, in both cases the concept of what defines a family - for the purposes of CareTogether - remains the same:
- Adults - one or more people over 18 years old in the family, which may or may not be household members, may or may not be the primary family contact, and can have one of several kinds of adult-family relationship: dad, mom, relative, friend, and even a domestic worker who is providing childcare (e.g., a nanny). Notice that this is a relatively loose definition of "family", encompassing people who are "doing life" together. Adults may in some cases pose a safety risk which can be noted and flagged in the system.
- Children - any people under 18 years old in the family, which have one or more custodial relationships with specific adults in the family. Custodial relationships include a parent with custody, a parent with court-appointed custody (i.e., a court has removed custody for that child from the other parent and awarded it to this parent), as well as someone who is a legal guardian. Notice that each child in the family can have different custodial relationships with different adults in the family.
The process for approving a volunteer (or volunteer family) begins with the receipt of a volunteer role application. At this point, a family is created in CareTogether and the key family details for the prospective volunteer are provided. An organization's or location's policies will specify some number of approval requirements, which can be represented as any number of form uploads (e.g., application forms, background checks) and/or activities (such as interviews), for a given volunteer role or volunteer family role. As these requirements are completed, CareTogether will automatically update the approval status for the prospective individuals/families and will determine when they have become approved volunteers. Approval requirements may also have to be repeated periodically, so a previously approved volunteer who, for example, fails to renew their background check in time will be identified as expired until any expired requirements have been addressed. Note that a volunteer or volunteer family can apply for multiple volunteer roles and be at a different stage of the approval process for each role. In situations where a particular form or activity satisfies multiple roles' approval requirements, CareTogether will automatically update each approval status. Finally, when defining volunteer family roles in a tenant's policy it is necessary to specify the family requirement scope for any approval requirements as either being required once per family or once for each adult in the family.
The intake process for families who are requesting help from a hospitality ministry begins when an intake application is received from a family (typically subsequent to the initial request for help and after an initial intake conversation). At this point, a family is created in CareTogether and the key family details are provided, and then a referral is opened for that partnering family in the system. Referral records are pending until all the intake requirements specified in the tenant's policies are met. This referral record then remains open until it is specifically closed for one of several referral close reasons: the need was not appropriate for the organization, the family requesting help was resourced in some other way (such as by referring to another organization that provides a required service), lack of capacity to meet the need, help no longer being needed due to a change in circumstances, or that the need has actually been met through one or more arrangements that were facilitated by the organization. Note that a referral cannot be closed as long as any arrangements within that referral are open.
While a referral is open, one or more arrangements can be created to try to help meet the needs of the partnering family. Each tenant may offer different types of arrangements, and those arrangements may or may not involve housing and/or daytime-only childcare for the partnering family's children. If children are housed or cared for in an arrangement, CareTogether facilitates tracking the location plan for each child, including each overnight/daytime assignment to a volunteer family providing care for the child as well as each instance when the child is returned to a parent. A tenant's policies will dictate the required setup actions and required closeout actions for each arrangement type. In addition, an arrangement may have required monitoring actions that occur on a specified recurring schedule while an arrangement is open. Finally, each arrangement type specifies one or more volunteer functions to which volunteers, or volunteer families, can be assigned as part of each arrangement, as well as how many volunteers need to be assigned to that function in order to open the arrangement: zero or more, exactly one, or one or more.
Individuals - in particular adults within partnering families - can define goals that they want to meet. These goals may or may not be met as part of a particular referral. They are tied only to the individual. This allows goals to be tracked long-term, potentially across multiple referrals.