This is the first in a 4-part series based on an Expert Webinar held Aug 13, 2026 called “Building a Community Safety Net: Connecting People, Processes, and Tools to Coordinate Resources That Matter”. Speakers were Randi Harms and Loretta Severin from the University of Kansas Center for Public Partnerships and Research. Sign up to see the full video and get future Expert Webinar announcements.
Pulse Check Points
Every Door Should Be the Right Door
A family doesn’t experience a community as a collection of programs. They experience it as a series of doors.
One door leads to a clinic. Another to a food shelf. Another to housing assistance. Another to a school, a county office, or a behavioral health provider. And when a family is already trying to manage too much, every new door can feel like another place they have to explain their story, figure out where they belong, and hope someone can point them in the right direction.
Public health nurses often become the people who help families navigate those doors.
They may be the first to recognize that a health concern is connected to something else—a lack of transportation, an empty refrigerator, unstable housing, or difficulty finding child care. They know that addressing the immediate need is important, but so is helping the family connect with the support that comes next.
That is where a community safety net becomes more than a list of resources.
It becomes a network of people and processes that makes those connections easier. A strong community safety net connects the people, organizations, processes, and tools that help families move from one source of support to another.
When that network works well, every door can become the right door.
What makes a community safety net strong?
A community may have excellent programs and dedicated professionals, yet families can still struggle to access the help they need.
Why? Because the family experiences the connections between organizations, not just the organizations themselves.
A public health nurse may know that a family needs housing assistance. But what happens next?
- Does the nurse know which housing resources currently have capacity?
- Does the family know who to contact?
- Can the nurse connect the family directly to the right organization?
- Will someone follow up?
- Will the nurse know whether the connection worked?
When those answers aren’t clear, families can get stuck. They may make repeated calls, complete duplicate paperwork, tell their story multiple times, or give up altogether.
That is a community safety net problem—not necessarily an individual provider problem.
Start with People and Relationships
Technology often gets the attention when communities talk about improving referrals and resource coordination.
But relationships come first.
Public health nurses already understand the value of relationships. They build trust with families and often develop strong connections with other providers and organizations in their communities.
Those relationships form the foundation of a community safety net.
Consider what happens when a nurse can say: “I know someone who can help you with that.”
That connection can make a complicated system feel much easier to navigate.
But informal relationships have limits. Staff leave. Programs change. Funding shifts. New organizations open and others close.
A community safety net becomes stronger when important connections don’t depend entirely on one person’s memory or contact list.
Communities can strengthen those connections by identifying the organizations that need to work together and creating opportunities for them to build trust, share information, and develop a common purpose.
Turn good relationships into reliable processes
Relationships create connections. Processes make those connections dependable.
For public health nurses, this might mean establishing clear expectations for how referrals happen.
For example:
- What qualifies as a referral?
- What information should accompany a referral?
- Who follows up?
- How quickly should the receiving organization respond?
- What happens when a family cannot be reached?
- How do providers communicate when a referral doesn’t work?
- How does the team know when the family has successfully connected to services?
These questions may sound simple, but different organizations answer them differently. That can create confusion for both providers and families.
The goal isn’t to create unnecessary rules. The goal is to create shared expectations that make it easier for people to work together.
For public health nurses, clear processes can reduce the amount of time spent tracking down information, making repeated calls, and trying to determine what happened after a referral.
Blog 2 in this series focuses on Processes.
Use technology to support the community safety net
Once people have built relationships and organizations have agreed on processes, technology can make those connections easier to manage.
A well-designed public-health EHR (electronic health record system) can help public health teams document needs, coordinate services, track referrals, and keep important information connected to the people and families they serve.
But technology should support the community safety net—not try to create one on its own.
The right question isn’t: “Which software should we use?”
Instead, communities should ask:
- “What problem are we trying to solve?”
- “What do our nurses and other providers need to coordinate care effectively?”
- “What information needs to follow the person or family?”
- “How can our technology support the way our community has agreed to work together?”
When communities start with those questions, technology becomes a tool for strengthening coordination rather than another system for providers to navigate.
Blog 3 in this series focuses on Tools.
Close the loop with data
One of the biggest opportunities for strengthening a community safety net is improving what happens after a referral.
A nurse may connect a family with a resource, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the family received the service.
The family might not have been able to reach the organization. The program may not have had capacity. Transportation may have been a barrier. The family may have needed a different service altogether.
Without visibility into what happened next, the nurse may never know.
Closed-loop referral processes can help change that.
When providers can see whether a referral was received, whether someone followed up, and whether the connection was successful, they can respond sooner when something goes wrong.
That visibility also creates an opportunity to improve the broader community safety net.
For example, referral data may reveal that:
- One service receives far more referrals than it can handle.
- Providers struggle to find resources for a particular need.
- Referrals frequently stall at the same point.
- Certain geographic areas have fewer available resources.
- Families face repeated barriers when trying to access a specific service.
That information gives communities something more useful than anecdotes. It gives them a starting point for action.
The last blog in this series focuses on data and partner mapping.
Make every door the right door
Public health nurses don’t have to know the answer to every question a family brings to them.
But they should have a reliable way to help families find the next right step.
That’s the promise of a strong community safety net.
When organizations build relationships, establish shared processes, and use technology thoughtfully, they can reduce the burden on families to navigate complex systems on their own.
The result isn’t simply better referrals. It’s a community where people can walk through one door and still find their way to the help they need—even when that help exists somewhere else.
Every door should be the right door and public health nurses are in a powerful position to help communities build the connections that make that possible.
A practical place to start improving your community safety net
Ask yourself and your community partners:
If a family came to us today with a need we couldn’t meet, how confident are we that we could connect them to the right resource—and know what happened next?
If the answer isn’t clear, that’s an opportunity to strengthen your community safety net.
Start with the people. Build the process. Then choose the tools that help make it work.
Watch for parts 2, 3 and 4 in this series over the next few weeks:
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The graphics used for this article were generated with a series of AI-prompts. The article was written by a human after getting an AI-generated outline of keypoints from the webinar transcript.