Forge Your Trail

The Program

Forge Your Trail is a program from Oklahoma Human Services and is run by the University of Oklahoma Center for Public Management. The program helps parents move towards getting caught up in their child support payments and improve relationships with their children. The project’s core idea is people usually want to take care of their kids. The challenge is they don’t see how they can do that with so many other demands.

Watch the featured story on the Forge Your Trail program from Oklahoma's KOCO 5 News.

The Process

The program has coaching sessions focused on skills to help someone plan and achieve their goals. These skills help with personal organization, keeping deadlines, sticking to schedules, and working through complicated paperwork. These are the same tasks needed to find a job and to be able to keep it.

Parents are guided through a journey of ongoing assessment and goal setting focused on jobs, managing finances, and navigating through government red tape. The coaching is done in a way to have long-term success.

The Bridge

Each person’s situation is assessed and tracked using a bridge framework. The Bridge to Self-Sufficiency(c) is held up by five major pillars. These are all connected and are all equally important.

Another pillar is for the encouragement the parent needs while on their child support journey. Although parents are offered to be in the program due to owing child support, the mission is to help them to set goals related to financial well-being. Some goals are finding a good job, saving money, and improving financial skills.

The Bridge guides the coach and the parent to decisions to help with what is happening now and looks towards the future.

The Coach

Each parent is assigned a trained coach who will use tools to assist unemployed or under employed non-custodial parents. The goal is to remove barriers the parent has to financial stability. Plus, they want to move from crisis management to planning then to reaching their goals. Coaching also looks at the poverty and stress-related trauma that can make decisions hard to do.

These techniques can be used online and through the telephone. They focus on helping parents find what they need. The content of the conversations is kept confidential. The fact a parent is working with a coach is shared with Child Support Services, so they know a parent is working to be able to provide support in the future. 

Contact us at forgeyourtrail@ou.edu

Other Resources