Alliance for Strong Families and Communities, Council on Accreditation rebrand as Social Current
At the beginning of 2021, the Alliance for Strong Families and Communities and the Council on Accreditation announced a merger, combining the nation’s largest trade organization for youth and family services providers with one of the largest accreditors of community and residential programs. A new name was in the offing, leadership said.
Nine months later, the groups used its 2021 virtual conference to unveil their new unified identity: Social Current.
“We are incredibly excited to come together as Social Current with a mission to advocate for and implement equitable solutions to society’s toughest challenges through collaboration, innovation, policy, and practice excellence,” said Social Current CEO Jody Levison-Johnson.
The Alliance for Strong Families and Communities worked with member leaders in the human services sector to help organizations boost the cause of equity, providing leadership development and construct solutions to tough social problems, and pushing them out nationally.
The Council on Accreditation, founded in the 1970s by a group of organizations that included the Alliance, was an international nonprofit accreditor of community-based behavioral health care and social service organizations involved in child welfare, behavioral health and community-based human and social services for children, youth, adults and families. Those certified organizations and programs serve more than 10 million individuals and families each year.
The two entities announced in the summer of 2020 that they were exploring a merger, and made it official in January of 2021. Alliance CEO Susan Dreyfus retired in March, and Council on Accreditation President Jody Levison-Johnson became the chief executive of the entity now called Social Current.
The name was established after months of work led by an internal naming task force, said Social Current spokesperson Jennifer Devlin, in an email to Youth Services Insider. That group collected data and input from the staff and boards of both organizations, conducted interviews with partners in the human services sector, and hired the branding firm Truth Collective to assist in the process.
“We believe Social Current embodies our vision, mission, and values which were also developed by a board task force and senior leadership from both legacy organizations,” Devlin said.
Social Current’s new website can be found here; social media links can be found here for Twitter, here for Facebook, and here for LinkedIn.
Correction: This article originally stated that the merger was finalized in January of 2020; it was January of 2021.