Staff Spotlight: Jessa Langton
For Jessa Langton, joining Family Service Rochester’s Family Resource Center is both a new chapter and a return to a familiar place.
Jessa grew up in Rochester, attended Mayo High School and earned her bachelor’s degree in social work from Winona State University. Her path into social work, though, began at Family Service Rochester.
After initially starting college in education, Jessa stepped away when she realized it wasn’t quite the right fit. A family connection led her to a newly created program assistant position on FSR’s Family Involvement Strategies team, where she became the first person to serve in that role. Working alongside social workers and seeing child welfare up close helped her recognize where she wanted her career to go.
“I realized, yep, this is what I think I should be doing,” she recalls.
Jessa completed her social work degree while continuing to work at FSR. After graduation, she briefly served as a facilitator with the Family Involvement Strategies team before moving to Olmsted County child protection, where she spent the next 10 years. That decade of experience is a big part of what eventually brought her back to FSR. Working alongside families involved with the child welfare system gave Jessa a close view of what families often need much earlier, before circumstances reach the point of child protection involvement.
“Most often, you could just see that if they had some more support,” she says.
Sometimes that means help finding community resources. Sometimes it means practical assistance. Sometimes it simply means having a trusted place to turn when things are getting hard. Jessa saw the Family Resource Center as an opportunity to focus on exactly that kind of prevention.
“The opportunity to be involved in something that is solely focused on prevention and supporting families before things get to that place was a really attractive idea for me.”
She returned to FSR in late July as manager of the Family Resource Center, stepping into her first formal management position after previously serving in a lead social work role.
One change she has appreciated is the opportunity to think more creatively about how families are supported. Child protection work is necessarily shaped by laws, rules and formal requirements. At the Family Resource Center, she has found more room to respond and adapt to what families and the community need.
“It’s been really cool and also just a new thing to kind of stretch the way that I think,” she says.
Jessa has also made a point of learning the work her staff members do firsthand. During her first weeks, that included doing resource navigation herself.
“I think it’s really important to understand the ins and outs of that before you’re going to say that you’re leading or supporting that in that role.”
The Family Resource Center, as Jessa describes it, is a place families can turn when barriers begin piling up and stress is increasing.
Through resource navigation, families can get help finding and connecting with services, understanding benefit systems and sorting through where to begin. The center also provides specialized support for kinship caregivers, including grandparents and other relatives raising a loved one’s child, along with support groups and playgroups that create opportunities for families to build connections with one another.
“There’s so many resources in Olmsted County when it comes to kids and families, but sometimes navigating them, getting connected to them, can be tricky,” Jessa says. “Having that connection and a trusted place to come, I think, is what resource navigation is for.”
That sense of trust is something Jessa has already seen firsthand. She recalled one person bringing a friend to the center during a difficult situation, not because she knew exactly what the FRC could do, but because she trusted that someone there would help.
For Jessa, that was exactly the kind of place the Family Resource Center is meant to be.
Outside of work, she and her husband are raising two elementary-school-age children, which keeps family life busy as well.
As Jessa settles into her new role, she has plenty of ideas about where the Family Resource Center might go next. But she isn’t arriving with a predetermined list of new programs.
Instead, she wants to listen.
That means listening to staff members who have been with the center from the beginning, to employees working directly with families and to the families themselves. The center’s Family Advisory Board, which Jessa is now helping facilitate, is another important source of those ideas.
“I could think of plenty of ideas,” she says, “but I think it’s important to listen to what the community needs.”
For someone who came back to FSR because she wanted to help families before problems become crises, that seems like a fitting place to start.
