Impact Foundation
Report date
December 2018
What has been most instrumental to your progress?
1. Workgroups: One of the aspects related to our work over the entire grant term which was instrumental in us making progress was establishing work groups within our Coalition. We have representation from twelve diverse sectors of our Community on the Coalition. The members self selected the work groups they wanted to become involved with to drive our strategies. We had a Data Dashboard Work Group, an Actionable Report Work Group and a Blueprint Guidebook Work Group. Each of these work groups had specific objectives they were working on to achieve the outcome measurements that we have in our Strategic Plan. (Strategic Plan attached). We have completed the Data Dashboard and the Actionable Report (Actionable Report attached). However, we found that, because of the complexity of our community, we wouldn't be able to complete the Blueprint Guidebook. Instead, the Coalition has refocused on other ways to support youth thriving. There has been much discussion evaluating our next steps and we've changed structure to youth, parents, and community workgroups to define the most effective and attainable ideas.
2. Social Capital Survey: An additional activity related to our work which assisted us in making progress was the creation of our own Social Capital Survey which assessed middle/high school students' connectedness, or social capital, related to peers, family, schools and community. The survey was administered to all public/parochial schools within the Fargo community. The findings of the survey were profoundly helpful in providing us with information to drive our next steps which had included the creation of a Blueprint Guidebook. This Guidebook was intended to gather and organize all of the activities for Fargo youth and work to ensure that as many youth as possible were connected to activities, a youth protective factor. The Coalition realized through the process what a daunting task that was as we began collecting data. We regrouped and are in the process of using our survey results, youth focus groups, and key informant interviews to assist in determining next steps to help youth thrive. All of this information is driving our next strategies and has been extremely valuable when sharing results not only with the schools but with other agencies and organizations in Fargo.
3. Actionable Report: A component related to our work which has been instrumental in us making progress was the culmination of data from the Social Capital Survey into an Actionable Report. The findings were significant. We found those youth with the highest levels of social capital were also those that were using none to fewer numbers of alcohol and other drugs. Thus, as social capital went up, alcohol and other drug use went down and conversely when social capital went down, alcohol and other drug use went up. We also found that even though youth are spending 2 or more hours a day with their families, approximately one third of them are not sharing their thoughts and feelings. The findings also showed that 19% of youth do not believe they matter to their community and 20% felt alone in their lives. About 38% of student do not participate in any activities outside of school. Our first overall Social Capital index score was 62.3%. This will be used to compare our future findings as we continue to help youth thrive in Fargo.This report has been the hallmark to begin educating and creating an awareness using responses from our youth both quantitative and qualitative.
Key lessons learned
1. Be Patient: One key lesson learned is the importance of patience in the development of the survey and the time to get the Actionable Report put together. When working with a highly collaborative, energetic and excited Coalition there are many view points. We recognized the need to ensure we are listening respectfully to everyone and that the process time needed to engage everyone to the best of our ability is a priority. At times, that delays the process, however, it was critical and made our Coalition become stronger as a group working toward our mission. The time to put together the Social Capital survey and then to collaboratively decide on what the most important elements for the community to understand from our Actionable Report took the greatest amount of time. The sense of failure may have been the frustration that some members felt in how long the process took. Now that this has all come to fruition; it has been great to see the final results and the useful information and tools that have been created. These will be much more effective in driving future strategies and were made possible through the funds and the time frame we were given through the Bush Foundation.
2. Too Much Data: Another key lesson we learned was that the value of the Social Capital Survey instrument has been significant to understand the behavior and attitude of middle and high school aged youth. A consideration however, is that there is so much data that sometimes it is overwhelming to choose where to focus to understand our youth. The youth focus groups and key informant interviews validate priorities. Also, our highly skilled evaluator assisted, when we had many differing views, to clarify what makes the most sense to affect our outcomes. The survey will be instrumental in tracking the trends over the years as we have been actively working with the Fargo schools to ensure that we can administer the survey every other year. We are working diligently to ensure that our data aligns, as best it can, with the issues we can have an impact on with our youth and their families. Again, our evaluator is very helpful in bringing us back to defining what we can influence and how we can best impact those variables. The Social Capital Survey and Actionable Report are instruments we look forward to sharing with other communities.
3. Blueprint Guidebook: An area that we might consider a failure was being able to create a Blueprint Guidebook to organize all activities in Fargo and identify gaps to fill. We began the process by interviewing approximately 20 youth related organizations and coalition members that represent the 12 community sectors. Many of the organizations had very similar recommendations as to what the barriers were which included; parental monitoring, lack of access to activities for several specific populations, lack of transportation and limited mentoring for many youth. We soon discovered that the community of Fargo is large, has lots of activities and those activities are constantly changing. The Coalition determined that we should focus on parent education, connection to youth supportive activities, transportation and mentoring. These greatest needs for youth that were highlighted in the data/interviews are the next steps we are strategically going to be focusing our efforts on to create the greatest impact possible.
Reflections on the community innovation process
Generating possible ideas in the work we have completed to date was possibly the most important element of our process. We continue to use this process to help us sort through all of the ways in which we can help young people thrive in Fargo. We have currently revisited our strategic plan and have assessed what things we have accomplished which can be removed from the plan, what objectives need more work, and what new goals and objectives can be added that we believe we can accomplish over the next years, both short and long term. An exciting project that the Coalition has decided to proceed with is the creation of a Family Gift Box. The Box will be gift wrapped and given to all sixth grade families at the start of the next school year. It will have as its theme to put away electronics or 'unplug to be present'. The box will be a place that families can place their electronics when they want to have time together to communicate and have fun together. The theme will be 'our presence is their present' with hash tag #never too busy. The box will contain small gift ideas for families to engage with one another. Search Institute and PARENTS LEAD materials will be included.
Progress toward an innovation
Our effectiveness and sustainability has been working through our 12 sectors engaging the Community in understanding the need for all youth to have some level of connectedness with caring, dependable and trustworthy adults. We have also realized the need for young people to connect with one another to have peer to peer healthy relationships. We are committed to assist the community to receive as much information and education as possible to understand adolescents and make space for patience in their development. We also want to ensure we create a strong message of non use of tobacco, alcohol and other drugs as research from NIDA has proven that youth who begin early use have much more significant problems in their lives. Thus, helping the community understand normal adolescent development, the need for them to be drug free and the critical need for them to be connected is our messaging. The Bush Foundation has supported the creation of an adolescent brain video which will be shared with the community through businesses, schools, faith based organizations and other organizations to help create an understanding of youth development and how provided external boundaries can help.
What it will take to reach an innovation?
The innovation we plan to achieve is to work with specific questions from the Social Capital Survey with low scores and create interventions that will impact those questions when youth take the survey next fall. One example is that 36.2% of youth said they do not regularly share their thoughts and feelings with their parents or guardians. The Parent Gift Box described earlier provided materials from SEARCH and Parents Lead to promote conversations with youth. Education will be included to be present, by putting down devices, and engage your child in conversation. Parents Lead has a deck of cards with questions that can be used. This will be provided to all the parents of 6th graders. Our goal, through this and other tactics in the coming year, is to lower that 36.2% when 7th graders take the test next fall. The Coalition is choosing relevant social capital questions for all identified strategies. Youth focus groups will continue monthly to get advice from them on how to impact some of the questions.
What's next?
We have had many conversations with Dakota Medical Foundation's President, Pat Traynor and he and his Board are passionate to continue the work in the field of prevention of youth substance use. They have recognized the need for sustainability for prevention and that prevention takes time, funding and a sincere commitment for the duration of time it takes to move the needle to more positive outcomes. He and his Board are currently discussing how they will work to make this a priority of DMF and what all it will take to ensure sustainability for the long haul as prevention efforts take sometimes many years to show outcomes of improvement. Currently, we need to focus on what that looks like, how we can design the process, what are the expected outcomes and how we are going to accurately to measure our outcomes over time. We are looking at an over arching community based prevention process and having it supported through Dakota Medical Foundation with support from other possible partners and resources.
If you could do it all over again...
The greatest piece of advice would be to have more patience and confidence in the process. I am an individual who likes to get things done and as quickly as I can, especially when I believe individuals need help or are suffering and there is something we can do about it. Throughout this time frame, I have learned that in order to get buy in from community members representing this large North Dakota community, it was important to step back and listen to my colleagues about the need to have confidence in the process and not be so excited that I wasn't investing the time needed to ensure that process was the best it could be for youth and their families. It would have been important to know for me personally that this type of work takes time and that the investment on the front end always pays off much more significantly at the end when we allow the process to run its course. I am so grateful that the Bush Foundation was patient with our process throughout the entire time. We had times that we needed to shift our direction and the flexibility helped me to understand the importance of being patient to ensure all key stakeholders remained engaged.
One last thought
Having the support from the Bush Foundation since the initiation of the Venture Youth Alliance to our current Coalition, LevelUp Fargo, has been phenomenal in that it has allowed us to adjust our needs throughout the entire process. We believe this investment has helped us to accomplish what we have done to date and our look to the future is very bright for what we will continue to accomplish. We are currently a SAMHSA, Drug Free Communities grantee and we believe we would have not had the opportunity or inspiration to even apply for that grant had we not had the confidence of what we were doing and what we wanted to accomplish through the support of the Bush Foundation and the leadership from Maggie Arzdorf-Schubbe. She was a tremendous support, encouraging us along the way and assisting us when encountered any 'snags' within our process and she always had very helpful feedback on what we could do to improve our efforts. She also supported the successes of the outcomes we were able to accomplish. We truly appreciated that one on one support throughout our entire process.