Legal Services of Northwest Minnesota
Report date
August 2017
What has been most instrumental to your progress?
Building the Coalition - From the beginning we hoped to link our two communities for the better sharing of information and resources and forging connections that would enhance local professionals' ability to serve children and youth. We invited strategic partners in the provision of services to children and youth to come together to form the Coalition. As simple as this process sounds, it required significant work and discussion to define the boundaries of the Coalition. Although we intend for the Coalition to eventually expand we realized there would not be significant planning work in the early stages unless we had the right people in the room initially and we took the time required to do this properly.
Defining the Coalition. Once invited, we asked our partners to do the hard work of setting the direction of the Coalition. They accomplished this and in doing so developed new working relationships and began learning from each other.
The Report of the Coalition. As the discussions at the Coalition matured, the members realized that there were gaps in service but because of a lack of shared and interpreted data between the two communities/across state lines it was difficult to identify gaps in services, opportunities for improvement and even to have a common language about the good services that were in place or a mean to measure progress over time. The Coalition focused on developing a report of the State of Our Children to tackle the tough job of producing data that was “apples to apples” across the communities – to be able to get a better picture of where our children are at today and what services are available and working. Likewise, the Coalition believed that the report would be of value to many members of our communities. The report process began with discussions about which existing metrics could be used to measure the health of the community’s youth. The research and analysis of that data was quite time consuming and at times overwhelming, but it is am important tool we will use to explore the wellbeing of area children.
Key lessons learned
Engaging Busy Professionals.
We learned that without an engaging and critical process it is difficult to have the right players at the table and to keep them there. Individuals have a limited capacity to commit their time. The Coalition could be seen as “one more meeting”. The grantees were concerned that this could be the result unless the meetings were full-bodied, engaging and added value to their work. This was very difficult at first. Additionally, an on-going and better funded project in the Fargo area was taking the time and energy of certain stakeholders that we would have like to have engaged. Without those stakeholders on the Fargo side engaging the same stakeholders on the Moorhead side was fruitless. As a result, we made adjustments to our mission and goals.
We learned that without an engaging and critical process it is difficult to have the right players at the table and to keep them there. Individuals have a limited capacity to commit their time. The Coalition could be seen as “one more meeting”. The grantees were concerned that this could be the result unless the meetings were full-bodied, engaging and added value to their work. This was very difficult at first. Additionally, an on-going and better funded project in the Fargo area was taking the time and energy of certain stakeholders that we would have like to have engaged. Without those stakeholders on the Fargo side engaging the same stakeholders on the Moorhead side was fruitless. As a result, we made adjustments to our mission and goals.
“Common” Data. With the differences in the child welfare systems, court systems and other differences outside of our control between the two counties it was very difficult to get common data. It is a testament to the commitment to the Coalition that all members worked hard to bring the data they owned and took the further step of trying to make sure that it was comparable data. In addition, we discovered that data we knew would be helpful to establish a baseline was not being gathered in an accessible format and therefore was unusable.
Failure. The Coalition worked long and hard to develop the “common” data. The process was fruitful and most members would say this was a valuable experience. A possible failure is that during the grant period there was not time to dig deeper into the data and develop strategies to identify the gaps in services and possible strategies to close those gaps.
Reflections on the community innovation process
Collaboration has been key to this process. True collaboration is not just getting together to meet but listening and accepting input from all members. It is a slow and sometimes difficult process. Collaborators in this project come from different perspectives personally, professionally and geographically. We learned quickly that one cannot assume we all agree to things as simple as definitions or goals. The work we do is all critical to protecting children from violence but each stakeholder has a different perceptive, role, and responsibility in that work that are at times at odds with one another. Working through these different perspectives and understanding each other's roles and limitations took time, patience and energy. In the end, however, be working through this process we established a true collaboration.
Progress toward an innovation
We have not engaged in significant progress towards a breakthrough. However, the development of an engaged, broad-based, and dynamic Coalition is in itself a breakthrough for this community. Professionals from multiple disciplines across two states are now regularly engaged in conversations about the needs of children in our community. This community collaborative has the potential to be an agent of significant change in the Fargo-Moorhead area. This is an effort that had been tried before and failed. But the Bush grant funds provided time to build a solid foundation of relationships, goals and trust to make the meetings meaningful and therefore sustainable in the long term. We have established the initial metrics to allow us to identify gaps, which makes us much closer to finding the innovation solutions.
What it will take to reach an innovation?
A policy or structural breakthrough will require further analysis and discussion of the data. Continued assessment and evaluation of the data will be required to find an original and groundbreaking solution that is feasible given our collective but still limited resources. The Coalition members are busy professionals that do critical work for children every day. They are passionate about what they do. Other projects take away from their critical daily work. Therefore, developing an innovative idea that sparks the interest of all or most of the Coalition members is a necessary step to ensure the innovation will have the energy and talent devoted to it to move that idea forward.
What's next?
The Coalition will continue meeting quarterly. The quarterly meetings assist in maintaining and deepening relationships. Members will be continually engaged with educational topics and networking opportunities and the opportunity to close gaps on needs of area children. There will also be discussions about expanding and diversifying the Coalition. The expectation is that the State of Our Children Report will be done annually. We would like to distribute the Report to the larger community through our Coalition members asking for input on its usefulness and how to improve it. Another next step is to drill down further with some of the data. For instance, we talked about having a better understanding of where kids are located and what are safe places in our counties. We will also consider how to include information from families impacted by the systems (courts, child protection, law enforcement, etc) that we work in with their input into the community need from the 'users' perspective. This is difficult information to gather as the Coalition members are sensitive to the confidentiality issues at play and unwilling to re-traumatize families in crisis.
If you could do it all over again...
Be patient. If an idea was simple someone would have through of it and done it already. Change take a long time. Grant funding is a gift to try new things. So measure and collect big and little data whenever possible to measure effectively and successes and the failures. With number we know what is and is not working for all aspects of a project, even for something as simple as meeting attendance. But at the same time start thinking about how the project will continue after the grant is over. Although we discussed sustainability there is not continued funding, and therefore, the Coalition must continue its work without a staff member and because the partners and core Coalition members are committed to the long term success of the work we believe it can happen.
One last thought
It is critical to have a staff member coordinating grant activities. However, when the staff member is employed by someone else it is very difficult relationship for the grant recipient and the grant coordinator. The lines of supervision are blurred and the primary employer has the day-to-day supervisors responsibility. If that supervisor or program is not fully committed to the project that puts the grant coordinator in a very difficult position. Grant partners can try to direct the work of the grant coordinator but they are not the supervisor/employer the grant coordinator is torn in many directions The grant coordinator was also given numerous other tasks by her employer (although they moved her to full time) that limited her ability to focus on this project. This three-legged supervisory model caused the project to stall at many turns.