Promise Neighborhood of Central Minnesota
Report date
March 2016
What has been most instrumental to your progress?
Community engagement
Community empowerment
Leadership development
Key lessons learned
The key lesson we learned is that going forward we will have to get better at program design, development and implementation sooner than we initially anticipated. Family and community needs are multifaceted, requiring that programming must me multipurpose, dealing with many issues. Simultaneously foundations and donors that support programs have high expectations from organizations in the areas of, work experience. Education, writing skills, developing measurables and other assessment tools. These are all areas that could provide challenges for community based programs, particularly when an organization represents inclusively low-income communities.
Another lesson learned was the urgent need to develop partnerships with the community, and other service providers.
Progress toward an innovation
Considerable progress is on display using our inside out continuous loop model. New leaders have emerged, jobs have been created at PN, community members have been empowered to fulfill the jobs, community members have been employed outside of PN, community member have moved into leadership roles at PN and outside of PN and relevant programming based on community identified needs have been developed. Our multi-purpose programming has ensured that programs are impactful and relevant.
What's next?
Next steps are to develop tools to measure success, scale up programming and develop partners to support program delivery and identify and receive resources to support programming.
If you could do it all over again...
Narrow scope of service delivery so PN can move to next level with program development and evaluation
One last thought
Community based programming is sustainable because of community involvement. It also creates leadership and economic opportunities and relevant, well attended programs and services.