United Way of Steele County
Report date
December 2018
What has been most instrumental to your progress?
The innovation we are working on is more people engaging together to solve problems but especially creating a culture and environment of diverse engagement where people can speak for themselves and not as representatives of their community and can bring ideas forward. This year our work with Marnita’s Table holding events that brought the community together and training community members in the intentional social interaction model was an important step to reaching this goal. We held community feasts and discussion on authentic welcome, engagement and creating employment connections. Across the community events, 333 people attended of which 214 were people of color and 156 were under the age of 24. Our goal going into the first year was to have people meet each other across difference, catalyze engagement and add seats at the tables of influence in our community. In order to accomplish this, we were intentional about having a goal of 51% people of color/immigrant/indigenous and 33% people under the age of 24 This is significant because we were told by many community members in stakeholder organizations that this was an impossible goal to set, because they just don’t come.
We created a paid bilingual student ambassadorship summer internship program which served in the place of the parent engagement specialist we originally proposed (more on that below under challenges). These young people age 14-19 embraced the role of ambassadors doing outreach with their parents, family and friends for community activities. They also created interactive projects with the community on areas of interest including on the street interviews, podcasts, videos and presentations on cooking, small business and agriculture and fashion as well as the challenges of growing up bilingual/bicultural in Owatonna. All of the student ambassadors attended a community training with the Marnita’s Table team in Intentional Social Interaction and assisted with hosting an event. We trained 3 people to be Master trainers for future cohorts. From one of the young people “Thank you for today. It was truly amazing and I loved hearing other people’s stories and what they had to overcome. It was totally amazing once again to be part of making that happen. If you ever need me I would definitely be there and my friends would love to have their families and friends come too,” Eman age 17
We launched a community-wide website to match people with opportunities to get engaged in the community, through helping or attending community events or creating their own needs/pages. The website is volunteerconnect.unitedwaysteelecounty.org and it currently has currently has 29 different organizations posting opportunities, 30 different volunteer needs, and 105 active users registered to help. This is important because it introduced the opportunity for transparency and skills based volunteering, matching individuals who registered their skills or interests with community organizations which expressed ongoing or one-time needs. In the past, Board membership and even opportunities to help with a community project were only knowable through word of mouth from other insiders in the community. People would remark that there was no one to fill their committees when in fact there were barriers for diverse, young community members to even know about opportunities to engage in the community and self-identify as being interested in an existing opportunity or to organize new ones
Key lessons learned
As part of the implementation plan in our grant proposal we had a partnership with Owatonna public schools to hire a family engagement specialist and develop some joint programs between UWSC and School staff to active engagement with new families to our community. After we were awarded the Otto Bremer Trust and Community Innovation grant funds we began to set up timelines for our partner to hire the staff and for us to support the deliverables that we had in our grant proposal. Deadlines kept slipping and the staff was hired late and then never really began to do the work as it was envisioned. The lesson to learn from this failure is around setting an expectation that failure is permissible. Once it became clear that we did need to change the way we accomplished new resident family engagement we were able to think about ways to accomplish the goal which included some additional community events and the creation of the student bilingual ambassador program. The revised plan was arguably better. We are looking forward to building on this model in Year 2 and are not trying to go back to the original vision of a staff member.
We have had a breakthrough in understanding how people like to be communicated with in our community. For our first CommUnity Table event we had a large attendance, most of the people who attended were recruited by people in our community that had relationships with the groups we wanted in the room, specifically people of color, immigrants, native populations and young people. These connectors were paid for their time both before the event and during to facilitate a welcoming and warm environment for all, including translation at the event. We saw the power of a personal invitation and this was reinforced during the event when people said this is how they like to learn about opportunities in the community (despite or perhaps due to the proliferation of social media) By the time we got to our most recent event, we thought that we could let the momentum of the previous two draw the audience and so primarily sent out emails and Facebook messages. The crowd was smaller. Engagement relies upon personal invitations and this needs to be sustained for longer than we initially thought.
Reflections on inclusive, collaborative or resourceful problem-solving
Inclusive and Collaborative: The progress that we have made this year has been when we collaborated with community connectors and young leaders in our community as well as the very diverse staff of Marnita’s Table. By including more voices in the process of understanding the problem and creating opportunities for others to come and participate in defining the future of our community, we have begun to move from a system where we are asked to identify one person who can represent their community to an expectation that everyone is only expected to tell their own stories. We have coupled that process with a partnership with Owatonna Forward, a grassroots community group that is looking to engage 200 new people in the coming year in solving community problems and creating new opportunities for a vibrant community across 6 dimensions.
Other key elements of Community Innovation
Ability to think creatively and take risks with our partners, openness to public failure, flexibility to rethink process that will get us to the outcome. We talk about this as being similar to a venture capital mindset.
Understanding the problem
We have learned this year that in order to have more people engaging together to solve problems and create community parent to parent and family to family connections, we need to recognize how people like to be communicated with even in a digital age this is by face to face invitations or conversations. We also had a very powerful moment during our CommUnity feast on Engage! Where people were asked to line up on a continuum- whether they were as engaged in the community as they wanted to be and were ready to step back on the one hand and whether they were looking to engage in the community on the other end, When we looked at who was in which spot on the continuum we were able to simply and powerfully show that older white people in our community are ready to step back and that the people that are ready to take their place were predominantly young People of color in our community. This has led us to think about how we design the next stage to make sure we can facilitate that handoff of responsibility.
If you could do it all over again...
Sometimes the first people to come to the table in a collaboration are not the right partners. They may be institutional stakeholders with a lot of limitations and less commitment. It has taken a long time to identify the right community individuals and partners to do this work. If we had known this at the beginning we would have designed the timeline for the Parent Engagement piece differently and not seen it as implementation but rather as the step before that in the innovation process. We are on track now but that set us back 6 months in that part of the project design.