Itasca County CI Report – Final

What has been most instrumenta to your progress?

1. Itasca County engaged a broad range of sectors engaged with the justice system with inclusion of sectors who could potentially assist with improvement in outcomes for crossover youth (higher ed and employment) from both Itasca County and Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe for relationship building. Equivalent representatives from both entities were invited. Meetings were facilitated virtually during the first year of the pandemic. A barrier is turnover of staff since that time.

2. Itasca County contracted with Anishinaabe Education for information gathering from tribal families engaged in the justice system including CPS and juvenile courts and/or truancy. This work began within the past month. Incentives were offered to families for their participation.

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Key lessons learned

1. Turnover is a barrier, especially when working on long-term relationship building and collaboration.

The pandemic has caused delays in implementation and engagement, for safety reasons and for time and energy to move new work forward.

Reflections on the community innovation process

Thus far, increasing collective understanding of the issue has been the most important, not only from sectors in Leech Lake Reservation and Itasca County but from the families involved in the justice systems themselves. We are delayed in our process; however, have taken steps forward to gather this information and will present the sectors who met initially to engage in relationship building between Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe and Itasca County.

Other key elements of Community Innovation

The intentional relationship building between sectors in comparable roles between the tribal and county entities was not in the diagram – yet important to building trust in the innovation process.

Progress toward an innovation

Due to Itasca County engaging in intentional relationship building prior to implementation of grant work plans, and due to pandemic shut downs and struggles with engagement and interaction with partner organizations and families, we are not in a place where our innovation is closer to occurring. It isn’t farther away either. We will need additional time to identify successes and barriers directly from the families who have been involved in CPS and juvenile justice systems, identify key themes, present back to tribal and county partners, identify innovations and if able, to pilot them.

What it will take to reach an innovation?

We need additional time to gather information from families, identify themes, present back to tribal and county partners, identify innovations (and who will implement) and potentially pilot the innovations.

What’s next?

We will continue on with our original workplan.

If you could do it all over again…

We wouldn’t necessarily change how this process has progressed as many of the delays were pandemic related. Knowing that there needed to be intentional and broad relationship building on the front end, perhaps from learning more from tribal partners and their experiences in working in collaborative grants with outside entities would have been helpful and could have been completed earlier in the process – pre-engagement type of work. We also recognized that our initial planning and implementation ideas were not necessarily what would have worked best for our tribal partners. Bringing the tribal partners in sooner during planning may have expedited some of our implementation.

One last thought

We are excited that our whole families innovation work is moving forward, even if slower than anticipated. We look forward to extending the grant cycle for the next 2 year cycle.