Promise Neighborhood of Central Minnesota CI Report – Final

What has been most instrumenta 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.

Reflections on the community innovation process

Other key elements of Community Innovation

Specifically mentioning and focusing on community and family development and empowerment, particularly when working inclusively with disenfranchised communities. Community members, who need to be part of decision making, leadership and economic benefit, Community empowerment should occur at all phases of the community based model. We use a continuous loop model that is inclusive and is similar to the Bush model. Engagement/ identify needs, analyze information, develop solutions, implementation, evaluation and then back to engagement/ identify needs.

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 it will take to reach an innovation?

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.