Ramsey County CI Report – Interim

What has been most instrumental to your progress?

Collaboration has been instrumental to our progress this year. We have had a really solid, consistent team, which has enabled us to stay on the same page as we advance. It has really felt like we are all working together to achieve the same goals. In addition, because of our close working relationships, each of us has pulled our own weight on the team, despite each of us having busy, full-time jobs.

Our community engagement strategy has also been integral to our success. One of the decisions we made early on was to transition from our proposed traditional engagement framework, consisting of community meetings and focus groups, to a more integrated model facilitated by Marnita’s Table called Intentional Social Interaction, or ISI. ISI is a model of engagement across race, class, and culture that is designed to be inclusive by ensuring each conversation includes at least 51% people of color and 1/3 youth under age 24. By embracing this inclusive approach, we have not only been able to achieve authentic input from a wide variety of stakeholders, but the stakeholders have had an opportunity to genuinely engage with each other and learn from each other’s perspectives. This has not only helped us generate ideas to consider as we move forward, but it has helped people feel valued and heard and helped advance the system change we’re seeking by helping system professionals gain additional perspective as to how end users experience our systems.

Finally getting our heads around the data sharing elements has been critical to our collaborative efforts. A lack of ability to share data within and among systems has long presented barriers to true, effective communication and collaboration. Because of this project and its commitment to finally putting the legal measures in place to overcome those barriers, project partners have remained steadfast in their commitment to see this through and to direct their staff to help find a way to make it work. We are currently in the process of vetting legal agreements through our agencies’ legal counsel, so we aren’t counting our chickens, so to speak, just yet, however we are all optimistic that we will succeed. In addition, it has been really gratifying to be met with enthusiasm by our staff when talking about this project and the data sharing it seeks to achieve. Especially among long term staff, and data staff, there has been great excitement expressed about the potential to finally overcome these barriers and transform our ability to see the big picture and improve our collective efficacy with kids and families.

Key lessons learned

We have learned multiple lessons in our work to-date around community engagement. The first is that community engagement is just plain hard. It’s hard to engage people in projects at the right level and in the right way. Timing matters. If you engage too early before enough decisions have been made, people ask questions that the decision-makers haven’t decided yet; if you engage too late, people feel that everything has already been decided and their input won’t be valuable. The approach matters. The challenge is not to provide too much guidance so as to predetermine the outcome, but enough to get concrete, meaningful input. With our project, everyone generally agrees that the status quo isn’t acceptable and change needs to happen, but the very important question that lacks consensus is, how?

Reflections on inclusive, collaborative or resourceful problem-solving

As described above, our ability to effectively collaborate has been integral to our progress thus far. Our core leadership team is comprised of high level leaders from each organization who have the decision-making ability, access, and influence to either make decisions themselves in short order and/or get answers to questions and decisions made quickly by system leaders, which has prevented us from getting held up as issues have arisen. Our close working relationships have made for a cohesive team, which has enabled the project to continue moving forward.

Other key elements of Community Innovation

The most senior member of our team, who is very experienced with collaborative public sector efforts, as she is nearing retirement, immediately responded to this question when we were brainstorming our answers as a group. She said our core group is comprised of very capable individuals who are good analysts, forward-thinking and bring a diversity of perspectives on systems and data to the table. This intellectual capacity has resulted in true system support.

Understanding the problem

As described earlier, we gathered lots of input from folks in our community about needs that exist surrounding youth in Ramsey County. We believe that our integrated data platform will be a partial solution to identifying those needs, and hopefully meeting them, going forward but a tangential benefit to using the Intentional Social Interaction model has been twofold: 1) residents, especially youth and people of color, have expressed that this engagement is the first time they have really felt a part of their school and/or community and that their input is valued and 2) system professionals, especially those who have worked in the system for years, have gained increased understanding of the impacts of the decisions they make and how people in our community experience our systems. As one of our team members stated, this will help people stop ‘leading from ignorance,’ and inadvertently making decisions that have unintended, and even counterproductive, consequences for our residents. These benefits should have ripple effects in terms of improving interactions and fomenting system change.

If you could do it all over again…

Our best piece of advice would be that this work is hard and will take longer than anticipated. We have not had the benefit of having any dedicated staff, so although having a core leadership team comprised of high level staff is helpful, it also means that we all have busy, demanding jobs and multiple competing priorities. Also, the work has evolved over the course of the year and new opportunities have arisen, which are beneficial to the work, but require flexibility and adjustments to our preconceived work plan. The Bush Foundation’s flexibility in enabling us to make these changes throughout our project has been critical to our ability to leverage this opportunity to gain others. Thank you.

One last thought

We feel like smaller projects have arisen over the years and when it becomes apparent that there isn’t consensus, we just revert back to the status quo because it is the easiest, least confrontational option. Although, everyone, detractors alike, agrees that the status quo isn’t acceptable. In order for us to achieve system change, we need to maintain the focus on changing the systems from within and listen to feedback, but refuse to let a few vocal critics subvert or stagnate the process. We have also had the benefit of consistent leadership and political will to this point and we have recently had a change in Superintendent and are anticipating a change in mayoral leadership in the near future, so that could impact the level of support and prioritization we receive for this project. And with new leaders often come new staff as well, which could affect the make-up of our team. We are determined to bring any new leaders along in our process, but that is an important factor for us to be cognizant of and proactively work to address.