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Topics: Youth

Consortium of Caring Communities: Weaving 101

At the Wingspread conference, Emerging Best Practices: Weaving the Work of Youth and Civic Development, participants analyzed stories from groundbreaking projects integrating youth and civic development; crafted a set of principles linking the fields of youth, civic and community development; and developed strategies for communicating these in practice. In accomplishing this, they activated a network of partners, seeded a national movement and called for a locally-driven multiplication of opportunities to fully engage young people in public life. Case study plus.

Contents

Case Study Plus: Consortium of Caring Communities

Phase I Revisited
Phase II The Birth of the Consortium
Key Strategies: Benefits & Struggles
Useful Insights
Discussion Questions
Notes
Attachment A: Associates
Attachment B: Beliefs & Aims

Case Study Plus: Consortium of Caring Communities

by Paula Schmidt-Lewis, Kate Gill Kressley and Emily Booth. Copyright © 1996.

Phase I Revisited

Two compelling beliefs took root in the school reform movement during the late 1980's and early 1990's: (1) schools can not "do it alone;" families must be involved and (2) school performance is inseparable from children's well-being outside of school. The first phase of FSCP (1992-1994) was shaped by these beliefs. The primary aim of phase I was to promote equal, respectful partnerships that united families and schools for children's learning, not traditional parent involvement that keeps parents in peripheral, passive roles. Key objectives of the FSCP initiative were to

• increase family involvement with children's education at home,
• increase the quality and quantity of interactions between families and schools, and
• strengthen the guidance provided by families.

Yet phase I evaluation findings also illuminated drawbacks to centering on parent involvement programs in isolation from the broader community and reinforced a desire to reconfigure FSCP in phase II. Findings suggested that partnerships take root in ground made fertile by shared visions, values, and a commitment to the future.

Citizens—parents, youth, educators, and the community at large—need to own the problems and generate the solutions. This requires intentional processes for deliberation, mobilization and action. Most often, these processes lie beyond the scope of traditional parent involvement programs. (Rosenblum and Brigham Associates, June 1994)

Phase II: The Birth of the Consortium

From these and other efforts came a new paradigm: just as school performance is inseparable from children's well-being outside of school, so is children's welfare inseparable from the well-being of the family and the stability of communities. Thus, to create meaningful change across the many institutions that touch the lives of youth, we must engage the citizenry in the broader public work of making communities hospitable places for children, youth, and families.

FSCP began to use this new lens to examine the feasibility of shifting the locus of its work from schools and parents to communities at large. At the same time, evidence mounted that an infrastructure for supporting such work was already under construction in Indiana. A number of public and private statewide organizations and initiatives (e.g., Indiana's Step Ahead Initiative, The Indiana Youth Institute, The Indiana Donor Alliance, Youth as Resources) had already begun to pave the way for working in collaboration in communities to focus on positive youth development. The Focus 2000 Initiative of Indiana's Bartholomew County, a fledgling initiative at the time, offered one example of how communities might begin this work, and several other communities seemed interested in undertaking a broad-based, community-wide initiative.

A new mission for FSCP came into focus—to build a movement that puts children and young people first, a movement that supports the healthy development of children, youth, and families, one that begins small, but grows eventually to touch every county in Indiana.

Several philosophical assumptions guided the formulation of implementation strategies. The Consortium should

• fuel an initiative with a clear vision and conceptual framework that combined the best of what is known about youth development and civic development backed by useful tools for doing the work in communities.

• assume leadership for building a coherent system for supporting the work of communities out of the disjointed mix of state and local, private and public organizations and resources that could be of assistance to communities.

• begin with a small number of communities (3-5)—communities that had already demonstrated some degree of readiness for this kind of work—under the rationale that early success in the project would be essential to its long-term viability.

• support, not direct, county-based initiatives, by providing technical assistance and training to local communities, as well as opportunities for networking with other participating communities.

Consortium Associates

The Associates were instrumental in directing the guide team to prospective community participants and in selecting the first set of participating communities. They have also met regularly to give advice about the general direction of the Consortium and to shape the work of the Associates.

Staffing

In its early work, the guide team developed a set of beliefs and aims to hold itself accountable to modeling youth and civic development tenets. (See Attachment B.) The guide team has worked consistently to clarify the project's conceptual framework and to develop or identify practical tools for use by the participating communities.

Communities

Four gatherings, held in February, June, July, and October 1995, supported the communities in the first year. Participants were immersed in youth and civic development principles and applications and were given time to network with other communities and set plans for their communities. Individualized technical assistance has been provided by two members of the guide team through frequent telephone contact with the communities and visits to communities for selected planning meetings and events. Much of this has involved coaching community planning teams about who else they might want to include at the table, how they might structure themselves to do business, leveraging resources, how they can merge work they had in progress with the broader work of the Consortium, how they can engage youth in more meaningful participation, and how they can gain visibility and momentum for their efforts. Among this work has been the messy business of helping communities figure out the "right" home and leader for their efforts.

Some youth are already benefiting because

• adults are beginning to include them in real roles in community work teams and, as a result;

• youth are learning the skills of public work and breaking ground for other young people to follow; and

• they are "finding their voices," and influencing the thinking of community leaders.

Dialogue at the community table is changing to include discussions about

• making human services planning part of a larger community planning process that involves people from all sectors of the community;

• how community and neighborhood leaders can be engaged in the process;

• citizenship and public work—shared responsibility among community members to build a quality place for children to grow up;

• how to link with other initiatives and resources in the community and state;

• the benefits of proactive planning to develop supports and opportunities for all children, youth, and families rather than reactive planning to social problems; and

• expanding visions from what can be done on behalf of children, youth, and families to encompass what youth and adults as engaged citizens can produce for their communities.

Each community has developed a core team of citizens drawn from diverse sectors of the community. Leaders and local facilitators have come forward from many walks of life, e.g., a utility company executive, community and education foundation officers, a mayor's youth advisory council president, a hospital marketing vice president, public school administrators and educators, YMCA and YWCA directors, neighborhood association officers, and a parish priest. Each team has included young people as integral members of its planning effort. Each is attempting, in its own style, to map the assets and needs of the community and to engage citizens and youth in public dialogue about the future of themselves and their children. None of these accomplishments has come easily. For example, building a diverse support-base and partnering with youth are proving to be ongoing challenges for the communities. Struggles such as those listed below have been common across the communities:

Building a cross-sector, diverse support base

• Marketing the youth and civic development concept,
• Getting the support of elected officials,
• Involving and sustaining corporate community interest,
• Diversifying the ethnic composition of local teams, and
• Incorporating neighborhood association leadership.

Partnering with Youth

• Attracting and sustaining youth involvement,
• Making youth partners, not just participants,
• Integrating youth into planning discussions, and
• Getting young people excused from school to participate in key events and getting adults to adjust their schedules to accommodate youth.

Civic concepts and skills are slow to emerge. Community teams have been invited to reinvent how public work gets done in their county. Local teams, comprised of professionals and "lay" citizens working together, are finding the language of decision-making unfamiliar. They are struggling with

Using Civic Concepts

• Understanding concepts and language,
• Taking on unfamiliar tasks, and
• Sustaining involvement over time.

Nonetheless, cross-sector support bases are emerging and youth, albeit in relatively small numbers, have become involved. Those youth who are involved report that they feel as though their voices are being heard, that they are developing skills and growing personally, and that they believe they are doing something important. They would like specific training to help them be more effective at running meetings, making presentations, and fundraising with corporations. They would also like to gain a clearer understanding of the Consortium's goals (in words that make sense to them) and to be more actively involved in shaping the work of the Consortium statewide and in their communities.

Local teams are challenged to sustain their members' involvement over time. Those organizations and individuals who first expressed interest in the local initiative have not always proven to be the most appropriate actors—realizations that have sometimes come slowly. Three of the four counties have changed team chairs in the first several months of action; one is in the midst of shifting responsibility for the initiative to a "yet to be determined" new organizational home. These transitions, while positive, have interrupted local efforts.

Shifting from needs-driven to asset-driven planning has been another common challenge. The positive youth development agenda urges communities to examine how resources are spent and to ask such questions as: Are there places, supports and opportunities that help young people grow in assets,—to be more than just "problem free?" In what ways does the community focus its attention on all youth, and in what ways is attention focused on youth that need intervention and treatment services?

Shifting to this framework is compounded by the complex nature of the planning committees' central task; i.e., spawning a whole community effort to envision what a caring community might look like. Articulating what this effort might achieve in a manner that attracts others to the initiative is one obstacle. Finding the time to devote to figuring out how to lead such a process is another. Conducting planning at the county level (rather than for a particular subset of the county) is yet another. When all these hurdles seem too tall to leap, the local teams have been tempted to resort to what they know how to do best; that is, chipping away at particular social problems with specific programs or activities.

Developing local financial support for the initiative is yet another concern for local teams. To date, funds have not been provided to communities to underwrite local costs for participation. Members serve on teams without compensation. Facilitators have come forward at no cost to the teams, and various organizations have absorbed incidental costs of meetings and communications. The communities find themselves in a quandary: their initiatives are too young to have products (new program ideas) or hard results (youth outcomes) which they can market. Yet, without financial support for the planning process, they have difficulty moving the process.

The Consortium at the state level has a keen appreciation for the inherent challenges of trying new ways of business. All of these dilemmas illustrate the difficulty of trying to do work in communities in a different manner.

Fuel the Initiative with a Clear Framework for Youth and Civic Development

• The need to articulate a clear vision and framework for this work has forced the guide team to grapple constantly with the key concepts of youth and civic development and their interplay. The pressure to be clear so that communities can be clear has pushed the guide team members to generate a variety of practical tools and processes that have been taught at community gatherings for participants to take back home. Yet, the guide team members sometimes feel that these accomplishments are precarious. Challenges are that
  • Finding language to convey the breadth of the vision and the complexity of the organizational intertwining that is desired is difficult but imperative for assuring continuity in efforts in communities. Both the local leaders and the keepers of the vision need something relatively simple to pass along to others in order to recruit new lifeblood and to hand-off responsibilities as local initiatives grow.

  • The community participants want formulas for doing this work. The guide team has been able to offer principles, stages, steps, illustrative stories, and ideas, but not recipes. Some participants have been adept at using these tools; for others, the whole process remains intangible.

Assume Leadership for Building a Coherent System for Supporting the Work of the Communities

• A broad-based, cross-sector support group of project Associates has been recruited and oriented and is on standby to assist communities. Some Associates have assisted with community gatherings and made trips to communities to discuss technical assistance needs. Others have provided training, given small grants or consultations. The will to be involved among Associates is generally strong, but connecting the Associates to communities in substantive ways has yet to occur.
  • The search for a meaningful role has been frustrating for some Associates, who are action oriented, but have not yet found a clear-cut role. The communities have not advanced to the point of articulating many needs for the specific types of assistance that Associates offer. Associates, themselves, are in the learning stages of working in broader ways outside their organizational boxes and connecting to youth and civic practices.

• The structure has facilitated a fluid tradeoff in responsibilities in accordance with the talents needed for the tasks at hand and has facilitated rich dialogue around strategic options and plans; the group has achieved a certain synergy in its work together.

  Yet the structure of the guide team has some drawbacks:

  • Management by committee seems to slow the pace of resolving important organizational issues.

  • The team composition lacks a depth of experience in community organizing and public work.

  • Each member of the guide team must balance work for the Consortium with other professional obligations—a dilemma that local team members also face. A resolution might be the infusion of sufficient resources to enable key individuals to give concerted attention to the work at hand.

  • The guide team is still seeking a satisfactory strategy for engaging youth in its own planning process. Input has been sought and incorporated into work, but young people are not yet an ongoing part of the guide team. A resolution might be inclusion of students, from relevant disciplines, from Marian College.

Begin with A Small Number of Communities

• The decision to begin small has had many merits. First, the charter communities have been a laboratory for learning how best to support community-based capacity development. The guide team has learned that four counties is a close-to-manageable number for its current capacity. Second, the work of the charter communities has begun to draw attention of others who are now planting seeds for working with the Consortium in the future. Guide team members have consulted with several communities to help them fertilize efforts for growing an initiative later.

Support, Not Direct, County-Based Initiatives

• A guiding principle of the Consortium has been to build lasting capacity in communities, not to build dependency on outside facilitation or resources. Thus the guide team has offered training, opportunities for networking with other participating communities and project Associates, and consultation as requested.
  • The good news is that the guide team and Associates have fostered local leadership and self-reliance.

  • The more difficult news is that progress in communities is slow. A more intensive, proactive strategy of technical assistance provided by an expanded staff and Associates might be appropriate during the early stages of a community's participation in order to enable communities to make more visible and tangible progress from the onset. Pass-through grants to communities for local facilitation staff might also prove effective in mobilizing teams beyond the planning stage.

Work in Communities

Agreeing on a common vision across sectors does not seem to be an insurmountable task. Getting organizations and individuals within and across sectors to work together optimally—to blur boundaries and maximize their collective wisdom and resources—is another matter. Leadership and accountability dilemmas are inevitable when people come together to work in new ways. These dilemmas, however, can be exacerbated, rather than diminished, by differences in styles of doing business. Human service agencies, in particular, seem to get mired in turf issues. Business representatives are baffled by the jargon and process. When neighborhood representatives and young people are added to the mix, neither of whom represent particular constituencies, working relationships become even more confused. Differences in styles and methods, then, can become points of contention even when there is unanimity about the vision and values of the initiative.

Mobilizing communities around youth and civic development is work is laden with tensions. Success depends, in part, on the ability to see these tensions and then to balance, even orchestrate them. For example, balance is called for in

• time devoted to planning versus concrete, action-oriented activities,

• group composition—involving both thinkers and doers,

• weighing and respecting different perspectives from group members and knowing when disagreement is okay versus when consensus is imperative,

• making judgments about stepping back because of uncertainties about how to proceed versus forging ahead in order to sustain enthusiasm.

Better grounding of the guide team and Associates in the principles and practices of youth, civic, and community development would have been a good investment of time and resources. Both groups are better grounded in youth development than civic development or the intertwining of the two.

Strategies for Supporting Communities

Leadership transition issues in communities are a persistent challenge for those trying to provide training to communities. The guide team envisioned that it would be training a core group of volunteers through a series of gatherings. However, as the composition of community groups changed, so did participants at Consortium gatherings; only a few participants came back repeatedly. Further, at each gathering, the new participants needed a basic orientation; skills and knowledge gained at previous gatherings had not been passed along. The guide team and community participants eventually decided that community gatherings were good forums for networking, but not for training. The communities requested that future training be tailored to each community.

Linking the state's resources to communities requires active facilitation. Associates have expressed a strong desire to assist communities, but have not taken charge to do so. Part of the problem has been the lack of interface between communities and associates; it takes time to nurture contacts, distance is a barrier to building relationships, no one person in communities is vested with the authority to ask for assistance, and Associates have other pressing organizational responsibilities. The guide team did not want to set itself up as an intermediary between communities and state resources, but doing so might have been more expeditious.

Our work on the Consortium of Caring Communities has posed many questions, that we today are still debating. These include

How can money be an enabling catalyst rather than a dominating force in doing work in communities with a youth and civic focus? When do external dollars displace local creativity and capacity to raise funds? If incentive grants are part of the process, how do we honor the aims that communities set and not be controlling of local processes?

How can serious, sustained engagement with the principles and practices discussed be obtained locally, at the state level and nationally? How can the groundwork be laid for continuity that allows people and ideas and community-based work the time needed to grow and take hold?

What are the best approaches for building capacity in civic and youth capacities in communities? What are the pros and cons of providing support to help communities carve out their own processes versus providing more prescriptive technical assistance approaches for communities to follow?

How quickly can such initiatives take hold? How can we negotiate reasonable timeframes with funders? with communities? What fruit should we expect our own work to bear and when?

What are the outcomes on which we should focus during the planning stages, the early implementation stages, and five and ten years down the road? How do we counsel patience and new ways of respecting work when we all operate in climates that demand quick fixes?

Notes

2. The Consortium plan called for an external evaluation that would, in part, help communities develop their own evaluation criteria and mechanisms. Funding for the evaluation, however, was not secured and, as a result, evaluation assistance to communities has been minimal.

Attachment B: Consortium of Caring Communities Beliefs and Aims

We believe that:

• Those who grow, live and work in a community must shape its future.
• Communities flourish when all citizens learn to work with and alongside one another.
• Children and young people grow up in families within communities, not in programs. All of our children and youth deserve a full range of developmental opportunities and supports.
• Even young people who escape risk factors may still not be fully prepared to step into adult roles.

We will support communities as they:

• Embrace children and youth and invest in their futures
• Forge connections among families, schools and the community.
• Enrich neighborhoods with resources and opportunities for nurturing children and strengthening families.
• Create the ways and means for public dialogue, problem solving and capacity building.
• Engage youth and adults in a fuller expression of community and civic life.

In our compact with Charter Caring Communities, we strive to:

• Recognize the presence and messages of courageous and passionate leaders.
• Engage young people in enriching their communities
• Provide leaders with processes and tools to aid them in mobilizing communities for children, youth and families.
• Invite citizens from all sectors of society to fuller participation in public life.
• Promote understanding of the core concepts of a youth and civic development framework.
• Support emerging and traditional leadership in holding fast to its community vision.
• Seek and sustain mutually beneficial relationships among community, state and national organizations.
• Broker technical assistance that is anticipatory and responsive to the local agenda.

With our Caring Community Intermediary Associates, we strive to:

• Promote beneficial and synergistic relationships.
• Build and maintain webs of communication to support work with charter communities.
• Deepen our understanding of youth, community and civic development principles and practices.
• Press for full investment of the associates and challenge them to creative ways of using resources.
• Expand our capacities to serve communities and constituents
• Invest in reflection and renewal practices, finding time to learn and grow.

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