Community Innovation Learning Logs | Bush Foundation

Interim and final reports from Community Innovation grantees that include key lessons learned from their grant project.

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I think that our ability to provide qualified individuals who have experience working with Native communities to facilitate the council meetings have enabled us to build trust with our members and tribal communities. Council members leave meetings with clear expectations and next steps.

Be in synch with your community. Look for major projects and challenges already happening and already being addressed in your community where the key doers and leaders in the community are already engaged.

In order to shift the culture of athletics we recognize it requires change on many levels. This includes changing individuals, organizations, media representations, state policies and procedures, national perceptions, and more.

As our youth programming continued to grow, we gained a better understanding that transportation issues were one of the most important variables when it came to sustained participation by youth. We were not prepared to address that issue financially or from a labor standpoint.

The openness and transparency of the 4 agencies who partnered with us to host the promise youth in action programs. They were able to defy the odds and prioritize this. Without their support it would have been impossible to implement this mission.

We wanted the effort to emerge from community needs and assets, for the community to engage the issue of breastfeeding support in businesses during our grant, and for the community to take over the actions related to this issue once the grant is over.

In many instances, United Way is playing multiple roles. In other cases we are starting in one role and moving into another role as the work progresses.

Northfield Healthy Community Initiative

Term: November 01, 2013 - December 31, 2017

"Northfield Promise" is a collective impact initiative designed to achieve community-level change for children and youth growing up in Northfield. By aligning all the major community institutions around a shared set of measurable benchmarks, assembling diverse action teams, collecting and sharing data, implementing action plans, and sharing progress with community stakeholders, the project seeks to ensure success for all Northfield youth.

Utilizing data to help evaluate efforts and guide future decisions has helped ensure a level of credibility for the Northfield Promise initiative and its resulting work.

Our goal has been to be flexible and to respond with help and assistance as needed on a group basis or to requests for individual assistance from Plan Directors.

One spontaneous outgrowth for participants of the Racism Study Circles has been for a local Native American Elder (who has attended every consecutive Racism Study Circle) to create a new women’s society entitled: Grandmother Turtle Society, made up of both Native and non-Native women.

We have learned the value of engaging with Minnesota’s enrollment infrastructure more broadly.

Up to this point in the initiative, resourceful has been the most important element. The work that has been done on farmland access by others in other parts of the country, and to some extent, in Minnesota, has been extremely useful to our process.

Calm down, things will move much more slowly than you’d like but it will be better and stronger because of it. Take the time to create more visual learning and communication tools and talk to consumers experiencing homelessness in a formal manner from Day 1.

One of the greatest challenges of this project was empowering community members to see themselves as leaders.

Connect student leaders – and prepare for student turnover.

Community engagement, as well as generating and testing solution/ideas, were both crucial parts of our feasibility study.

Building capacity in elements of community leadership such as developing a shared vision and strategy, working collaboratively, engaging others and building trust is proving to be valuable to Wellness 50+ team members.

Typically we are restricted by the particular funding or project parameters and end up not being able to adjust and innovate on the fly with our activities.

In initial contacts with cities, we felt the pressure to provide answers to questions where that knowledge base had yet to be developed. We learned that cities are most interested in learning from each other and, if we could facilitate that, we did not need to have all the answers.

Vision and leadership are needed to create an expansive vision of what public life can be and how arts and artists help to advance the collective imagination for public art and public life.

When working with multiple collaborators, it is important to be flexible in your action plans as new challenges and information emerges.

The process has facilitated the transformation of teens from volunteers/helpers to truly expressing their own voices and creating their own work for an issue they are passionate about.

The “inclusive” element has grounded the entire project, that is, the elders who are going to benefit from the project, are integrally engaged in contributing their own knowledge and own assessment of needs, and in also proposing and brainstorming possible solutions.

The Barbara Schneider Foundation

Term: November 01, 2013 - December 31, 2015

The Barbara Schneider Foundation will work together with four Native nations--Red Lake Nation, White Earth Nation, Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa and Rosebud Sioux Tribe--to create culturally distinct programs for prevention of and intervention in mental health crisis and wellness recovery. Each Nation will identify strengths, needs, priorities and barriers to wellness, and develop a collaborative response plan for their community.

We come from this majority society that has made enormous errors in our relations with Native communities and we have so much to learn from them as we engage with them in this work.