Grantee Learning Logs | Bush Foundation

An important part of creative problem solving are the lessons learned along the way. As a learning organization, we realize how important these discoveries are and have intentionally included time for reflection and sharing as part of how we work.

In that same spirit, we ask our Community Innovation grantees to share their reflections and learnings through interim and final reports. Their learning logs are a great resource for what went well, what didn't and what others might take away as they work to make our region better for everyone.

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Many times the community members who foster the true knowledge aren’t always the ones front and center. We took additional steps to be inclusive by reaching out to service groups, libraries, schools and other contacts to improve our intended diverse participation.

The group felt the most important voices were those of students and at some meetings only one student was present. This was the biggest lesson learned. If we want students to be included, we need to change how and when we do our work.

Being open to seeing and understanding one another’s perspectives is vital for us to continue moving forward.

We recognize that from the beginning there was a need to frame the process and history, and then to repeat it over and over for all participants.

The most important element of the community innovation process is being collaborative. We recognized that to provide the services need for our participants to be successful in their individual education plans and their individual success plans, we needed to be collaborative with other organizations.

Many of the ideas that will help move the region forward are already being tried in some communities. That learning needs to have a way to be distributed more broadly, so those ideas can be tried, tested and refined.

While housing may be viewed as a physical structure in a community, the role it plays to the individual and community is vital for vibrancy. Some of the communities now have other groups working on different aspects that tie back to housing.

It was good to hear women express real fears around mental health that don’t really show up strongly in research and data compiled from the broader community.

This cross section of the community creates lively conversation when it comes to choosing the artistic elements of the park.

In the community innovation process diagram, we felt that the collaborative component was the most important to our project. We had two levels of collaboration: the key institutions and the team members.

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.

Partnerships with other organizations, administrators and decision-makers are critical, but helping artists feel welcomed and appreciated is the key to Arts Rapid City’s success.

Four Bands Community Fund

Term: November 01, 2013 - June 30, 2016

Four Bands Community Fund, of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, will lead a reservation-wide effort to develop and implement a comprehensive workforce development program. Using a combined place- and sector-based approach, Four Bands will provide training opportunities to increase the capacity of individuals to gain meaningful employment while supporting businesses to build their capacity to effectively hire and retain qualified employees.

The major takeaway from the first year was understanding that there is a spectrum for collaboration.

After holding several stakeholder meetings, we discovered that the Northside Funders Group was doing similar work and we knew that utilizing partnerships would allow for us to do more efficient and better work. We have since begun building partnerships.

Our impact has been nothing short of amazing. But a real breakthrough requires us to institutionalize these innovate changes and measure them over a two-year period. For this, we are committed!

Too often decisions that impact rural child care policy are made in the Twin Cities, without thought to the burdens created on small, but vital, child care businesses in rural areas.

Relaying information, ideas and development concepts in a more interesting way would have solicited a much deeper discussion process in the economic development leadership program and would have assisted in maintaining a focused vision discussion during the charrette process.

When we each struggled to have our priorities represented in the game, we were actually finding the right balance, which made the game stronger.

As we shared data from each of the perspectives with the community professionals, it generated very good discussion that led to new insights for some, and reinforced the complexity of the issue for others.

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.

Little Earth Community Partnership

Term: November 01, 2013 - January 31, 2015

The "Little Earth Community Health Initiative" seeks and implements solutions to the underlying causes of chronic health conditions in their urban American Indian community through holistic, community-driven processes and projects. Activities will be co-designed with community stakeholders and will include baseline data collection, appreciative learning journeys, communication strategies and the creation of an evaluation framework.

Practice being out there, connecting with people, ascertaining needs and identifying what will work.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.