Ramsey County CI Report – Final

What has been most instrumenta 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?

We also learned that working across systems is hard. There are multiple competing priorities and it is a challenge to maintain a sense of urgency when it’s necessary to keep pushing things to the back burner to do one’s job. We definitely learned that we should have engaged one agency’s political leaders earlier in the process to get their legal counsel to follow through, instead of allowing them to delay our entire project due to lack of follow through.

Reflections on the community innovation process

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 largely 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

First, I would say Bush’s flexibility to not tie our hands to our original proposal, but enable us to adjust and alter our path as we proceeded was essential. Also, our ability to leverage the progress we made under this grant into a new opportunity that will help advance our overall effort put us on the path toward implementation.

Progress toward an innovation

We have definitely made progress in terms of getting everyone to the table – community members, system leaders, elected officials – and collectively aligning our efforts in a single direction. Prior to embarking on this collaborative effort, we all agreed there are challenges and disheartening outcomes, but no one knew what to do, on a large scale, to change these disparate outcomes. We have also made progress in terms of coming up with actual strategies to enable the data sharing we feel is essential to our ability to better serve the children and families in our community. We are in the process of proceeding down the path to execute those strategies, which puts us meaningfully closer to operationalizing our vision and achieving our innovation.

What it will take to reach an innovation?

In order to fully achieve our innovation, we need to execute the legal documents necessary to support our work, enable the National Council on Crime & Delinquency to perform its predictive analysis on our data to determine which factors lead youth to become involved with the justice system, and then take meaningful steps to prevent those factors from occurring and to respond with effective interventions when they do occur, to put youth on a path to educational success and away from the justice system. Achieving our innovation requires creating a systemic approach to operationalize the identification of youth at risk, effective connection with preventive resources, and measurement of our effectiveness.

What’s next?

See above. We are meeting with the superintendents of all school districts in Ramsey County today to discuss with them the results of our task force input and next steps in this project, including asking them to sign on to our new joint powers entity. Then we will reach back out to the cities of Saint Paul, Maplewood, and Roseville and make the same request.

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. We knew the was the case going into the project, but at this point in the project, the newfound optimism and motivation has waned and it is easy to see why people have good ideas, but end up walking away and resorting to the status quo. It’s much easier than continuing to fight an uphill battle.

One last thought

Again, as our work has evolved and new opportunities have arisen, the Bush Foundation’s flexibility in enabling us to make changes throughout our project has been critical to our ability to be successful and to leverage this opportunity to gain others. Thank you!