Impact Foundation CI Report – Interim

What has been most instrumental to your progress?

The Fargo Community Coalition has been highly engaged and committed to its mission this entire year. The Coalition members have worked together diligently to create a new design for a social capital survey instrument to be administered to all middle and high school students within Fargo Public Schools beginning in November 2016. Dr. Jeffrey Schatz, superintendent of Fargo Public Schools, is a member of our Coalition, and his doctoral dissertation research was on the concept of social capital. He is invested in using the social capital instrument in the school district and has been instrumental in supporting us with identifying a usable definition of the term “social capital,” as well as in critiquing the survey instrument.

The survey creation was important because no survey currently exists that measures exactly what we seek to know about our community. In addition, in order to explain social capital we needed to come up with a usable definition. We have spent several meetings discussing the survey and a definition of social capital. Our Data Dashboard Work group has done much of the ground work and continues to bring their recommendations to the full Coalition.

The social capital survey created by the Coalition will initially be administered in November to a sample of Fargo Public Schools middle and high school students, including English Language Learner students. Initial survey results are projected to be available within two months. During this initial survey process, we will hire a consultant to research all the available data on youth attitude and behaviors. This information, when combined with the initial survey results, will be compiled in an easy-to-understand report that will be disseminated widely throughout the community of Fargo. This is important, as it will allow community members to know specifically how they can get involved.

Throughout this process, we are continuing to build the membership of our Coalition to engage in conversation and action in the six specific workgroups within the Coalition, which include the following workgroups: Youth, Parent, Data/Evaluation, Policy/Environmental Strategies, Media/Marketing, Grants. Building the Coalition’s workgroups are important so that we continue to engage as many sectors of the community as possible. This is important, as the concept of workgroups has helped to allow each member to find a place where their expertise and passion can be fulfilled by joining whatever group(s) they find meaningful to him or her. The workgroup concept will also allow even more people to be involved in the Coalition.

Key lessons learned

Our Coalition grew in numbers quickly, so we have learned not to be in a hurry for growth of membership. Instead, we have learned it is important to simply bring people together in small groups around the ideas, initially. Then there is a focus on discussion and no pressure for interested community members to commit to being part of the Coalition right away. From there, our Coalition and our workgroups can grow slowly and with meaning, as interested community members can decide how much of a commitment they can give and where they would find most value in their involvement.

Another key lesson has been the importance of defining and encouraging a mutual lens for the Coalition members. For example, we have two graduate students from a local university writing their thesis projects based on our study; this was helpful to our Coalition as it helped us keep a pulse and timeline on our survey development and its implementation. This has led to very focused, intentional meetings and discussion throughout the last year. Many lessons our Coalition has learned came from the previous initiative from which the Coalition was created: the Venture Youth Alliance (VYA). While VYA had an important purpose, it failed in terms of keeping its members actively engaged and focused on specific end goals. This previous form of our Coalition helped us understand the importance of being focused on a concrete end goal to keep Coalition members engaged.

Reflections on inclusive, collaborative or resourceful problem-solving

At this stage, the collaborative element of the community innovation process has been most important in making progress. The Fargo Community Coalition is centered on collaboration. We have included community members from several different sectors from within the community and worked to esnure that we have the voice of those who aren’t always heard, such as homeless youth and New American residents. We are currently establishing workgroups in the areas of Policy/Environmental Strategies, Youth, Adult/Families, Marketing and Evaluation. These workgroups will help us to engage our membership and make the Coalition even more collaborative as we can invite other members of the community to join in our efforts to reduce substance use among young people.

Other key elements of Community Innovation

There is not a key element in addition to the three identified above that has contributed significantly to our progress at this point in our community process.

Understanding the problem

The clarity that has been defined from our grant application has made it possible for us to develop a workable system. The system has given us clarity in recognizing the steps that we need to take to be successful as a Coalition. First, we will conduct a survey on social capital with a usable definition of that term. From that report we will condense the findings into an actionable report. We will conduct ongoing youth and adult focus groups to get a better understanding of what our community’s youth need and struggle with. This report will contain not only the results of this survey but any other data we can locate on the behavior and attitudes of youth within the Fargo, North Dakota community. This report will be easy to understand and will be widely disseminated throughout the Community of Fargo through multi-media sources including a town hall meeting. After these steps have been completed, we will develop a Blueprint Guidebook, which will be used to assist the community in learning about what areas of youth support are needed in order to create a community that helps young people to make healthy, safe decisions and reach their highest potentials.

If you could do it all over again…

If we could return to the beginning of this grant period, we would have reviewed the progress or lack thereof in our group and made a shift sooner in terms of how the group was structured and led. Venture Youth Alliance (VYA) was a great concept and accomplished several things for our community, yet we learned from VYA that some of our goals were too vast to accomplish within the timeframe with the staff and resources allocated to it. This would have been important to know as we could have adjusted how the group functioned to be more effective and engaged. In retrospect, VYA taught us a lot about what is needed to make meaningful community change, and the Fargo Community Coalition wouldn’t be as engaged and focused as it is today if it were not for what we learned from VYA. We are grateful for what we learned from VYA and are eager to continue applying lessons learned from that project to our current one to ensure measurable, positive outcomes for Fargo’s youth.

One last thought

The funding from Bush Foundation has allowed us to carry on the original mission of the Venture Youth Alliance and blend it with the Fargo Community Coalition to prevent alcohol and other substance use among young people. We have also received a significant multi-year Drug Free Communities grant from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration for this project, and we would not have been able to apply for that grant without the groundwork for the project this Bush Community Innovation Grant’s support made possible. We hope our Coalition’s model of community engagement around a local issue, if we achieve our outcomes, can be replicated by other communities who wish to use the model so even more communities can know exactly how to come together successfully to begin solving complicated community issues such as youth substance abuse.