Interview with Colleen Beye, Impact Monterey County

Challenges faced by collective impact initiatives

• Centralization: No collective agency or accountability
• Tokenism: Insufficient diversity in leadership, nimbleness, and adaptability
• Far-fetched goals: Disorganization or uncontextualized stakeholder engagement results in inefficiency
• Competition: Awareness that participating organizations are competing for the same resources

Impact Monterey's Successes

• Data-based decision-making: they used data to assess the most vulnerable communities
• Impact Monterey was kept a grassroots and very localized initiative
• The meetings that were community based were more effective
• Consistent reporting and evaluation

Recommendations

• Consider the role of each partner in the initiative
• Select the most effective backbone organization and champions to spearhead the initiative
• Remember CI is suited to address "wicked problems" - problems that are difficult to solve
• Ensure that the scope of the initiative is narrow enough
• Follow up with participating member's feedback to ensure the initiative is adaptive
• There must be sufficient buy-in from the community

Quotes

"Your organization has to be nimble and willing to pivot to work in Collective Impact"

"It's important to keep collective impact initiatives localized"

BRIGHT BEGINNINGS

Interview with Megan Kennedy-Chouane, Senior Manager at Bright Beginnings

Bright Beginnings is an early childhood development initiative located in Monterey County, California. The initiative works to provide an opportunity for the community as a whole to work together to ensure that young children, from the prenatal stage through age 8, have what they need to succeed. Bright Beginnings aims to maximize community efforts to improve early childhood development outcomes through effective coordination, capacity building, empowerment, and strategic action for children and their families. Rather than focusing solely on education reform, Bright Beginnings develops its objectives from a “whole child perspective,” pursuing a policy agenda to advocate for families and children and supporting its partners to envision transformational change. Bright Beginnings also works very closely with Bright Futures, a local collective impact initiative focused on “cradle to career” outcomes.

Organizational Structure

Steering Committee & Backbone

The Monterey County Children’s Council (MCCC) serves as the Steering Committee for the initiative. As a Steering Committee, the MCCC is action-oriented and champions Bright Beginnings throughout the county.

The MCCC was formed to enhance services and decrease duplicative efforts in child and youth service provisions. The MCCC also develops and incubates strategic cross sector initiatives to address crucial county-wide issues that impact the wellbeing of children and youth.

Besides having a staff to implement the Initiative, part of the Collective Impact Framework includes having a body called “the Backbone.” For Bright Beginnings, Backbone support is a group that acts as a neutral convener, facilitator and data analyst to guide and support the work of the Initiative. The Backbone for Bright Beginnings is composed of a cross-sector group of individuals from the Monterey County Department of Social Services, Monterey County Office of Education, the Monterey County Health Department, First 5 Monterey County, the Monterey County Childcare Planning Council, California State University Monterey Bay – Bright Futures Initiative and United Way.

Collaborative Action Teams (CATS)

Bright Beginnings provides capacity building and technical support to six communities in Monterey County: North Monterey County, Pajaro, Seaside, Salinas, Gonzales, and Greenfield. These communities are identified as Collaborative Action Teams (CATs). Each community has held a series of meetings to strengthen community efforts while developing their own action plan on how to strengthen area efforts in early childhood development.

Policy Advocacy Network

In conjunction with the work the Collaborative Action Teams are working at the local level, Bright Beginnings is supporting a Policy and Advocacy Network to affect systems change. This includes building a county-wide commitment to support high-quality early-learning environments that benefit every family along with identifying and recommending actions to influence policy and systems change at both the local and larger levels of government.

The Policy Advocacy Network has identified several goals:

• Identify and sustain effective systems and support systems change across the entire policy spectrum: local, state and federal.
• Promote meaningful public awareness and education about the importance of the Bright Beginnings indicators and early childhood development, generally within and across communities.
• Empower individuals and communities to take action by supporting civic engagement and capacity build that is representative of all communities, in particular for parents and caregivers who are most affected by the policies and systems.

Funding

A diverse set of funders are supporting the Early Childhood Development Initiative including the County of Monterey, Community Foundation for Monterey County, and David and Lucile Packard Foundation.

What makes Bright Beginnings Effective?

COLLABORATIVE NATURE

• There is a very strong vision for child wellbeing goals in Monterey County
• The initiative benefits from shared accountability for results in early childhood goals; this means that no single agency is entirely responsible for progress toward those goals
• The cross-sectoral, collaborative aspect of the initiative allows partners to build on each other’s strengths and accomplish milestones that social services, the health department, or the County Board of Supervisors could not achieve alone
• The Bright Beginnings initiative strategically aligns resources to advance systems change, rather than focusing on individual programs that produce isolated outcomes

LOCALIZED DATA

• All partners in the Bright Beginnings initiative have indicators that they use to track their progress toward shared goals, and each partner contributes localized data on the importance of early childhood development
• This capacity for data provision, evaluation, and communication has strengthened the initiative as a whole and facilitated project management support for each of the Collaborative Action Teams
• Bright Beginnings use of results based management and strategic reflection continuously drives the initiative to analyze the root causes early childhood development issues in the community, rather than only addressing the symptoms

COMMUNITY INVOLVEMENT

• Bright Beginnings has invested significant effort to ensure that its goals and indicators are informed by grassroots participation. Their six early childhood development goals are locally defined, produced through community collaboration, and advanced by action teams hosted by a local entity
• The initiative recognizes local nuances and complexities and its participation processes are tailored to stakeholder needs. For example, focus groups and regional meetings are hosted in Spanish or interpreted, and the agendas generally follow a more open rather than structured format, with the goal of identifying strategies prioritized by stakeholders

Community leadership and engagement

Allowing communities of color to have decisionmaking power

The Pajaro Collaborative Action Team (CAT) examined the early childhood development indicators proposed by Bright Beginnings and liked “kindergarten readiness” and “literacy and language development,” but they wanted the direct input of Pajaro community members in defining childhood wellbeing. Consequently, the CAT implemented a listening campaign to gather feedback from families and identified a cadre of mothers to participate in local meetings. Through this process, the CAT started to identify priority strategies for working with the Pajaro community. Mothers in the group stated that they wanted more access to nature for their children - a goal that the CAT would not have necessarily developed on its own. This collaborative work highlighted the benefits of “putting moms in the driver's seat” and allowing them to drive the development of indicators, rather than merely consulting them after the fact.

What challenges has Bright Beginnings encountered in developing and utilizing a collective impact approach?

• Developing shared measures is usually a challenging endeavor for collective impact communities, in part because it is difficult to connect long-term outcomes to factors that action teams can influence
• The initiative provides data and research around inequity in Monterey County, but analyzing the data to examine the intersections between inequities is no simple task
• There can be a tension between community-based work and the results-based approach, with its focus on data, indicators, and evaluation
• It is challenging to capture the short-term results of individual projects in data collection and analysis
• In collective impact initiatives, there will always be a need to balance partner expectations on how quickly results can be achieved. Partners have different levels of patience based on their schedules and funding models. “Moving at the speed of trust,” means collective impact initiatives might move more slowly than individual agencies, but partners can achieve more together

What should organizations consider before pursuing a collective impact initiative?

• Organizations should ask themselves, “how deep is the common vision?” Oftentimes, organizations assume everyone is on the same page, but when you get down to the details people might actually have different ideas about how to approach a problem
• Spending time on developing a common agenda is key
• Organizations should consider whether they are comfortable focusing on long-term change, which may require more patience and collaboration than they are accustomed to
• Because collective impact initiatives require collective accountability, organizations’ leaders must ask themselves, “Am I willing to put my mandate as the head of an agency below the goals of a collective agenda?” That’s a tough ask, and one that requires courageous leadership. Without motivated leaders who know when to push, pull, and support, collective impact can turn into a bureaucratic exercise

REFERENCES

Images:

CleverFiles. What is collective impact? Definition, collective impact model. Click here for access.

Bright Beginnings homepage. https://brightbeginningsmc.org/