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Contents of Fall 2004 Collaborative Solutions Newsletter:In this issue: Collaborative Solutions - Six Key Components Tom Wolff & Associates - What is new? Resources: COLLABORATIVE SOLUTIONS -- SIX KEY COMPONENTS What does the phrase Collaborative
Solutions really mean? The answer to this question has been the driving
force behind thirty years of my work with hundreds of communities and
organizations. It is a fascinating yet daunting question. In its simplest
form collaborative solutions involve doing together what we cannot
do apart. So, what does it take to create collaborative solutions? I propose six crucial components:
COMPONENT # 1:Engage a broad spectrum of the community. In order to seek collaborative
solutions, we need to bring together all the key parties. How can
we think that we will find workable solutions without engaging the
key players, especially those most directly affected by the issues?
Yet, we often try to resolve gang violence without gang members at
the table, combat youth drug abuse without talking to the youth, address
the needs of new immigrant communities without bringing immigrants
into the room, or understand why front line employees are disgruntled
without asking the employees. Spotlight:
In Santa Barbara, California when the Pro Youth Coalition wanted to
understand and halt an outbreak of gang-related killings, they brought
the gangs to the table with the coalition. Ex-gang bangers became
the staff for the programs that would engage the gangs in seeking
new solutions. COMPONENT # 2Encourage true collaboration as the form of exchange. We use the term ‘collaboration’
quite easily, often glibly, without really defining the word. My colleague,
Arthur Himmelman, has done us all a great service by defining collaboration
and differentiating it from networking, coordination and cooperation. Spotlight: In Rockford, Illinois when the Violence Prevention Collaborative wanted to engage the African-American community they offered small minigrants to African-American churches to support summer youth activities. Through this new partnership, the Violence Prevention Collaborative was able to enhance the capacity of these churches to acknowledge and intervene in the violence in their community, and the African-American community was able to see the value of the Collaborative and join the Collaborative’s Board. COMPONENT # 3Practice democracy and promote active citizenship and empowerment When a coalition sets up their
chairs in a circle and fills the room with a broad spectrum of the community,
we have the possibility for democracy and participation. When the leader
asks everyone in the room to list the top issues facing their community
and the Mayor’s answer and the grassroots residents’ answers
are written down on newsprint with the same pen and given equal weight,
then we have one of the most concrete examples of real democracy that we
find in America today. Creating settings where all voices can be heard,
respected, and counted is our first step. Spotlight:
The North Quabbin Community Coalition in rural Central Massachusetts
identified transportation as their key issue in their first year of
existence. Five years later, not much had happened on this issue.
At that point, the graduates of the local literacy project decided
to make transportation their cause. In partnership with the coalition,
they became the backbone of a persistent lobbying effort to the state
and federal legislators for a solution to the lack of transportation.
In the meantime, they modeled Margaret Mead’s famous saying,
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens
can change the world, indeed it’s the only thing that ever has.”
They began a volunteer rides program to fill the gap and sold buttons
with Mead’s quote to fund the operation. A few years later,
their Congressman delivered the funding for the first comprehensive
transportation system for the area; residents could now get to jobs,
health care and shopping. In the first year alone, there were 23,000
rides COMPONENT # 4Employ an Ecological Approach that Builds on Community Strengths In my first undergraduate psychology course, I was taught that behavior
is a function of the person and their environment. Many decades later,
I marvel at our inability to take in both the person and their environment
at the same time. When the issue of obesity lands in the headlines, we
see attempts to either blame the victim or, blame the candy/soda manufacturer.
We have a hard time simultaneously understanding the role of each party
and their interactions. Spotlight: In one community in Connecticut, the local Asthma Coalition has developed an ‘anti-idling’ policy for school buses; buses no longer idle outside the schools while waiting for children to be dismissed. This seemingly simple action took enormous collaboration amongst a broad group of players (as an ex-elected school committee member, I know what it takes to change a school district’s bus contract!). An anti-idling policy recognizes the key role of environmental triggers in the high rates of asthma among schoolchildren. Identifying and building on a community’s strengths and assets is another key component of the collaborative solutions process. Once we decide that a person’s environment is critical to their lives, we can begin to look at the assets that both they and their environment bring to the possible solution of problems that may arise. John McKnight (Kretzmann, J. and McKnight, J. Building Communities From the Inside Out, 1993) has taught us to seek the assets and strengths of communities and this remains a key variable in finding collaborative solutions. COMPONENT # 5Take action by addressing issues of social change and power based on a common vision.Taking action: Collaborative solutions do not come about automatically by just getting the right people around the table and talking respectfully. Indeed all that may be produced by such meetings is hot air. Community change, organizational change and systems change happen when the group decides to act. Too often we sit around and study issues to death and never get around to creating change. The spotlight that follows illustrates a collaborative that did create change: Spotlight: In the
1990’s, Provincetown had one of the highest rates of HIV infection
in Massachusetts. In order to get adequate care, however, persons
with AIDS had to travel to Beth Israel Hospital in Boston, a three-hour
drive from Provincetown. For those without a car or those who were
unable to drive, their only mode of transportation was the bus. Daily,
the public bus left Provincetown in the morning and arrived in Hyannis
where they had to change for the private Boston connector. Unfortunately
that Boston bus regularly pulled out on schedule fifteen minutes before
the bus arrived from Provincetown. Once in Boston, the patient had
to make their way across the city to Beth Israel. This was ridiculous. COMPONENT # 6Align the goal with the process: Gandhi stated “Be the change
that you wish to create in the world.” This quote speaks eloquently
to the final component of collaborative solutions. We must create
collaborative solution processes that parallel and reflect what we
hope the outcomes will look like. If in our common vision we are seeking
a community that is respectful of its diversity, then we must get
there through collaborative processes that model diversity and respect.
If we wish to create a caring and loving community, then our collaborative
must be caring and loving too. This is the spiritual aspect of the
work, that we rarely talk about. Spotlight: Founding coordinator of the North Quabbin Community Coalition, Barbara Corey, epitomized the aligning of the goal with the process. Barbara had a practice of ‘carding’ people. This involved sending postcards of appreciation to people after their special participation in a meeting, whether it was a presentation or staying afterwards to help with the dishes. All of us who received cards from Barbara cherished and saved them. And then we did something special – we bought a stack of cards to keep in our desk so that we could ‘card’ others. It was ‘infectious appreciation’ and represented the caring and concern the coalition was trying to create in the community. The six key components of Collaborative Solutions will be expanded upon along with many real world case examples in an upcoming book by Tom Wolff. Stay tuned. Tom Wolff & Associates - What is newCatch Tom Wolff Delivering Keynote Address to the Champions Conference in Snowbird, Utah. This June, Tom Wolff had the
honor and privilege to address the Champions for Progress gathering
in Snowbird, Utah. Champions provides support to a national network
of those working with children with special health care needs. We
are pleased that Champions chose to put the video of the keynote address
on its website. Click below to catch the full talk:
National Councils on Aging, Washington, DC RESOURCES:Many of us know of Geoffrey Canada’s remarkable work on youth violence from his 1995 book “Fist, Stick, Knife, Gun.” The articles below are an account of his new transformational work in the Bronx where Canada has moved from remedial programs to community and systems transformation. It is an amazing example of the kind of effort that is needed all across the country. Bravo Geoffrey! New York Times Profiles Harlem Children's Zone – From Philanthropy News Digest Geoffrey Canada is a man on a mission, a mission to change the way America thinks about the problems of thousands of kids growing up in poverty, the New York Times reports. In 1990, Canada was president of the Rheedlen Centers for Children and Families, a Harlem-based nonprofit organization that offered an array of not-so-unusual services -- after-school programs, truancy prevention, anti-violence training for teenagers -- to disadvantaged kids and their families. After a few years of running programs, however, Canada's ideas about fighting poverty began to change, inspired, in part, by a waiting list he was forced to establish for an increasingly popular after-school program. His frustration with only being able to serve five hundred children, rather than every child that could benefit from the program, combined with his growing knowledge of what worked and what didn't when dealing with the problems of disadvantaged kids and their families, made him resolve to find a new way to address those problems. Rather than helping a few kids to beat the odds, he wondered, why not change the odds altogether? Three years ago, that's what he set out to do. Choosing as his laboratory a twenty-four-block zone of central Harlem (now expanded to sixty blocks) -- an area with about 6,500 children, more than 60 percent of whom live below the poverty line and three-quarters of whom score below grade level on statewide reading and math tests. Canada reinvented Rheedlen as the Harlem Children's Zone and reached out to funders for help in creating a comprehensive, cradle-to-adolescence approach to addressing the problems faced by kids growing up in poverty. The HCZ approach combines educational and social programs with medical services serving preschool children, grade-schoolers, adolescents, new parents, grandparents in parental roles, and others. The programs are carefully planned and well run, but none of them, on their own, is particularly revolutionary. It is only when considered together, as part of a larger, holistic framework, that they seem new. Canada believes that each child will do better if the children around him are doing better. So the organization's recruiters go door-to-door to find participants, sometimes offering enticements to parents who enroll their children in the group's programs. The result is a remarkable level of "market penetration," as the organization describes it, with 88 percent of the roughly 3,400 children under eighteen in the core 24-block. HCZ neighborhood already served by at least one of its programs. The objective, as Canada describes it, is to create a safety net woven so tightly that children in the neighborhood can't slip through. Tough, Paul. "The Harlem Project." New York Times Community Food Assessments We are constantly impressed
by how many groups are adopting a collaborative solutions approach
to their unique work in the world. While working in the field of healthy
communities we held conferences that gathered those around New England
who were working in parallel fields such as sustainable communities,
smart growth communities, safe communities, civic engagement, community
building, livable communities, restorative justice, and others. We
realized how much we had in common, and how much we could learn from
each other. Subscribe to Collaborative Solutions: |
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