Previous Post on a Strong Message

As you probably saw in the previous post, (Starting With A Strong Message) I wanted folks to have an enjoyable start to understanding our social development work—and each other’s. Or, at least, enjoy the “catchiness” of what is presented! Thanks to respective creators of the content. Please view the post if your unfamiliar with what I’m talking about. Enjoy! By the end of January, I’ll post again about logistics of what we will bring to the table.

Aspirations

My strong message is this: I’m committed to continue building out the shared spaces that support our communities we belong to. However, I also understand that with vital work comes the need for rest. Taking care of ourselves means knowing when to slowdown or take a step back in the work of social development and civic engagement. It’s not easy. Further, knowing who, where, and when to choose the people that will show-up to align compassionate efforts with incremental change to move forward is vital to sustainability. I’d like to take a very grassroots and community-driven process in this work. Listening, being proactive problem solvers, and building sustainable change through C3D’s work is our start.

Laying the Foundation For C3D

I want to talk about how I plan to create a strong foundation for this work. Many people and organizations are doing great things. With the challenges that we face now and tomorrow, we need people who continue to align efforts with community. Things are not static. Due to the slow nature of change, top-down approaches to governance, and a plethora of siloed efforts, we need to do better. C3D’s approach takes my experiences (personal, professional, and community-shared) and uses strategic approaches to tackle the challenges that I’ve seen in our systems. These three priority areas are our focus.

(1) Coordinate

Research conducted by the Sustained Collaboration Network indicates that 73% of 45 assessed collaborations showed successful outcomes for impact via collaborative efforts. The report states that collaborations “addressed social issues including human services, food insecurity, domestic violence, and workforce development.” The sectors spanned numerous areas of health care, education, arts, etc. The report discusses that the evaluations used showed any of the following outcomes,

• Greater innovation or new approaches to programs
• Program growth
• New funding from sources other than Sustained
  Collaboration Network initiatives
• New projects that organizations could not have
  completed by themselves
• Improved efficiency by sharing resources
• Policy wins at the state level
• Increased capacity to meet the demands of the
  served population
• Community asset development
• Improved service quality
  
  

(2) Connect

The ability to connect people, systems, and parts of a whole is not easy sometimes. Additionally, structures, processes, and outcomes take a lot of effort and time to be understood. Cormac Russell and John McKnight state in The Connected Community, “At the root of many of the world’s problems is our disconnection from one another and from our natural surroundings.” In their research, they indicate that by being in connected community spaces, you can reduce the risk of mortality by 50% for that given year.

To put connecting into perspective, perhaps you’ve heard the saying, “it takes a whole village.” Whether you’re working on a health campaign, building safe neighborhoods, raising a child, or trying to get a healthy meal on the table—it takes a whole village. Let’s take the last example for one. There are many interconnected spaces which involve workers, producers, manufactures, quality checkers, researchers and so on. When you get the meal finally prepared and ready to eat, you may not have considered that your brown rice had numerous workers which harvested it, producers to maintain farms, manufactures to purchase and sell inventory, quality analysts to make sure there’s no high levels of arsenic in the rice, and then researchers that conduct tests on the health outcomes of eating rice. It takes a village to see an end result for this example. Knowing the linkages and connected spaces positions us as individuals to solve problems better.

(3) Community Development

The Urban Institute shows in their report on The State of Community-Based Development Organizations that we have about 6,225 community-based development organizations (CBDOs) with a total of 271,000 staff in the US. About 96% of these CBDOs provide services to their constituents. It’s hard to quantify or devise metrics for the total impact of human and social development. This is because each organization may have different processes and priorities. Grant funding requirements, definitions of success, or long-term outcomes that take time to see change all contribute to fully grasping the landscape of positive impact. I’d like to navigate the space of impact measurement and develop clear expectations of this for our projects.