Evaluating Community Weaving Partnerships - Measuring Effective Partnerships

Okay, measuring effective partnership. So if we go back, we've paid attention to SCARF as a way to be aware of how people react in a group and how people may feel threatened or may feel super comfortable depending on what's happening. We then looked at what Darren Hicks, Chris Slip, a bunch of other folks have been talking about with collaborations and what is successful. So building on all of that, we've been moving this collaborative, it's been moving forward. We're gonna go back to the canopy community learning model and say, okay, we need to learn. If we're going to keep these groups focused on their ultimate actionable outcomes, we need to take a step back. And if you wanna call it learn from the community leadership model, or you wanna call it continuous quality improvement, there has to be this evaluation happening on a regular basis. Hold on one second, I'm gonna take a little sip of water. So working with a large collaborative that had been moving trucking forward for about a year and a half, we realized it was time to do a deeper dive. So this particular collaborative had probably about 10 different action teams who are working on different actionable items, some more actionable than others. So some of the products included youth engagement standards, a youth bill of rights, kind of a meaty skeleton of what a youth endorsement system might look like. We were looking at what training and technical assistance could look like across the state. And then it kind of hit like a bump in the road. And we started hearing from the action teams, we need more information. We're not sure when we can make a decision or who's needed to make that decision, et cetera. So the backbone organization, The Canopy, was approached by a master's level student who said, I wanna do my capstone on this collaborative, Colorado 925. Sorry, I forgot to mention that. And just see what's happening. I was like, yes, please. Love to have a third party do this check-in midway to where we were. Hard to say it was midway, but it was a substantial amount into the work, amount of time into the work. And she put together some amazing interviews, also a survey and let the leadership team know that, hey, the action teams need more clarity on how to make decisions, who to involve with making decisions. There's a lot of people doing this work on top of their 40 hour plus week job. And just a lot of like, okay, we need to slow down. We're kind of missing out on some of these core group issues. Then, this is amazing, the leadership group for Colorado 925 listened to the feedback and said, okay, let's take a deeper dive. And dove into an internal process. And Katie, if you don't mind moving to the next slide. Yes, okay. So they did what they called an action team commitment assessment. And they put together a pretty amazing set of questions on everything about people's involvement and their ability to commit to the work. So this is a very qualitative evaluation step here, but it was a real stepping back from the work, responding to what was simmering among the groups and then listening harder. So it was about 14 questions and they asked about the commitment and then they asked about the balance and what was difficult, what was working. Communication turned out to be a key factor. Basically, people were struggling with what is it that we're achieving? And that didn't mean just concrete achievements, but the bigger, bigger picture of the large vision of Colorado 925 with its major goal of having every young person between nine and 25 be safe, healthy, educated, connected and contributing in the state of Colorado. Well, how are we moving there? How does having these things accomplished move us toward those outcomes? How can I contribute was also a big piece. With the vision that large and CAE and I'm assuming many of you on the call, your collaboratives are huge and people need to know that the needle is moving that way. And then finally the decision-making process and inclusion. So some of the quotes were, we want more transparency. I'd love to know how decisions are being made. I don't hear about that. And the call to action was very clear. And one of those was understanding how it was that people were balancing their work with the work of the collaborative or the collective impact. We found out that many people on this 9 to 25 collective impact were doing Colorado 9 to 25 on top of everything else. So if they went to a two hour meeting it meant they stayed later at work. So that's been a major kind of rewrite as we move forward ensure that if Anna from an organization is involved that her supervisors know that the organization knows so that the work can be built into job descriptions. And that's also gonna make it more sustainable. They also asked for how to partner to ensure that their organizations were also on board with the mission and vision. So the next slide, please. Okay, actually before I mentioned these evaluation tools I wanted to say a few things about what's happened with 9 to 25 as we're moving forward. So the leadership team has spent several months diving into the work of the action teams and really looking at where it was that these action teams were going and what was needed to move us forward based on the action plan. It also came time to go back to that recruitment and listening to who we already had on the collaborative and what we needed. That resulted in a survey, kind of a skills inventory of all the members of 9 to 25 and then a gaps analysis for who are we missing on many different levels from geographic to spheres of influence, to passions for the various outcomes. Then a lot of the struggles that came out in the commitment assessment were woven in to the recruitment and to the interview process. So talking about, okay, if you join this collaborative how does that work with your current job and things like that. Do you have any suggestions or tips for evaluating small partnerships where maybe there's a few players involved or kind of informal ways that you can evaluate the strength of partnerships? Yeah, I think we work with a fair amount of smaller partnerships and in weaving in that learning part of our community learning model, we actually have been for the past year or so being very intentional about asking at the end of major meetings directly, is this what you were hoping for? Is the collaborative moving forward in the way that you want it to? Did you feel like things were clear in this meeting? Do you know what your role is in this meeting? And we actually do a survey with some of our smaller groups after every monthly meeting just to check in. And as we know, there's different ways that people like to communicate and it's not always in a large group. So we compile the results of the meeting evaluation, the process evaluation, distribute it to everybody on the team and then use it in planning the next agenda. Another quick, fun, easy way, and this is probably more direct and immediate feedback is to do something just called plus delta. And you basically ask the group for what did you like about this meeting? What do you like about the process so far? And what do you feel like needs to be changed? So whether it's the way that the agenda was set up, how people were included in the creation of the agenda, agenda items, whatever it may be. But having that instant, okay, we're gonna take the last three minutes, you can just popcorn out your immediate thoughts is super helpful. And then the evaluation helps people respond more, I guess, less audio or less immediate, but on their own time. Thank you. Yeah, it's definitely impacted the flow. I think we often tend to schedule too much into one meeting and then people feel frustrated that not enough was accomplished. So this is tempered and made our meetings more realistic and therefore the work of the collaborative more realistic.