Now that you have used data to help understand your ecosystem, it is time to begin building consensus amongst your core team. In this process, you may also identify additional partners who should be part of designing the solution. Cohorts agree that it’s important to have the right stakeholders at the table. Aligning expectations for roles, responsibilities and pace is equally important. Use this worksheet by CivicLab to help your core team identify your overall goals, responsibilities, shared work and stakeholders from the near to long term.
The purpose of this section is to provide guidance on how to build trusted partnerships as you embark on your pilot project. We will also discuss how to set goals that everyone can work to achieve.
Partnerships can fall apart if there is no trust between organizations and the communities they serve. Cohorts found that building trust with their underserved populations took intentional work and acts of goodwill.
Building Trust in Your Community and with Your Target Population
Cohorts all agree that talking to individuals in communities builds trust. By doing so, cohorts discovered what barriers these groups had in attaining training and education. Neighborhood liaisons and community advocates (official and unofficial), faith-based organizations, neighborhood medical clinics, and Boys and Girls Clubs are great links to getting to know a community as these organizations work directly with local populations.
Cohort Tip
Some barriers include – but are not limited to – transportation, food, childcare, primary healthcare access, completing forms and resume creation. Think about the barriers specific to your target population.
Building Trust with Your Partners and Establishing a Collaborative Relationship
Strong relationships between partners are foundational to increasing credential attainment. The durability of partnerships relies on alignment between chambers, community colleges, CBOs, employers and other partners. Doing so requires intentional structure and clear communication.
Based on months of collaboration, cohorts recommend the following as important things to consider when beginning this work:
- Create team norms. Committing to a safe environment of mutual trust and respect increases problem-solving when difficulties arise.
- Ensure leadership buy-in. Each organization’s leadership needs to endorse the vision of the partnership and provide an explicit commitment to see the initiative through to completion. This may entail specific commitments of time, money, personnel or other resources. Galvanize your work with an MOU.
- Leverage existing partnerships. If your core team includes a partner that you have previously worked with, this may strengthen your chance for successful outcomes. Teams observed that long-term partnerships had established cadences and could pivot quickly if needed. As a result, they were able to effectively take on the work. Note: prior collaboration does not mean that the work will happen quickly or that goals will be immediately met.
- Meet regularly. Partners meeting regularly must also understand that staffing patterns can change as priorities change and people’s lives change. Nearly all communities participating in this cohort went through staff changes and other roadblocks. Entities that leave responsibility for the work with only one individual risk losing momentum and potentially may lose commitment to completion long-term.
- Communicate regularly. Consistent communication is essential. Identify and outline the cadence of your communications and other touch points in your MOU. For a detailed discussion on communication, click here.
- Spend time where it’s needed. Identify which partnerships might need more time in relationship building and prioritize that partner. This may change over time, and staff or leadership turnover may require you to reprioritize relationship building.
- Agree on capacity. Committing time and capacity to this work is non-negotiable. Capacity was a critical success factor for the cohort. Staff with more bandwidth or organizations with more staff professionals involved could complete action items and next steps in between meetings. Identify other projects or initiatives that will compete for resources and time. Make this an exercise in your core team during your first working session.
- Analyze the landscape. Identify who else might be working in this space and might see this work as competitive. As a team, discuss how to mitigate or address these issues. It may be helpful to discuss who has strong relationships with other organizations and may be able to approach them about this work.
- Focus on employers. The ultimate goal of this work is for marginalized workers to secure a well-paid, in-demand job. Credentials or degrees are not valuable if students are not hired upon graduation, so employer engagement is a must-have from the outset.
- Celebrate the wins. Recall your passion for the work. Share even the smallest successes in each meeting.
Cohort Tip
When working with diverse cultures, if you are invited to attend a community event such as a meal or a holiday celebration, go! Your presence will build trust and a robust relationship that will go far beyond metrics and reaching goals.
Resources:
- How to Lead Collective Impact Working Groups: A Comprehensive Toolkit
- 2×2 Feedback Form
- Wilder Collaboration Factors Inventory
- Collective Impact Self-Assessment and Planning Tool
- Cross-Sector Partnership Guideline
In the application for this cohort, ACCEF and AACC asked participants to rank the strength of their partnership and share details of their work. The matrix they used can be helpful to you as you begin to partner with other organizations.
Based on the data and information you collected in the previous step, and your understanding of the ecosystem of agencies, organizations and resources, your core team now must create a goal and start a pilot. Pilots can help you determine what seems to work well and what adjustments you will need to make.
Identifying a Goal
Using the data systems you’ve established, identify a key aspect of credential or degree attainment to tackle. From this, develop and refine the goal for your pilot. This is the first step in the Stakeholder Engagement Process. To learn more about this process, take a look at the graphic below:
Build a consensus on the problem or system the initiative is trying to solve/dissolve based on information and data. Identify the policies, practices, resource flows, relationships, connections and power dynamics in the ecosystem. These are the conditions that either keep the problem or issue in place or help to dissolve the issue or problem if addressed.
How to Build Consensus
Because core teams were community-oriented, they found that consensus-building (rather than democratic decision-making) created the most successful outcomes for their diverse populations. Take a look at the table below to understand why consensus-building can be a more effective framework to use.
Using your goal and the information gathered to this point, begin to craft your pilot program. As you begin (and throughout all phases of execution), intentionally review data with core team members to validate existing strategies, seek new information and get feedback. Evaluating data and identifying data gaps are important to understanding the issue or problem. Use data to drive outcomes and results. When you don’t see desired outcomes and/or results, or there are significant changes to your core team, you must adjust the strategy.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Your progress can be tracked using KPIs. The following are helpful resources to get started:
Finalize data-sharing processes based on new data and update any MOUs as necessary.
Cohort Tip
The pilot phase is a good time to consider using focus groups, surveys, and individual interviews with target populations to identify barriers, critical support and what might be working.
Cohort Case Studies
• Tallahassee began to work with a local community college. As the work was underway, the college experienced a reorganization and as a result was no longer able to work with them. This caused the cohort to adjust their strategy. As a result, Tallahassee shifted its focus from working with the community college to working with wraparound services that served a particular population.
• Fargo wanted to better understand the barriers of a particular refugee population when obtaining education or training. Their initial efforts did not produce responses. As a result, the cohort shifted their approach. Using partners who were on the ground with this population, they conducted extensive community surveying, which provided positive outcomes. They learned that going directly to the community to listen to pain points deepened their understanding.
Once there’s a shared understanding of goals in your pilot, your core team will need to create a team structure that outlines roles and responsibilities.
Role and responsibility identification and assignment differ from ecosystem mapping, which we learned about here. As we learned, mapping your ecosystem is the first step to identifying potential partners. As your core team begins to engage other community stakeholders, each team member will need to have an assigned role and responsibilities. These roles and responsibilities should be outlined in your MOU.
Key roles and responsibilities might include:
Backbone Organization
A backbone organization is responsible for financial management and stakeholder progress reporting. It can also be the convening entity, but this is not always the case.
Convener
A convener organizes the meetings and distributes agendas and key materials.
Guiding Team
The guiding team is a small group of representatives from each of the major stakeholders. They provide overall strategy and coordinate with one another to improve collaboration and reduce duplication. They serve as thought leaders, connectors, and ambassadors.
Facilitator
The facilitator leads the conversation but is not the leader of the work. Key outside leaders might include:
- Chamber members
- United Way
- Community Foundations
- Colleges & Universities
- Community-based organizations or local foundations
- Local chapter of the American Society for Training & Development
Scribe
A scribe captures notes, actions, and next steps and assigns work to core team members.
Subject Matter Experts (SMEs)
Subject matter experts can provide content knowledge depending on the goals of your work, specific topics that need to be addressed, and agenda items.
Cohort Tip
Consider (hired) expert facilitation among collaboratives to advance the work more efficiently and intently. The Collective Impact Forum and other organizations have lists of roles organizations can play in collaboration.