Over the past three episodes with Marlo, Sixto, Anthony, Bryn, and Samantha, we have explored how we might unlock the power of lived experience through true collaboration. Whether through shifts in our mental models as Marlo and Anthony proposed, or through policy and practice changes as Sixto and Bryn shared, or through power-sharing and trust-building as Samantha demonstrated, I hope that you discovered pathways that will lead you to better collaboration with people with lived experience. In these final few episodes of this season, we are going to attempt to bring many of these lessons all together. I invited Bryan Samuels back to the podcast for the next two episodes to help us do that through Chapin Hall’s years-long review of the best strategies and lessons learned that you can find in their report titled “Systems Transformation through Community Leadership.” In this first episode, we are going to explore why systems transformation through community leadership is needed, and why the conditions are right now. Bryan will also introduce the 5 key strategies to advance Systems Transformation through Community Leadership. In the second episode, Bryan will share how to bring these 5 key strategies to life in our communities through shifts in our practices, policies, relationships, and mental models.
Today’s episode included the following speakers (in the order they appear):
Host: Luke Waldo
Experts:
:11-:33 - Bryan Samuels - I think at the end of the day, there are lots of folks that want change. There aren't a ton of folks that have realized that change. And for that, it often requires some of us to bring forward the best thinking so that people can take advantage of experiences that others have had, so that it might inspire and direct their efforts.
:42-4:55 – Luke Waldo – Introduction to Systems Transformation Through Community Leadership report, Bryan Samuels’ bio, and welcome.
Why is systems transformation needed today in the US?
4:56-6:33 - Bryan – How can we make services more effective and more equitable? How can systems change to meet the needs of diverse populations?
Chapin Hall was motivated out of a sense that there was a window of opportunity to contribute to the growth and change and direction for the country, and to bring some unique insight into how systems go about changing themselves in order to respond to the needs of a diverse population of families that they serve.
6:34-7:01 – Luke – Can you expand on why Chapin Hall felt that our systems weren’t meeting the diverse needs of our children, families and communities?
7:02-10:54 – Bryan – How do systems take a limited amount of resource and share them equitably? Many of our most marginalized communities have received less services and resources. Over 50% of Black children are investigated by CPS. Families living in poverty are disproportionately investigated by CPS.
Chapin Hall believes that we are living a moment where many want change, so we are providing them with some of the best thinking and tools from across the country to enact that change.
10:55-11:18 – Luke – What does Chapin Hall hope to change or accomplish with the Systems Transformation blueprint? What are some of the key components of the blueprint?
11:19-13:30 – Bryan – Connect the dots between what people were proposing and what we know works. And so we wanted to look at these questions:
Does community engagement and engaging folks with lived experience produce better results?
Does systems change happen when the only people making the change happen are people leading the system right?
Do folks have the skills they need to be successful in the long term?
Do we have the right resources at the table to enable real, meaningful long-term change to occur?
There were lots of lessons learned. So even in failure, there were things that one could conclude about what you would do better the next time.
13:31-13:51 – Luke – Can you expand on those lessons learned?
13:52-17:51 - Bryan – Lessons learned.
17:52-18:47 – Luke – Can you outline those 5 key strategies for us and how you came to them?
18:48-20:48 - Bryan – Conducted focus groups and learned from system leaders to inform this process along with reviewing the research. There are 5 principles.
20:49-21:10 - Luke – Gratitude.
21:11-23:33 - Bryan – “Opportunity to speak to these issues are near and dear to me.” Bryan’s experience that speaks to why this work is so important to him.
23:34-27:03 – Luke – 3 Key Takeaways
Closing Credits
SPEAKERS
Bryan Samuels, Luke Waldo
Bryan Samuels 00:11
I think at the end of the day, there are lots of folks that want change. There aren't a ton of folks that have realized that change. And for that, it often requires some of us to bring forward the best thinking so that people can take advantage of experiences that others have had, so that it might inspire and direct their efforts.
Luke Waldo 00:42
Welcome to season 3 of Overloaded: Understanding Neglect, where we explore how we might change the conditions that overload families with stress, so that families can thrive and children grow up with a strong foundation built on positive childhood experiences.
Hey everyone, this is Luke Waldo, your host for this podcast series and the Director of Program Design and Community Engagement for the Institute for Child and Family Well-being, our partnership between Children’s Wisconsin and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Helen Bader School of Social Welfare.
Over the past three episodes with Marlo, Sixto, Anthony, Bryn, and Samantha, we have explored how we might unlock the power of lived experience through true collaboration. Whether through shifts in our mental models as Marlo and Anthony proposed, or through policy and practice changes as Sixto and Bryn shared, or through power-sharing and trust-building as Samantha demonstrated, I hope that you discovered pathways that will lead you to better collaboration with people with lived experience.
In these final few episodes of this season, we are going to attempt to bring many of these lessons all together.
I invited Bryan Samuels back to the podcast for the next two episodes to help us do that through Chapin Hall’s years-long review of the best strategies and lessons learned that you can find in their report titled “Systems Transformation through Community Leadership.”
In this first episode, we are going to explore why systems transformation through community leadership is needed, and why the conditions are right now. Bryan will also introduce the 5 key strategies to advance Systems Transformation through Community Leadership.
In the second episode, Bryan will share how to bring these 5 key strategies to life in our communities through shifts in our practices, policies, relationships, and mental models.
Bryan Samuels is the Executive Director of Chapin Hall, a nonprofit policy research institute focused on connecting research to action. Under Bryan’s leadership, Chapin Hall is actively working in more than 40 states in building knowledge and creating solutions with and for public system partners, community leaders and members, and families—all with an aim to improve the wellbeing of children and youth, and ensure all families thrive.
Across his career, Bryan’s work has centered on identifying and addressing inequities using evidence in policymaking. Key accomplishments include the creation and application of a well-being framework based on the best developmental understanding of normal childhood development; formation of a shared and actionable understanding of the effects of exposure to violence, trauma, poverty, and adverse childhood experiences on the mental, emotional, behavioral, and physical health of children; and emphasis on the importance of building the capacity of public and private child- and family-serving systems and organizations to focus on and produce positive outcomes.
Bryan was appointed by President Obama as the Commissioner of the Administration on Children, Youth, and Families (ACYF), where he served from 2009 to 2013 and leveraged the work of federal departments including Health and Human Services, Justice, and Education, among others, on behalf of children in foster care, youth experiencing housing instability, and families impacted by domestic violence.
Bryan’s voice, experience and expertise can be heard throughout the first season of this podcast series; and he has also contributed generously to our Institute’s vision and growth through his partnership and guidance over the past decade.
Welcome, Bryan. Thank you for joining us today. It’s wonderful having you back on the podcast.
Bryan Samuels 04:31
Glad to be here.
Luke Waldo 04:33
Bryan, I invited you to have a conversation today, specifically about Chapin Hall's Systems Transformation through Community Leadership report that was developed recently to understand what has and hasn't worked in efforts to build and embed black and brown community leadership into public systems change. Why do you and Chapin Hall believe that now is the moment for these changes?
Bryan Samuels 04:56
Sure. So appreciate the introduction. As it suggests, I've been at this work for a while. I started the work that we're going to talk about here today when I was 21 or 22 and have realized across time that there are these waves of insight that occur. People come upon an idea, they noodle on it, they do some work on it, they make some progress on it, and then they move on to the next idea. But give them a little bit of time, and they'll come back to this good idea, and they'll do a little bit more work on it, and then go away.
And it felt like to me that during the pandemic, during the uprise related to George Floyd, understanding the kind of the social unrest that existed in the country, that this was going to be another instance where we return to the question of, how can we make services more effective and efficient? How can we make them more equitable?
And so the work that Chapin Hall did in this space was really motivated out of a sense that there was a window of opportunity to contribute to the growth and change and direction for the country, and to bring some unique insight into specifically how systems go about changing themselves in order to respond to the needs of a diverse population of families that they serve.
Luke Waldo 06:34
Thank you, Bryan, can you expand a bit on how Chapin Hall began that process, and more specifically, why you and Chapin Hall felt that some of our systems, particularly the systems that serve children, families in our communities, were not necessarily meeting the needs of all children, families and our community members?
Bryan Samuels 07:02
Sure. So the issue of equity has always been a question for government agencies. How do they take a limited amount of resources and share them equitably to support the needs of families? And so for a long time, especially in our deep end systems like child welfare, like the juvenile justice system, even our education system, some communities have been marginalized and received fewer resources, and often have been underserved.
So as we were looking at the challenges that you might see in a child welfare system, where over 50% of African American children will have been investigated by the child welfare system by the time that they're 18, while other communities are also over surveilled. And then, more importantly, if you look at issues of poverty, that poverty plays an essential role in child welfare, and the reasons why people come to the attention of the child welfare system are uniquely related to poverty. So you'll see that over 80% of reports to child welfare involve families that are within 200% of the poverty rate.
So there's a disproportionate treatment in these deepened systems of marginalized communities and folks that don't have many resources, and so in that context, I think we all have an obligation to call out those inequities, to recognize the root causes of the problems that are represented in those inequities, and then the work towards responsive and evidence-informed solutions to address those inequities. And so I think in this space and this time, there's a real sense that public agencies not only recognize that they need to change, but they actually want to change.
And so we feel like bringing forward new ideas, things that are grounded in the literature based on real experience could be valuable to those public agency leaders and their partners to really take advantage of this moment and make real change happen. Right? It gets harder to commit oneself to change if all of the efforts that we engage in related to change fail, right?
So we wanted to be able to contribute to the process by which people could experience some success and build a sense of momentum towards transformation. And at the same time build some muscle and competency in the change process so that they get better and more effective across time, because we think that that's ultimately the way you make systems change is by enabling and empowering people, building skills and competencies, putting the right information in front of them as they need it, and allowing them to define the goals and outcomes and objectives, and then using the resources that we have to pursue those, those activities.
I think at the end of the day, there are lots of folks that want change. There aren't a ton of folks that have realized that change, and for that it often requires some of us to bring forward the best thinking so that people can take advantage of experiences that others have had, so that it might inspire and direct their efforts.
Luke Waldo 10:55
Thank you, Bryan, so what does Chapin Hall hope to change or accomplish with the Systems Transformation through Community Leadership framework? And beyond that, what are some of the key kind of components or mechanisms of the framework that you believe will, will drive this, this blueprint forward?
Bryan Samuels 11:19
Sure, so the, the blueprint itself really emerged out of a sense that we were again in one of those moments where people were talking about change. And then recognize that as we look closer at the language that people were using to describe change, they were describing things that have been tried before. And so the first thing that we wanted to do was to do a deep dive into the ideas that people were talking about and to see if we could connect the dots between what people were proposing and what we know works.
And so we wanted to look at these questions of, does community engagement and engaging folks with lived experience produce better results? Does systems change happen when the only people making the change happen are people leading the system, right? Do folks have the skills they need to be successful in the long term? Do we have the right resources at the table to enable real, meaningful long-term change to occur?
There were lots of lessons learned. So even in failure, there were things that one could conclude about what you would do better the next time. And so in addition to just figuring out what worked and what didn't work, we also used the things that kind of sort of worked to bring forward proposals for how somebody might do it today, right, to put people in a position not to make the same old mistakes as before, but to at the very least make informed decisions about doing it differently this next time, with the hopes that if they did it differently and had more support, we'd actually increase the likelihood that they'd be successful.
Luke Waldo 13:31
Thank you, Bryan, can you expand a bit more on, as you mentioned, some of the specific lessons learned that you see as critical to systems transformation for those that are on this journey and maybe referring to Chapin Hall for some guidance?
Bryan Samuels 13:52
Great. So a couple of the things that we learned. Admittedly, I'm gonna say these things, and nobody's going to be surprised by them, but somebody's got to say them, so I'll be the one that says them.
So the first thing that's easy to confirm is that top-down approaches to systems change rarely work. Just having the person at the top of the organization creating their own vision and direction and expecting that everybody else will follow their lead consistently demonstrates a lack of progress. And so we learned that just asking people at the top to make the decision and have everybody else follow them doesn't really lead to systems change.
We also learned that systems change takes time. So so often there were these initiatives that had short timelines and had fairly conventional measures of success, and they usually failed and they usually didn't achieve the conventional measures of success that one would anticipate so it takes more time than people typically allot.
We also learned that the lack of engagement by community partners was critical to a system's failure to make change happen, to recognize that folks with lived experience engaged one time in one conversation doesn't lead to the kind of insight necessary to change an entire system. So the lack of engagement of community partners, time and time again, showed itself not to be a successful strategy.
The fourth thing that we learned was that people not only showed up with assets, talents and knowledge that they could bring to the table, but they sometimes had gaps in their skills or gaps in their knowledge, and it created a barrier for them being a much larger contributor to the discussion as well as to the solution. So recognizing that skill building is a part of systems change is something that is an important lesson that we took away.
And then ultimately, the thing that's most striking about what we learned is that in order to achieve success, it requires shared leadership and decision-making, right? That if you want to move a system, you've got to have people at every level of the system sharing in the goals and objectives and committed to achieving the change that one might aspire to. That's the same for folks in the community, that if you want to engage communities as part of a larger change process, then they've got to have a role in the leadership, and they've got to have a role in the decision-making. In the absence of those roles, one, you see that they don't continue to participate, and the initiatives overall don't lead to significant change.
So those were, those were some of the takeaways. Top-down doesn't work. Short-term projects have limited success. The lack of engagement of community partners creates real barriers to trusting conversations. That skill building is absolutely necessary in the systems change process. And shared leadership and decision- making are an essential element to long-change.
Luke Waldo 17:52
Thank you, Bryan, for sharing and then summarizing those key lessons learned for sustainable change. As you know, this podcast is an extension of our Strong Families, Thriving Children, Connected Communities initiative, which aspires to transform systems and ultimately change the conditions for overloaded families so that we may reduce family separation for reasons of neglect. I am hoping to provide opportunities to our listeners and our community partners to not only learn about the transformative approaches that we are discussing today, but also to provide tools and strategies to implement them.
So with that in mind, I’d like to finish today’s conversation laying out the key strategies that Chapin Hall developed in the Systems Transformation through Community Leadership report. We will go into much greater depth as to how those strategies have been implemented in the next episode. So, can you please outline those 5 key strategies for us and how you came to them?
Bryan Samuels 18:48
We took the lessons that we learned in terms of success or failure, we actually did focus groups to understand from communities that have engaged in this change process, what the lessons were. We also reached out to a number of the leaders of these kind of change initiatives to get their input and insight so, so we didn't rely solely on the literature. We really did want to make sure that we engage people who had real-life experiences trying to transform systems and to learn from them things that might be done differently or done better.
As you can imagine, the lived experience of people trying to make change was just as valuable. We concluded that there were basically five elements to the transformation process. So the first principle really revolves around disrupting system mindsets and habits. The second one was a need to invest in the community. Third was to reimagine what community engagement looks like. Fourth, transforming systems with communities in the lead was the fourth principle. And then the fifth, embedding community leadership and adapting over time. Right? This idea that if you want communities to lead going forward, you've got to build an infrastructure of support around them so that they can feel comfortable and confident that they have both the knowledge and the resources necessary to be successful.
Luke Waldo 20:49
So thank you, not only for all of that Bryan, but, but for your years and years of partnership and mentorship. We, we feel deeply grateful for all that you've contributed to our work and continue to contribute to our field's work. So thank you.
Bryan Samuels 21:11
The opportunity to speak to these issues are near and dear to me. Again, I started my career working in communities, organizing communities, getting folks with lived experience to come to the table and help me get insights from them so that we could change the conditions in many of those communities.
I started off working in the economic and social supports space of trying to think about how to get more economic opportunity to low-income communities and how to build social supports in those communities. And so that was a really powerful experience for me. And then that work kind of evolved to helping to stand up Family Resource Centers in states around the country, using federal resources. And so that meant I got to travel all over the country, helping people think about their skills and assets, helping them recognize the resources that were available in their community, helping them think about, how could they create a Family Resource Center that met the unique challenges and circumstances of families in that area, was a really powerful experience.
And then working on systems change. Before I was a systems leader, I was a planner for helping community- based processes change the systems around them, and so I was able to sit on the side of communities, anticipate the concerns that they would raise, and to help them strategize to put forward solutions that really could be translated into systems change. And so those early experiences stick with me, and I hope that in this presentation, those experiences are represented from work I did almost 40 years ago coming full circle and being able to give a set of new ideas and opportunities that I wish I would have had 40 years ago.
Luke Waldo 23:34
Well, we appreciate you sharing it today, and your experience and your expertise is invaluable. So thank you again, Bryan.
I hope that this episode and insights from Bryan have you thinking more about how we might transform systems through community leadership. Before we go, as always I wanted to highlight three key takeaways to reflect on as we move into our next episodes.
Thank you for joining us for today’s episode. We hope that you will come back and listen next week as we continue to explore how we might change the conditions that overload families with stress, so that families can thrive and children grow up with positive childhood experiences.
To learn more about the experts that you heard today, visit the Show Notes, which is where you will also find links to sources or information that were mentioned in today’s episode.
If you enjoyed today’s episode, please share with friends, family and colleagues. Also, leave us a rating or comment so that we can see your reaction and reach more people.
This podcast would not have been possible without the support and talents of Carrie Wade, who is responsible for our technical production and original music composition. I can't express my gratitude enough to Carrie for all she has given to this project. I'm also grateful to my team at the Institute for Child and Family Well-being at Children’s Wisconsin, who drive the Strong Families, Thriving Children, Connected Communities initiative and contributed to the ideas behind this podcast.
Finally, I would like to thank all of our speakers that you have heard today and throughout the podcast for their partnership, their willingness to share their stories and expertise with me and all of you, and their commitment to improving the lives of children and families. I'm Luke Waldo, your Host and Executive Editor.
As this season is how we show our work as we learn about the innovative systems change happening across our state and country. Please share your work that is changing the conditions for children and families by leaving a note in the comment section or emailing me. Thank you again for joining us. See you next week.