As I listened to Bryan Samuels in our last episode, I thought a lot about communities that drove their own transformation by collaborating with and changing the systems that should be serving them. Whether it’s the Harlem Children’s Zone that disrupted intergenerational poverty through community-driven Promise Academies, medical centers, and after-school and job training programs. Or here in Milwaukee where the Lindsey Heights Neighborhood Initiative increased homeownership, household income, and access to healthy food and quality healthcare through its Innovation and Wellness Commons all while empowering its residents rather than displacing them. In turn the community saw a decrease in crime and vacant lots as it trained more and more community leaders. We're talking about systems and community transformation that's more than statistics—though the numbers are powerful. But the true magic isn't in the data—it's in the strategies that these communities used to drive real change. In today’s episode, Bryan will share the 5 key strategies from Chapin Hall’s report “Systems Transformation through Community Leadership” that were developed from reviewing how people and leaders from communities like Harlem and Lindsey Heights changed the odds from the ground up for the kids and families that live there. I encourage you, as Bryan does at the end of today’s episode, to follow along with the bulletins as he brings these 5 key strategies to life. You can find the link in the show notes.
Today’s episode included the following speakers (in the order they appear):
Host: Luke Waldo
Experts:
:07-:39 – Bryan Samuels - Is the goal that you’re trying to get engagement? Or is the goal you’re trying to get ownership? And when you think about ownership, then you have to think about going the extra mile.
:42-3:24 - Luke Waldo – Opening, introduction to Bryan Samuels and the Systems Transformation Through Community Leadership report.
3:25-10:15 - Bryan – Disrupting System Mindsets
10:16-19:15 – Bryan – Investing in Communities
19:16-28:47 - Bryan – Reimagine Community Engagement
28:48-39:18 - Bryan – Community Leadership
39:19-48:20 - Bryan – Embedding Community Leadership
48:21-52:20 - Bryan – Use the podcast as inspiration to dive more deeply into the bulletins and build a strategy from both.
52:21-52:50 - Luke – This conversation has been both inspirational and instructive. Gratitude.
52:52-55:00 – Luke - 3 Key Takeaways
55:05-56:53 - Closing Credits
Join the conversation and connect with us!
Bryan Samuels00:07
Is the goal that you're trying to get engagement, or is the goal you're trying to get ownership? And when you think about ownership, then you have to think about, you know, kind of going the extra mile. Getting ownership means really having a much longer timeline and be comfortable with that timeline, because at the end of the day, what you're trying to get is a product that that essentially the community sees as theirs and not the systems.
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.
As I listened to Bryan Samuels in our last episode, I thought a lot about communities that drove their own transformation by collaborating with and changing the systems that should be serving them. Whether it’s the Harlem Children’s Zone that disrupted intergenerational poverty through community-driven Promise Academies, medical centers, and after-school and job training programs. Or here in Milwaukee where the Lindsey Heights Neighborhood Initiative increased homeownership, household income, and access to healthy food and quality healthcare through its Innovation and Wellness Commons all while empowering its residents rather than displacing them. In turn the community saw a decrease in crime and vacant lots as it trained more and more community leaders.
We're talking about systems and community transformation that's more than statistics—though the numbers are powerful. But the true magic isn't in the data—it's in the strategies that these communities used to drive real change.
In today’s episode, Bryan will share the 5 key strategies from Chapin Hall’s report “Systems Transformation through Community Leadership” that were developed from reviewing how people and leaders from communities like Harlem and Lindsey Heights changed the odds from the ground up for the kids and families that live there. I encourage you, as Bryan does at the end of today’s episode, to follow along with the bulletins as he brings these 5 key strategies to life. You can find the link in the show notes.
Bryan Samuels is the Executive Director of Chapin Hall and the former Commissioner of the Administration on Children, Youth, and Families under the Obama administration.
As this episode was part of a much longer conversation with Bryan, you will be joining as he begins to share the first of the five strategies. So let’s jump right in.
Bryan Samuels 03:25
If you want to move up to the top of that list, this idea of disrupting system mindsets and habits we thought were important, because one, in order to be successful, you've got to be able to shift from this perspective of seeing families as having problems to seeing families as those that can bring forward solutions. Right, this idea that just seeing a family struggling doesn't give you insights, as well as talking that to that family about what you can learn about the solutions to their problems which were critical.
Another idea here really revolves around rethinking the role that power and positionality play in collaboration. Right? This idea that somehow, if you have the system leader sitting on a table around a group of community leaders, you've got to recognize that there are power differentials there, that they control different resources, they have more authority to act upon some of these ideas. And when there's a great power difference, when there's a dramatic kind of strong position versus fairly weak positions, you don't get the kind of buy in and commitment that you often need to find those really important insights and make systems change directions.
You also want to try to reinforce a new narrative about the role of communities, from a place where only bad things happen to a place where folks are resilient and hardworking and committed to their families and see them as having assets around which you can make a place safer to live, more productive to live, ultimately, can see it as a place that anybody could be successful in raising a family. So rethinking and rewriting that narrative about what community is and isn't became critically important in this idea of disrupting system mindsets and habits.
We also found that the initiatives that were the most successful were ones that establish some infrastructure right? They created a process and some resources around which these systems transformation efforts could build upon, they included coordinated planning, so you weren't asking communities to do something in isolation and then taking those plans and applying them to this systems level change effort without bringing much specificity to the table. So coordinating planning was really, really critical.
And then continuous quality improvement, right? This idea that if you establish a transformation process, if you establish trying to change the system, that you can't assume that everybody is effectively engaging and contributing everything they can up based on the same decision-making structure. So sometimes you need to pause and check in with everybody and say, Hey, is this working for everybody? Is the time we're meeting working for everybody? Is how we're setting the agenda working for everybody? How we summarize and exit the meeting, Is that working for everybody? Right? So asking these questions that allow you to course correct this idea of continuous quality improvement in the engagement process was really critical.
We also find that people tend to use complicated language, and so it's often the case that establishing a common language within a group is really critical to building momentum towards change. And this sense that communities need to understand and have some input into the way the resources are brought forward in support of this initiative. It's often the case that the agencies might establish a budget and then carve out a piece of it for the community, and the only resources that are ever talked about in that entire change process is the amount of resources that are being dedicated to the community. So those those funds are used in isolation of all of the other resources that might be available. And so sometimes it's difficult for communities to understand where they fit in the larger picture when they only know about the resources that have been dedicated to the community level change, and they don't have the benefit of knowing all of the other investments that are brought to bear on making systems change happen.
And the last point that I would make is this idea of power building has increasingly become an important part of thinking about shifting systems by disrupting the mindsets and habits, right? And this power building is this sense that um, that change process may start with individuals at different levels of authority. They might start with different levels of power, but the goal of a systems change process should be one of sharing power, so that across time, communities have more equal say in the decision making and the resource allocation right? So that the power in the decision making moves from disproportionate to equitable, and so that everybody around the table feels empowered to facilitate change, as opposed to looking around the table and recognizing that some people have a lot more power to make stuff happen than do others. So this idea of power sharing becomes an increasingly important theme in the space in which you want to disrupt this system's mindset and change the habits that leaders might portray.
10:16 - Investing in Communities
The second principle that really emerges out of our research, as well as talking to folks and engaging people with lived experience. The second component really revolves around investing in communities that again, that people have often talked about the importance of communities being at the table and contributing to systems change, but they rarely have invested in the infrastructure necessary for communities to come to the table and consistently contribute to the change process.
So as you can imagine, for a long time in this country, we've had we've had issues of race and racism. We've had communities that feel marginalized because of their race, ethnicity or income, and so the beginning of this process often means that the community folks don't have the same access to resources necessary to support a long-term planning and change process. And so it's really important from the beginning to recognize that there have to be some resources brought to the table that will facilitate having a meeting place, having something to drink and eat, allowing people support for for for child care, really thinking about what are the other supports that need to happen in order to facilitate change?
Remember, most of the community folks who will show up to these meetings, they either already have a job, and so they're going to do their nine to five and then show up to a community meeting. While the professionals will be coming to those meetings as a part of their job, right? So it creates a different level of investment. Other folks may not have a job, but they're taking care of their three kids during the day. They don't have much time and space to get prepared for a meeting, and then when they show up, they've had a full day, plus, now you're asking them to engage and contribute, while they also have to worry about who's taking care of their kids, who's feeding them, how are they making sure that the homework is getting done? So it's really important, this concept of investing in communities and recognizing that not everybody is doing this work from the perspective of a professional whose job it is to do this work.
We also recognize that if you're going to invest in communities, you don't want to just rely on the usual suspects. You don't want to rely on just four or five people that would typically show up to community meetings and make statements and comments, but you want to really try to dig in and find a diverse group of contributors, some that systems may know, some that systems may not know, some that will have experience being served by government, others who haven't had the experience of being served by government. So thinking about the diversity and representation of the community that comes around the table is critical, and so investing in finding those other assets in the community and making sure that they're represented around the table becomes an important part of being successful.
Again, we've talked about the fact that not everybody will naturally come forward as a leader of the group, and so shouldn't expect that everybody's going to be the person that stands up and says all of the things that need to change. There are others are going to be sitting around the table that have really great ideas, but they need another way to participate. So sometimes having surveys, taking a poll, taking a vote by hand, so that people can visually see where there's commonality and where there isn't all of those things are really, really important as a way of investing in the diversity of participants that you ask to come around the table.
There's also just this issue of trust, and trust is something that is earned, and so in a community building, community engagement process that is intended for transformation, it may take you more than one meeting to have everybody feel like they're a part of the group. It may take you more than a minute before people believe that you're not going to take the information that you share and misrepresent them when you share it with others. So part of investing in communities is taking the time to build trusting relationships. If you're just trying to get in and out, then you don't need to know people and they won't get to know you, and therefore they won't trust you. And so building trust is a form of investing in community, because you're taking the time that it takes to get to know people, both at a personal level, as well as in their more professional perspectives, their expert perspectives, because that ultimately makes a big difference in the long term viability of the work itself.
One of the other things that people talked about in this section was about the fact that the that they didn't realize that they had skills that specifically translated into this transformation space, right? So you you might have a mom of five who hasn't spent much time in a professional environment, at least not in a recent time, but they're really good at scheduling things. They think about it as that's the way they survive with five kids and a husband, you know, who's going to leave at six o'clock in the morning and she's not going to see him again until six o'clock at night. She's got to be organized. She's got a plan. She's got to execute things in a very specific way in order for her to feel good at the end of the day. But she won't necessarily think that maybe she has a role in setting the schedule for the group for the next six months, right? So there's also this process that emerges across time of people coming to recognize that they have other skills and competencies that can be brought to bear on systems transformation, but they need the time and investment in order to see where they can adapt, where they can adjust, and where they can make a unique contribution to the direction of the group and the work.
I make, I make two other quick points about investing in communities. One is that investing in communities sometimes mean taking a moment to explain what the intent of a policy or an action is. If you're not part of a child welfare system, if you haven't taught in the school system, if you haven't been a part of a Workforce Investment Initiative, you may not understand how that system actually makes decisions and what happens behind closed doors. And so sometimes investing in communities is pausing long enough to make sure that everybody understands what you mean when you talk about the intake process for the work and workforce employment opportunity that exists in a community. So investing in communities is also investing in the time to make sure that they understand the systems that they're going to be interfacing with, or that you're trying to transform.
And then the last one, which folks have really articulated as important is this, this, this recognition that it's often the case that folks need appropriately to be compensated for the time that they spend doing the work at the table. So sometimes they're taken for granted when they're asked to participate in a change process, and folks don't realize that they're giving up other opportunities to earn funds.
19:16 - Reimagine Community Engagement
So the third principle for Systems Transformation revolves around this idea of reimagining community engagement. There have often been times in the past where grant requirements require that you get community participation. So somebody goes out, they do a focus group, they come back, they say they've completed that component of their grant, or they recognize that getting community engagement means that they'll get extra points when that grant is being evaluated, and so they think about surveying residents as a way of demonstrating that they got meaningful engagement from the community. And while those things are still valuable and helpful, the systems transformation work and the lessons learned from this research suggests that you have to do more than finding a way to create a rubber stamp or check the box that you are able to again get community engagement.
So community engagement from the beginning has to be seen as something that is more than a one time commitment. It's got to recognize that in order to get true commitment and engagement, it's about building relationships with the communities that you that you care about. It means allowing the community actually the time to understand the choices that are available to them in this process, because community residents with a list of five really interesting solutions to the community problem might prioritize that list of five very differently than a system leader would. And so providing the community the opportunity to engage in priority setting sometimes can be really valuable and create some insights for those system leaders about where there may be a difference of experience between what they think they're delivering to the community and how the community experiences the way that system operates.
Reimagining community engagement also means creating a shared vision of the future. It's often the case that leaders come to the table with their own vision, and they assume that communities will see the value in the vision that they have for changing the system. And so they began the process of asking people to engage after the vision has all been already been created, so the opportunity to pause and to build a shared vision of a better system is a critical component to reimagining engagement.
Allowing people the time to sit and think about ideas, to incubate them is also valuable, right? So to put an idea in front of somebody and ask them what they think, immediately, you may not get the same quality of feedback as you would if you introduced a series of ideas, and you said in the next meeting, we're going to return to this issue, and we'd like you to be able to weigh in on it. So we've put together a list of these ideas, and we're going to make sure that everybody walks away with the same list, and next week or next month, we're going to talk about this list that allows the idea to incubate, for them to think and consider, have it applied to their own circumstances, so that the next time they come back to the table, they're in a better position to reflect what's in their best interest, because they've had the opportunity to think about the goals of something, to understand what the results of each of the options might be, and either even have the time, the time to think about what the challenges might be for any one of the options. So, so just because they're five really good options doesn't mean that they're equally as easy to implement. So you might have a great idea that's really hard, or a good idea that is really easy, right? And having the time to think about both what the goal and intent is as well as what it's going to take to actually make the change happen, may lead to you not choosing the best idea because it's hard, it might be impossible. Uh, right? Versus the second or third idea, which is kind of sort of really cool, but far more likely to be well received by the community or respond to the diversity of needs in a particular community. So this idea of incubation becomes a really important aspect of reimagining engagement.
Make a couple of other points. It's often the case that again, from the beginning there's there are even power differences within communities, right? Sometimes people in these initiatives often treat community residents as equal to community providers, right? But only one of them lives in the community. The other one serves the community, so they bring very different assets to the to the table, and so reimagining community engagement in part allows the residents of that community an opportunity to make a unique statement or contribution to the group that's distinct from a service provider that lives in the community. Again, service providers that have been in communities for a long time will be absolutely certain that they are capable of representing the interest of the community. That's not always true, and so giving deference to the folks that actually live in the community, or giving deference to the people that actually will experience this systems change is a really different approach to getting community engagement and and ultimately putting the community in a position where their contributions actually end up central to the plan that emerges from this engagement process.
I'll make one other point that I probably should have made earlier, but I will make it now that again, this idea that there are usual suspects, there are some community residents you know them, they show up to every school board meeting, and they've got lots of stuff to say, and they come well prepared. There are others that operate in the community. They're held in high regard, but it's not their instinct to engage with government in trying to fix government. And so sometimes you actually need the community residents to find the residents that they hold in high regard as the people to bring forward to represent the community. So if it's an agency representative that's going out and finding people. So they take the obvious people you may not get the same benefit of engaging residents around the question of who they hold in high regard, who they think might represent their interests best, and going and investing in recruiting those people to the table, so that you really have people that the community has respect for, and that when this plan or this strategy or the systems change comes forward, they know that they can trust the ideas that are embedded in it, because the people who they hold in high regard had something to do with the final product. And so this idea of using stakeholders to find other stakeholders can be a critical strategy for making sure that the final plan has credibility, because it's been validated by people in the community that are held in high regard
28:48 - Community Leadership
The fourth principle. The fourth principle revolves around this idea of community leadership, and calling it out as explicitly the leadership of the community that actually makes the change happen, and when they when we talk about community leadership, in this instance, really talking about community ownership, we're talking about the idea that there are some instances where you are trying to strike the balance between what the system folks think think and what the community folks think, or what the Education folks think versus the Child Welfare folks think. There are other instances where you're actually trying to achieve something greater than the commonality of perspective, or making sure that equal contributions are being made. Sometimes you actually want the end product to be community ownership, that you want everybody in the community to see that strategy as the result of their participation. And in that instance, it really does take an extra effort.
So to be clear about what the goal is, is the goal you're trying to get engagement, or is the goal you're trying to get ownership? And when you think about ownership, then you have to think about, you know, kind of going the extra mile. Getting ownership means really having a much longer timeline, and be comfortable with that timeline, because at the end of the day, what you're trying to get is a product that that essentially the community sees as theirs and not the systems. So identifying the specific knowledge and expertise that you need in the community is a critical component to getting community ownership, to creating a decision making process that gives great weight to the community representatives is a way of facilitating ownership,
Creating a governance structure where everybody recognizes how the process works, understands the role and responsibilities of each of the members and understand how decisions actually will get made, is a critical step towards trying to achieve community ownership. It's often the case in this space of ownership that, again, not everybody shows up with the same set of experiences. And so if you want kind of community ownership, one of the important things to think about is a ladder of opportunity, right? That not everybody is going to come in at the same levels. And so you want to be thinking about, hey, we've got this really great person, they haven't participated in these kind of processes before, but we really think they've got great potential. Where might they start in this process, and how might they actually see their influence increased across time? Because as they've grown in the process, they've seen opportunities to grow their contributions. So if you're trying to get community ownership, you want people that come in at different levels, but create the sense that everybody can grow in this process, so that they're better off and more capable when this work is done than they were when they came to the group.
I think, I think sometimes we rely too much on champions, you know, people that will come in and say, we, we believe in the righteousness of government. It's easy to get those people to come to an agreement that says the government ought to keep doing what it's doing. And so sometimes you want to make sure that if you want community ownership, you've got to move beyond just those people who will say the right thing, and make sure that you've got people around the table that will defend the right thing, right? Because the final product that you want, in order to have ownership, you want people to be prepared to say, this is representative of my best thinking, and it's representative of the best thinking around the community, and I'm prepared to defend this decision over the other options that we had, because I'm personally invested in this work. And that usually only happens when people have an opportunity to grow across time. They can see explicitly the role and responsibility that each person has around the table, and they understand how the decisions got made. That's how you get to a place where people own the final product, as opposed to just saying nice things about it, but aren't prepared to take the heat that sometimes comes with making decisions that don't necessarily have equal benefit for everybody, but it shows the right benefit for the folks that need the most help, right? And so having somebody that's prepared to defend a decision is a process, and not one that one should assume everybody who comes to the table day one will be prepared to do that.
Two other things I'd call out in this space around community leadership. One is sharing in the budgeting process. So often these initiatives have a budget. They have a budget for how much they can spend to move people from the beginning of the process all the way through until the end of the process, right? And so often the systems leaders or the government representatives that are there, they know what the budget is, but nobody else does. So when they're making decisions about what we got, we've got resources to get people to meetings, but we don't have resources to feed them at the meeting, right? If the community folks were there, they might say, You know what? If that's the money we have, maybe we have fewer meetings. So we're not paying so much for people to get to the meeting, and we actually have resources left over to feed people who are at the meeting, right? So being willing to share what the funding is, what the funding levels are, how those funding, how that funding is allocated for this community process, shows you that you trust and respect the community, as well as the community has a chance to own the choices about how that money is spent, and ultimately, how the community benefits from it.
And then lastly, in this process of ownership, you may need to pause at different times in the process and allow the community folks to be in the room with only community folks to make sure that they're all on the same page, to make sure that they all are hearing the same thing, to make sure that everybody is increasing in their level of trust in the decision making process, and equally as important for them to share things that they have learned during this process that others may not have, right? So we come into these processes with different experience. We got different skills and assets. We got lots of other things that we’re responsible, responsible for during the day we join these initiatives, you ultimately want me to own the final product. And part of me owning the final progress is seeing the growth and development that occurs for me as well as that occurs for the other community folks that are around the table. So creating opportunities for community residents to sit together and share the lessons, share ideas and and and see the kind of progress that people are making in understanding the process and what they're trying to accomplish can be a really important opportunity to really cement community ownership. It might be the instinct of a government agency or a not for profit leader to want to hear everything that gets discussed in a meeting, That may not always build the kind of ownership in the final product that you want.
Again, I use the example of I spent time working for the transformation of public housing in Chicago. My job was to work with the tenant associations to make sure that they could come to the table and negotiate for their best interest in the redevelopment of public housing across the city of Chicago, and there's a lot of learning for them that happened in the large meetings with everybody else around the table. But equally as important in that process was those those tenant associations and those members being able to meet with one another and learn from one another things that now were shared across the entire group. So when they go back to the table, they've got a shared understanding of everything that's happening, even though the individuals may not have all picked up on or learned the same things at the same time. So creating this kind of peer learning opportunities by allowing them to meet together and to strategize, I think, at times, often cements their understanding of what they're trying to accomplish, and they own the final product in a way that they wouldn't if they were constantly in a room with only the professionals and never quite had a chance to acknowledge with one another that they were on the same page, they were moving in the same direction, and that they had a shared goal and purpose in this process.
39:19 - Embedding Community Leadership
So so the fifth principle in all of this work focuses on embedding community leadership and adaptation across time. That that this principle is really around an understanding that people grow and change across time. And so if you're if you're going to stand up a community based process for learning that you have to think about the time that it takes for that process to be successful and to build an infrastructure that supports everybody. So you got to have a budget, you got to have a communications process to keep everybody on the same page. You got to take minutes. You got to make sure everybody gets those minutes. You've got to give people the time, if they got a car share, or they got to share transportation, that they have time to figure those things out. And so, you know, if you go into the process and you're thinking, okay, I can get this done in three meetings, then you don't develop those lines of communication. You don't give people the time they need to schedule this meeting in the context of everything else that's happening in their lives, to give them the time to reflect on the things that they've learned.
And so this fifth idea, this fifth thing that we learned, is that when people go into a process and they think it's going to be a one and done, that they don't put in place the structure necessary for the community to be successful in the long term. It's also it's also often the case that if you're a community resident and you're choosing to participate in this process, you're not thinking that this is the last time you're going to participate in a process. And so from your perspective, part of the reason why you're choosing to engage here is because you believe that you're actually going to learn something and there you're going to build skills, and you're going to be even better the next time an opportunity comes along for community engagement. And so if you take that perspective, then you typically need a more structured process to be able to know what the beginning the middle and end of the process looks like, to be able to understand the resource allocations across time, to think about the lines of communication, so that you understand that in a collaborative process, people are growing and learning at the same time. They may not be in the same place at the beginning of the process as they end that are at the end of the process. And so the more structure or infrastructure you can provide to that process, the greater is the likelihood that people are going to come from that process both satisfied with the experience that they had, but also have the sense that they're better prepared to contribute to the next process because of this experience.
And so that infrastructure includes, again, providing the right kind of meeting space, investing in the leadership opportunities that people have across time, to make sure that there's consistency and continuity about the decision-making process. So if you typically start the meeting and you provide an outline or an agenda that creates structure for them. If you tell them that you're not going to make the decision at the beginning of the meeting, you're going to make a decision at the end of the meeting, but you tell people at the beginning of the meeting to be prepared for the decision you're going to make at the end of the meeting, then they have the entire agenda the entire time they're in the room engaging to think about how they're going to contribute to that decision. If you're not well organized and sometimes you make decisions at the beginning of the meeting, sometimes you make them at the end. Sometimes you don't make decisions at all, then folks come to the process and they don't have the confidence, and they're not ready to make the full contribution, simply because you haven't created a consistent construction and environment that they can anticipate. And then they can grow because they know how to process information at the beginning the meeting, so that at the end of the meeting, they're actually ready to make a contribution to the decision that they know is ultimately coming.
Again, if you're trying to embed this in community leadership again, having the right policies in place, being clear about your procedures for making decisions are really critical. Having a consistent line of communication, or a channel of communication is well well developed. And then if you're going to embed a process in the community, then roles have got to be defined. If I get to make a decision, you need to tell me that from the beginning. If you're only consulting with me, I might choose not to participate, but even if I choose to participate, you ought to tell me that you're only asking my opinion, I don't actually get a vote in making the decision.
We talked about this early, but if you're going to embed community leadership in this change process, you've got to have some CQI mechanism. You got to have a way of checking in with everybody that's on the group. Hey, are we moving in the right direction? Are there things that you have concerns about, and we course correct to make sure that we come back to that issue so that we're all on the same page that. Embedding leadership in the community means having a quality improvement process that allows you to validate across time that everything is moving in the right direction. You know, there is no doubt that all of these processes at some point, you make a misstep, you make a mistake, something you thought was going to work actually didn't work. You know what you said something in the last meeting. You meant it one way, but when the folks came back to the next meeting, they explained to you that they experienced that thing that you said in a very different way than the way that you intended. And so part of that CQI process is having an agreement that you can talk through any of these missteps or these comments that were made that landed the wrong way for some people. Community people can have the same experience. They might say the wrong thing too, and that systems leader feels like he's been flipped off, when that's not really what the community resident was saying. They were just activated by something in the discussion, and they may have made a statement that was stronger than they intended to make it, but there's got to be a process by which you can go back and clean those things up so the group can continue to move forward. And so a CQI process allows for these kind of missteps to not drag on for long periods of time or not get resolved. And so coming back, checking in, having a process to do that at the beginning of the meeting, or the beginning of every other meeting, or once a quarter, is a really critical way of making sure that those small mistakes don't metastasize into a much larger mistake, because you simply didn't have a process in place to go back and fix some things.
Last thing, obviously, is just around regularity. If you're going to build this process into the community, if you really want them to make a significant contribution to the work, you got to have a regular way in which you plan meetings. You got to have a regular way that you you give product updates, because sometimes not everybody will be at the meeting at the same time, and you have to have some way of giving status reports, right? You got to be able to write up something that says we made it this far in the last meeting. Our goal is to make it this far in the next meeting. So having a standard way by which you give those updates and status reports can be really critical tools for maintaining the momentum that happens in these collaborative processes, and that increase the likelihood that you can be successful.
Bryan Samuels 48:21
So I said all of these things, the important takeaway here is not that Chapin Hall discovered all of these things in five minutes or five weeks, in five months. These five principles that we've articulated here were part of a more than two year long process of culling the literature, talking to people that had real experiences doing this, finding initiatives that would have existed in the past, and going back and looking at reports and other information that it didn't get published somewhere, but it was retained as evidence that an initiative existed. And so we culled through all of that information to bring both the things that we learned as well as this set of recommendations about how you do the work different going forward.
So I say all that stuff to say that it's important to say that you don't have to do everything that I've just described, and you don't have to do it exactly in the same order that I described. That that's not what we're trying to represent here. Instead, what we're trying to do is to give you tools, to give you strategies, to give you options for how you can go about approaching transformation, and do it in a way in which you don't make the old mistakes, but instead you go forward, and you make progress in some areas because you've learned and and you fail in other ways because it's the first time somebody did it. But the only way to do that is to extract from the stuff that we've already done that we know doesn't work, and we go out and make some new mistakes.
So this is a robust description. I don't mean for everybody to digest it at one time. If you think that you want to see more examples of the principles that I've just described, those examples are actually included in the bulletins. So if you want examples of community based initiatives, if I've used language or I've made suggestions about approaches that you might take, there's a 99% chance that anything I said is included in the bulletins. And more importantly, there are often instances where there are examples of what I've said that give you a little more meat to work with and give you a greater sense of the context in which some of the comments I have made actually were experienced.
So I would really encourage people that listen to this podcast to maybe pause the podcast and and go look at some of the bulletins, and then come back to the podcast, because there might be greater insights gained from the podcast, because you have a basic knowledge from the bulletins. Conversely, you could take the podcast, use it for inspiration, use it to reach a collective agreement that yes, this is what we want to learn how to do, and then go back and kind of a peer review process and get a group of people to read the bulletins, to read the examples and then to build a strategy based on using the podcast as the beginning of the journey, using the bulletins to get more specific, and then using those bulletins then to decide exactly how you're going to go out and make some new mistakes.
Luke Waldo 52:21
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 fields work. So thank you.
I hope that this second episode with Bryan has given you practical strategies and tools that might inspire and guide you to 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.
Join us next week for this season’s final episode as I talk with Kate Luster about the Rock Families First movement that brings together many of the strategies that you’ve heard this season.
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.
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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.