Nothing Works…but Everything Might

Tag: Collective Impact

July 21, 2011

Sick of Food Deserts? Try California FreshWorks–And Have Some Jobs On The Side

The American Constitution Society Blog (ACSBlog) published my guest post about the launch of the California FreshWorks Fund today.  I’m cross-posting it here:

On July 19, first lady Michelle Obama announced the launch of the California FreshWorks Fund, a $200 million public-private partnership to provide financing to food retailers and distributors willing to locate in food deserts.  Spearheaded by The California Endowment (“TCE”), a private, statewide foundation with a public-health mission that it interprets increasingly broadly, the Fund pulls together an impressive array of banks, philanthropies, industry players, government agencies, and investors under the umbrella of healthy food.

Why food, and why now?  Food deserts — areas without access to healthy, fresh food, namely grocery stores, but usually with abundant access to unhealthy fast food — are disturbingly common attributes of lower-income neighborhoods.  Across California, four million people live in food deserts, which correlate with higher rates of obesity, heart disease, high blood pressure, and diabetes than areas with grocery stores. I’ve written previously in this space about the unhappy cohabitation of racially isolated poverty and diminished access to healthy food.  And we can little afford such poor healthy food access now, when our nation faces a tsunami of obesity and its attendant costs in health care and economic productivity.  As TCE Director of Community Health Marion Standish and I wrote here last week, the increasing rate of childhood obesity threatens to wreak even more havoc in future years as obese children become obese adults.  And we know that access to healthy food decreases the risk of obesity.

But that’s not all. California FreshWorks and initiatives like it bring more than fresh food to underserved communities: jobs, increased property values, and increased tax revenue roll into town too. And that’s why healthy food financing initiatives are precisely the right thing to do now, in the face of a sluggish economic recovery, including a stubbornly weak job market. On average, 24.3 new jobs are created for every 10,000 square feet of retail grocery space (grocery stores are usually 20,000 to 50,000 square feet in size). A similar initiative in Philadelphia resulted in a 4 percent to 7 percent increase in property value, along with further commercial development. And increased retail, employment, and property value means increased tax revenue.

While food deserts are often densely populated, meaning significant block-by-block income (though not per-capita income, the more usual measure) waiting to be spent in area stores, the high cost of entering food deserts has long deterred retailers — even though grocery stores in food deserts can become profitable. The Fund provides loans and some grants to retailers to help overcome this barrier to entry, with longer time horizons for payback so retailers can, over time, generate the necessary level of sales to be profitable.

The Fund, though it draws on philanthropy for some of its funding, is not itself a charitable endeavor traditionally conceived. This is Philanthropy 2.0 — a highly networked and intensely collaborative effort that seeks robust, lasting, large-scale change.  (Interested in new approaches to large-scale philanthropic efforts?  FSG Social Impact Consultants founder Mark Kramer’s work on Catalytic Philanthopy and follow-on book, Do More than Give, with Leslie Crutchfield and John Kania, are must-reads.) The Fund is in the business of investing in communities, and its industry partners and investors intend to make a profit — but the initiative only reaches its objective if a healthy share of that profit remains in the community in the form of jobs and increased tax revenue.  Keep your eye on this program as it goes to work on one of the nation’s toughest problems in a big, diverse, and economic crisis-ridden state. The combination of public health improvement and economic revival could be a tempting recipe.

Read more about cross-sector approaches to improving public health and education and fighting poverty from my blog, Nothing Works…But Everything Might.

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June 30, 2011

Moving the Needle on Poverty: Why Nothing Works, But Everything Might

Today, the American Constitution Society Blog published a post I wrote about poverty and collective impact.  I’m cross-posting it here:

Countless urban neighborhoods are drowning in a miserable mix of poverty, bad schools, food-deserts lacking grocery stores and food-swamps providing an overabundance of fast food (I’ve written previously in this space about health care reform and the power of real food), and a dearth of jobs. Every year, countless non-profit community agencies provide a stunning number of hours of service to these communities. Yet intergenerational poverty maintains its stubborn, iron grip. Time and again, children drop out of school and face pathless futures.

It’s easier to design solutions to discrete problems than to back up and look at an entire social system. And so we try to improve the educational lot of poor children by spending more money per child, by lowering the teacher-to-student ratio, by going “back to basics,” or some other idea intended to leave no child behind.  But think of all that these approaches leave to the side: healthy, fresh food, without which children cannot retain facts and learn how to think; physical education opportunities, without which children are at a much higher risk of obesity; public safety, without which children live amidst the kind of stress and fear that fractures their ability to learn; and child care, without which children lack the kind of consistent adult guidance necessary to sustained learning. And we haven’t even touched health care.

The scenario is similar if an agency tries to move the needle on unemployment by improving only an individual’s job-seeking skills.  We’ve left aside job development (are there even jobs to apply for?); public transit (where is the job, and can the person get there?); child care (who takes care of the children while Mom and Dad are working?); job skills; and — critically important but often overlooked — financial management skills like budgeting, saving, and improving credit scores.

We face a situation where nothing seems to work — the best-executed and best-intended interventions fail to move the needle, year after year after painful year.

But where nothing works, everything might.

Think about it.  What if we tried to solve an entire set of interconnected problems at once?

Sounds a little crazy, doesn’t it?

But we don’t have to wonder whether this will work; we already know it does.  Here are just a few examples from California and elsewhere:

Promise Neighborhoods.  Modeled on the Harlem Children’s Zone, this federal initiative, currently run out of the Department of Education, makes grants to communities to develop schools with wrap-around social services, “from cradle to career to college.”  The California Assembly recently passed a bill to create a state-level program; Senator Harkin has dropped a bill to make Promise Neighborhoods a permanent federal program. Follow its progress at PolicyLink’s Promise Neighborhoods Institute.

United Way SparkPoint Centers.  The Centers provide integrated financial counseling services to families with the goals of increasing assets, improving credit scores, increasing income, and a reduction of debt-to-income ratio.  I recently wrote about the United Way of the Bay Area’s ninth SparkPoint Center, soon to open in San Francisco’s Mission District.

California Endowment’s Building Healthy Communities program.  TCE’s ten-year strategic direction focuses on the importance of place to health.  The program’s milestones involve reducing childhood obesity and youth violence and increasing school attendance and access to quality health care. 

Oakland Unified School District’s African-American Male Achievement Initiative.  The Initiative will create systems that support prevention, intervention, and retention for African-American youth.  The Initiative actively seeks partnership with community organizations, the school district, parents, and foundations to build “full-service community schools” that include employment, language, and health care services alongside education.

Obvious challenges to this approach abound. The attempt to coordinate a large number of agencies could rapidly generate barely controlled chaos, and where those agencies must co-create an agenda and attack plan, patience and time are required in large measures. Funders like to give money to agencies working on discrete, easily measured problems, because it’s easier to quantify and describe clearly bounded outcomes. The kinds of projects we’re talking about have five- and ten- and twenty-year time horizons, and that’s longer than funders want to contemplate. Partnership with, and capacity-building within, the vulnerable communities most in need of these projects is critically important but arduous work.

But a sea change is coming. Boston-based FSG Social Impact Consultants leaders Mark Kramer and John Kania recently formulated a concept they call “collective impact,” denoting cross-sector collaborations that integrate and coordinate a wide range of services and programs focused on a single social challenge. In a blog post titled “Revolutionary Reboot,” I wrote that “collaborative projects powered by collective impact also function like a human body:  organic, proactive as well as reactive, and able to shift constantly in response to the conditions it encounters.” For organic problems, there are organic solutions with collaborative DNA.

You can track related developments at the Healthy Eating Active Living Convergence Partnership; PolicyLink; FSG Social Impact Consultants’ Knowledge Exchange; and many more sites, including my blog, Nothing Works…But Everything Might.

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June 6, 2011

SparkPoint in the Mission: Collective Impact for Financial Self-Sufficiency

Sheltered by Twin Peaks to the west, the Mission District boasts more sun and warmth than any other part of San Francisco.  Vibrant, echoing with music and brimming with public art and neighborhood markets, the densely-populated Mission pulses with life.  Its roots strike deep: the Yelamu Indians lived here thousands of years before the arrival of the Spanish; and Mission San Francisco de Asis (now Mission Dolores), founded in 1776, is the oldest surviving structure in San Francisco.  For over fifty years, the Mission has been the city’s center of Latino art, culture, and music. 

And now the Mission’s residents face significant economic challenges.  The poverty rate here exceeds the city’s average, and the stubborn recession has made jobs especially hard to find. In a region where financial self-sufficiency exceeds the reach of so many families, and in a state where unemployment recently hit 11.9%, the Mission stands out.  But the Mission has the “fire in the belly” necessary to come roaring back, which is why the United Way of the Bay Area chose to site its ninth SparkPoint Center here. 

One core intuition drives the SparkPoint Centers: people living in poverty face multiple, inter-related problems, and therefore they need bundled services and personalized coaching.  Not earning enough money is often connected to a lack of job training or education, low credit scores coincide with insufficient assets and too much debt, and poverty often affects family health due to factors such as environmental quality and lack of access to recreation and healthy food.  Accessing help one service at a time is both overwhelming and confusing.  And as I wrote previously, isolating and treating only one of these problems is like using a band-aid to cover a scrape while ignoring a person’s broken arm and concussion.  Concerted action isn’t just more effective: it’s the only thing that will work.

Previous SparkPoint Centers tested the hypothesis that families will achieve economic self-sufficiency more dependably and more often if multiple services are bundled together under one roof, and if families take advantage of more than two services over an extended period (the Centers make multiple-year commitments to their client families).  The desired outcomes are quantifiable and measurable: livable income that reaches the self-sufficiency standard for the relevant geographic area ($65,000 for a family of four in San Francisco); a credit score of 650 or above; savings equal to three months of living expenses; and a debt-to-income ratio (DTI) of less than 40%.  The early evidence is in: and the answer is a resounding yes.  The Oakland SparkPoint Center measured client success against specific benchmarks including decreasing DTI by 5%; increasing income by 5%; increasing credit score by 50 points; and either accumulating two weeks of savings or meeting a specific savings goal. Interim outcome measurements at the Oakland SparkPoint center demonstrate that 65% of the families taking advantage of two integrated services reached intermediate benchmarks for the four outcomes.  For families enrolling in three or more services, the success rate was 85%. 

“One-stop resource centers” are hardly new.  What makes SparkPoint different?  Primarily, the power of collective impact.  Government and non-profit service providers don’t just occupy the same space–they work together to provide integrated services to clients, and they use one system and one set of metrics to track client progress in an Efforts to Outcome database.  And starting with the Mission SparkPoint, the partners will more consciously pursue the shared goals, priorities, and outcome measurements that collective-impact initiatives establish collaboratively.

The unified SparkPoint approach, encompassing livable income, credit score at least 650, three months of savings, and DTI less than 40%, produces robust and significant results impressive enough to draw industry’s notice.  On June 3, Chevron donated $1 million to the brand-new SparkPoint Center in Richmond.  Visitors have toured Bay Area centers from as far away as the Netherlands; the concept has been copied all over the country.  Its flexibility and scalability will likely be tested soon; the Mission SparkPoint leadership is currently considering adding partners to boost job development, public health, fresh food access, and more.  The core concept is collaboration on an equity basis with shared agenda, goals, and measurement: collective impact in motion.

On June 14, the group of ten community partners that will open the Center, led by the Mission Economic Development Agency, will sit down at a table at Plaza Adelante in the heart of the Mission to imagine–together–a supercharged Mission District revitalized by the power of small business, improved credit, increased assets, and financial self-sufficiency.  (Read the original San Francisco SparkPoint RFP, including a more detailed explanation of the SparkPoint concept and a list of FAQs.)  The Mission was born before San Francisco was even an idea.  Now, as the United Way sparks economic revitalization, entrepreneurship , and empowerment here, the Mission SparkPoint Center could provide a national-level model for community-based economic recovery.  I’ll periodically post about the Mission SparkPoint Center here.  (Disclosure: I am a founding member of the UWBA Women’s Leadership Circle, which supports the UWBA’s ten-year project to reduce Bay Area poverty by 50%.)

Adelante! 

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May 24, 2011

Revolutionary Reboot

What if, in the next ten years, we could reduce poverty in the Bay Area by fifty percent?  What if reducing poverty also required increasing access to healthy, fresh food, improving environmental quality, adding open space and safe sidewalks in vulnerable communities, revising and expanding public transit to take people to jobs, buttressing public education, and impacting the social determinants of health, including public safety, obesity, and asthma?

Too audacious, you say?  Too much to expect in the midst of a recession–or ever?

Well, what if doing only one thing will accomplish nothing durable, but doing everything at once will move the world?  One simple, beautiful idea: what if multiple organizations worked together for a common goal, in the service of a common agenda and mission, with fully coordinated efforts?  Could we make a difference if we tried to do everything at once?

The United Way of the Bay Area is about to try (check out Make It Be).  Their project, which aims to reduce Bay Area poverty by fifty percent in ten years,    pulls in more partners daily.  And it’s fueled by “collective impact,” a concept that describes collaborative projects that can scale to sizes sufficient to really move the needle–finally–on some of the most stubborn social problems we confront. 

“Collaboration is nothing new,” John Kania and Mark Kramer of FSG Social Impact Consultants concede in their article Collective Impact.  But imagine collaboration enabled by a common agenda, shared values (and shared power), and a central staff.  That’s collective impact in action, and this kind of directed coordination across groups and sectors is the revolutionary reboot so desperately needed now.

Working together, organizations dedicated to collective impact reinforce each other’s work, creating a whole greater than the sum of its parts–and potentially able simultaneously to attack multiple dimensions of highly complex social problems like poverty.  Consider the examples from education, environmental conservancy, public health, and more, in the Kania and Kramer article and in the New York Times “Fixes” op-eds by David Bornstein, especially The Power of Partnerships and Coming Together to Give Schools a Boost. 

Archimedes famously said that given a long enough lever and a fulcrum, he could move the world.  But this image evokes a machine governed by the laws of physics and mathematics.  We cannot solve the problems in front of us with a simple lever and fulcrum; we can’t attack them one at a time.  No machine, and no mechanistic approach, will help.

That’s because large-scale social problems are organic, dynamic, and fantastically complex.  Take education, where we’re still looking for the magic bullet.  By turns, we sign on to the idea that fixing the curriculum will turn the tide.  Then, we’re certain it’s the teachers.  A while later, we’re on to class size.  But while education involves classes and teachers and books, it also involves nutrition, public safety, environmental quality, public transit, and many social determinants of health.  Trying to “fix” only the curriculum or the teacher is like bandaging a knee while studiously ignoring the fact that the patient is burning up with fever and has a broken arm.  We can’t “fix” education until we care for the whole child, and that challenge can seem insurmountable.

But that’s the power of collective impact.  By coordinating efforts in several dimensions–pulling together partners from the for-profit, non-profit, and public sectors to analyze and coordinate responses to a set of closely-related problems–collaborative projects powered by collective impact also function like a human body:  organic, proactive as well as reactive, and able to shift constantly in response to the conditions it encounters.  Partners seeking collective impact will need to function as part of an organic being, and that is a significant, considerable challenge.  Nevertheless, we must confront it.  Now is the time.

I created this blog to explore the revolutionary reboot.  The next post will focus on the United Way’s declaration of a renewed war on poverty–so audacious that it just might work.

 

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