Increasingly, these collaboratives are extending their focus beyond single problems or concerns. They are pursuing comprehensive strategies that cut across the education, health, and human service systems and engage neighborhood and community-based organizations. They are seeking fundamental reforms within and across these systems. Progress toward this goal has been significant in recent years, but much more remains to be done.

Some of these systems reform initiatives are moving across even wider boundaries. They are beginning to build connections with the community development movement, which historically has focused on economic and housing issues. They are seeking to enlist community leaders and make contact with the community organizing world, which seeks to enable people to organize themselves and represent their own interests.

The Together We Can (TWC) Partners believe a strategy that better connects systems reform, community development, and community organizing efforts is crucial to success. Without economic opportunity, the efforts of education, health, and human services, communities will be unable to produce healthy children and families. Communities without jobs, without decent and affordable housing, and without parks and playgrounds do not provide a suitable environment for nurturing children and youth. Communities without organizations which can speak for the diverse interests and aspirations of their residents lack the capacity to define their vision for the future and formulate solutions to their most pressing problems. Despite the growing recognition of the need to connect these historically separate reform efforts, there are no roadmaps available for undertaking this task.

It is in this context that the Together We Can Initiative designed Results for Children, Youth, Families and Neighborhoods: A Community Collaborative Wellness Tool. The wellness tool has two goals:

1. to strengthen the capacity of community-based collaborative efforts that seek to change how public, private, and community institutions work together to support children, youth, and families

2. to build bridges between these efforts and the community development and community organizing arenas to strengthen their efforts to create healthy communities.

The wellness tool reflects the experiences of many community collaboratives in working toward comprehensive reforms. It raises issues collaboratives must address in accomplishing their ultimate goals of improved results for children, youth, families, and neighborhoods. It pushes collaboratives to explore new relationships with community development and community organizing efforts.

The seven substantive elements of systems reform are:

1. Collaborative Decision-Making: Establishing a decision-making group of diverse stakeholders (who are well known, are respected, and have buy-in from the community) to guide reform and perform critical policy and leadership tasks.

2. Public Engagement: Working to inform, educate, and involve the general public such that it can be involved in the work of the collaborative and help build political will for reform.

3. Parent, Consumer, and Neighborhood Participation: Engaging, as full participants, the people most affected by decisions concerning their well-being and ensuring that their assets are recognized.

4. Accountability for Results: Defining measurable results for children, youth, and families which promote collaboration across agencies and systems, and provide the foundation for a system of responsibility for achieving the desired results.

5. Comprehensive Services, Supports, and Opportunities: Creating the conditions needed to ensure that children, youth, and families succeed at high levels, including: effective services to meet individual needs, a nurturing community with a rich array of natural informal supports, and economic and social opportunities for personal growth and development.

6. Financing and Resource Development: Mobilizing and weaving together sufficient public, private, and community resources to achieve the desired results.

7. Leadership/Professional Development and Capacity Building: Creating the capacity within a community and among people working with children, youth, families, and neighborhoods to make positive change that produces tangible results.

TWC has sought to explicitly call attention to issues of equity and diversity throughout the elements of reform. Reform will not succeed unless collaboratives give serious attention to the inclusion of diverse groups, drawing upon their cultural strengths and ensuring equal opportunity for people of all backgrounds.

Movement forward on any element can leverage some change. When the elements interact, they create a powerful synergy for systems change.

The stages of collaborative change shown on the wellness tool are:

1. Getting Together: Bringing a diverse and representative group of stakeholders to the table.

2. Building Trust and Ownership: Building working relationships, establishing common ground, and clarifying a shared vision, mission, and values among stakeholders.

3. Strategic Planning: Designing a strategy and action plan to create a more effective system of services, supports, and opportunities.

4. Taking Action: Implementing the strategy and using its experience of what does and does not work well to change policy and current practices.

5. Deepening and Broadening the Work: Building connections with like-minded and complementary people, organizations, and collaboratives to create a more comprehensive and strategic change process that will produce even better results.

Successful collaboratives continuously pay attention to strengthening what they already have achieved, and using those strengths to address challenges they are facing. Still, all collaboratives must move from planning to implementation to accomplish their goals, and all must address the same fundamental issues.

Further, the questions should not be answered with a simple "yes" or "no." Rather, they are designed to help individuals and collaboratives assess how well they are doing in addressing the issues which the questions raise. When teams from community collaboratives work together to answer the questions, the wellness tool becomes an assess ment instrument to chart progress, identify challenges and fundamental issues that must be addressed, and create a more strategic course of action. TWC has designed a set of tools to enable collaboratives to use the wellness tool as an assessment instrument. Collaboratives can conduct this assessment on their own or with the support of an external facilitator.

The next sections offer brief overviews of each of the elements and the stages of collaboration. The following section offers brief answers to the questions on the wellness tool. These answers explain the thinking behind each question and possible ways to address the issue.

COLLABORATIVE DECISION MAKING
Changing the way public and private agencies, community organizations, government, neighborhoods, and communities work together requires new forums for community decision-making. Collaboratives need to develop a process for deciding and carrying out their plans. This decision-making process must be inclusive. It must inform, influence, and potentially change or become part of formal community governance structures. Within any community, there may be an array of different collaboratives working toward reform and improved results. These can take several forms:

Community-wide collaboratives: This type of collaborative focuses on setting goals for improving results for children, youth, families, and neighborhoods across a broad range of dimensions of well-being. Often starting as a coordinating and planning body involving local government and major service funders, community-wide collaboratives usually seek to engage representatives of diverse sectors of the community, from parents to policymakers, from business and civic leaders to neighborhood leaders, from public agencies to community-based organizations. Many such collaboratives are emerging through state efforts to establish a single entity at the community level to address child, youth, and family needs. Typically, a community-wide collaborative does not offer services, supports, and opportunities directly. It sets the vision and strategy for reform, makes or influences decisions on the allocation of resources, and works to hold partners accountable for implementing reform efforts and achieving intended results. Increasingly these community-wide collaboratives are negotiating flexible new service delivery arrangements with states in exchange for greater accountability.

Issue- and service-focused collaboratives: Many community collaboratives form to address specific issues or service needs which require strategies that cross traditional lines of agency or departmental authority. Issues or service needs around which collaboratives have formed include: school readiness and early childhood develop ment, adolescent pregnancy prevention, substance abuse prevention, youth develop ment, juvenile justice reform, school-linked services, infant mortality reduction, af fordable housing, workforce development, and violence prevention. These collaboratives usually seek to design comprehensive, cross-system, community-based strategies to achieve their specific goals, and often have agendas that overlap with one another. In some places, these collaboratives are integrating themselves into a community-wide collaborative, or are developing linkages with such an entity.

Neighborhood collaboratives: An increasing number of collaboratives are developing from grassroots efforts to mobilize residents to address neighborhood concerns as the residents see them. These collaboratives may seek: 1) to design their own solutions to needs such as neighborhood safety; 2) to ensure a stronger voice and better representation of their interests at the community level; 3) to negotiate new service delivery arrangements in the neighborhood; or 4) to engage in community building efforts that reweave the social fabric of the neighborhood. Unlike community-wide collaboratives, neighborhood collaboratives typically do not include those with direct decision-making authority over the allocation of resources at the community level; but they seek to influence them.

The wellness tool raises critical issues about collaborative decision-making: inclusiveness, legitimacy, representativeness, sustainability, ability to marshall resources across systems, ability to hold participants accountable for their actions, and adaptability to changing circumstances and new challenges. Over time, the decision-making and governance structures within communities must address all of these issues.

The wellness tool does not define an ideal structure for community governance. Rather, it is designed to apply to each of these types of collaboratives. As collaboratives within a community mature, and deepen and broaden their activities, it becomes increasingly important that they find ways to connect with one another. The collaborative decision- making group -- whether community-wide, issue- or service-focused, or neighborhood- initiated -- is responsible for pursuing the six other elements of systems reform.

Collaboratives need communication strategies to reach and involve diverse audiences. Moving beyond public relations, collaboratives must explain to the public the challenges they are addressing, the solutions they are framing, and the results they are seeking. They must help the public see the human face on child and family issues at the same time as they work toward concrete results. They must help the public recognize the critical importance to invest resources in children, youth and families of all backgrounds.

Collaboratives must encourage participation by concerned citizens. Citizens can bring their expertise and interest to the collaborative's efforts by serving on committees, speaking at public forums, and carrying out ad hoc tasks to support the collaborative's work. Citizens also can volunteer to work directly with children and families. Experience and common sense tell us that caring adults make a difference in children's lives. Collaboratives must encourage and provide opportunities for this and other kinds of caring activities.

Regular accountability to the public is essential. This means regularly reporting progress to the public on how well children, youth, and families are doing. This includes identifying progress for the group as a whole as well as identifying telling patterns regarding who is not benefiting from services and support currently available.

Accountability also means informing the public about the results of the work of the collaborative. One measure of the success of a collaborative is the extent to which it has established its visibility and credibility with the general public.

To change the system, collaboratives must see parents, consumers, and neighborhood resi dents as partners who have a primary voice in decisions addressing their own family, neighborhood, and group needs. This means significant and substantial representation in decision-making at all levels -- the community, the neighborhood, and the service delivery site.

Public, private, and community organizations must actively engage the parents, families, and neighborhoods they serve. Engagement begins by reaching out to parents, families, and neighborhoods; listening to their concerns; and creating a system of support that addresses those concerns. It includes challenging and changing practices that discourage parent and neighborhood involvement.

Collaboratives must keep in mind that most communities are far from monolithic. They include a wide variety of sub-groups reflecting differences such as race, culture, linguistic background, socio-economic status, gender, and neighborhood. Participation of people from these various groups is essential to gaining a comprehensive understanding and picture of what is happening in a community. Reaching out to parents and consumers often requires spending time building relationships of trust and developing strategies for building bridges across differences in race, language, culture and class.

A responsive system creates mechanisms that enable parents, consumers, and neighborhood residents to assess the services, supports, and opportunities that are available, and to negotiate necessary changes with providers and policy makers.

• Developing community consensus on measurable community goals can serve as a driving force for reform by making the community aware of the need for change.

• Clearly defined goals can lead to a discussion of the conditions that are necessary to achieve them and the development of strategies which cut across traditional profes sional service domains, and extend beyond those domains to mobilize other assets in the community.

• Measurable goals can form the basis for establishing new systems of accountability to ensure that community results are achieved.

Collaboratives need to establish systems to collect data on progress toward their desired goals. They should assess what is happening community-wide as well as look at results broken down by factors such as gender, racial or linguistic background to ensure all children, youth and families are benefiting.

The collaborative's goals and their indicators should be realistic. Collaboratives should carefully consider the level of resources needed to achieve the desired results.

Finally, collaboratives need systems to hold partners and the overall collaborative account able for fulfilling their individual and collective responsibilities in implementing the strate gies. Establishing mutual expectations and articulating guidelines for dealing with situations where partners "do not deliver" or when conflict arises can help collaboratives over difficult hurdles.

Services: Many collaboratives start with a focus on bolstering existing, publicly- funded service systems (education, child welfare, public welfare, juvenile justice, health, mental health, employment and training, law enforcement, social services, and child care). Change involves more than providing increased support to these public systems, however. Collaborative strategies must involve changes in the manner in which these systems interact: with the children, youth, families, and neighborhoods they serve; with each other; and with other networks of support within the community. Publicly-financed services should reflect a new set of principles. They must be community-based, accessible, comprehensive, family- centered, asset-based, preventive, and culturally and linguistically appropriate. Given the changing demographics of the United States, services must also support a positive sense of racial, cultural and linguistic identity while also promoting understanding and respect for people of different backgrounds.

In addition, collaboratives must ensure that families can access these systems and other networks of support and opportunity in their community. The development of new services and supports -- family resource centers, home visiting programs, school-linked services, and prevention-oriented family support programs -- is based, implicitly if not explicitly, on a recognition that additional supports are needed if all children, youth, and families are to connect with the services, supports, and opportunities they need.

Supports: Children, youth, and families also need natural networks of support, in cluding a basic circle of caring relationships -- extended family, friends, neighbors, and co-workers. This fabric of community support also includes access to parks, libraries, recreation facilities, and programs; and a dense web of voluntary institutions including religious institutions, civic organizations, support groups, and self-help organizations. In general, these supports represent social goods that cannot be "ordered" as a service to a specific child or family. Instead, they must be in sufficient supply for children, youth, and families to participate in those that best meet their interests and needs.

Collaboratives must be ready to address the need to build these community supports, particularly within distressed neighborhoods where such systems of support may be threadbare. This requires connecting with neighborhood residents to help bolster existing community institutions and to build new ones where they are needed. Collaboratives also must take concerted steps to ensure that publicly financed services do not see themselves as operating independently from these supports. Schools and human service providers, in particular, must seek to connect their work with voluntary networks of support.

Opportunities: Beyond services and supports, children, youth, and families need opportunities to achieve their own goals and dreams. At a most basic level, this involves employment at a livable family wage, safe and affordable housing, and reli able transportation. It involves a sound infrastructure of safe streets, clean water, and general neighborhood maintenance.

Collaboratives need to ensure that these opportunities exist for all children, youth, and families. This requires new partnerships with community development activities within distressed neighborhoods. It involves new levels of commitment from the business and financial communities. Collaboratives can serve as bridges across these constituencies.

Collaboratives must be careful to determine the scale of resources necessary to achieve the results they seek. At a time of increasing constraints on public resources, collaboratives must work to achieve better results by more effectively applying existing resources. They also must be prepared to make clear to policy makers and the public the level of resources needed to achieve better results for all children, youth, families, and neighborhoods.

On the public side, collaboratives cannot ignore large scale funding streams, including the new Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) Program, Medicaid (Title XIX), and Child Welfare (Titles IVB and IVE). Dealing only with financing from discretionary grant programs is not likely to be sufficient to create the pool of resources needed to achieve dramatically improved results. At the same time, funds from foundations and corporations cannot be overlooked as a source of support for a particular programmatic strategy. Such support often can help to secure significant public attention for the work of the collaborative.

Tapping the community's human and physical assets is another important resource develop ment strategy. Neighborhood and community volunteers, existing facilities, civic and reli gious institutions, and other organizations all have assets that can contribute to improved results.

Collaboratives also must ensure that they have access to the resources necessary to carry out their planning and oversight functions. Whether through dedicated staff, shared staff from partner agencies, or administrative and staff support designated by other agencies and organizations, collaboratives must secure the necessary resources to sustain their own functions within the community.

Over time, collaboratives should be building long-range financing strategies to enable them to achieve the results they have defined. Developing such strategies, and successfully securing necessary resources, will require the efforts of all collaborative members and the larger community.

• for participants in the collaborative itself;

• for front-line workers and others working to support children, youth, and families;

• for parents, consumers, and neighborhood leaders;

• for policymakers; and

• for administrators.

Regardless of their role, participants need to change the way they think, work, and act, both independently and collaboratively. All participants need skills for working in multiethnic settings and building bridges across lines of race, language, class and culture. Policy makers need to understand the implications of shifting from the present fragmented categorical system to a comprehensive and integrated approach. Administrators must expand their role to work with other systems and to think about the needs of children, youth, families, and neighborhoods comprehensively and holistically. Front-line staff need to learn new forms of family-centered practice that build on family strengths and work across formal professional boundaries. Personnel from human services and community development organizations need to learn about each other's systems and philosophies so their efforts can reinforce one another.

Within neighborhoods, parents and residents need leadership development opportunities to become strong advocates for their interests, to build associations and networks to address identified needs, and to participate in collaborative settings with other community stakeholders. Government, business, and civic leaders need to interact with parents and neighborhood residents in mutual learning environments to understand the assets and capacities each brings to the table.

The collaborative itself needs to train and support staff capacity to carry out its responsibili ties. This includes the capacity to analyze and manage data, to examine and set forth policy alternatives, to negotiate new arrangements among agencies and organizations, and to design new leadership and professional development strategies.

Stage One: Getting Together
Stage one begins when a small group comes together to explore ways to improve community responses to children and families, and achieve better results. It works to broaden its own group to better represent the diversity of interests within the community. This is the beginning of a continuing effort to ensure that all constituencies which will be affected by the collaborative's decisions, which have the power to make decisions, and which might block decisions are involved.

In this stage, participants engage in a series of exploratory activities that begin to develop a foundation for future action. They discuss their perceptions of how well children, youth, families, and neighborhoods are doing in their community.

The individuals create a representative group that has agreed to work together. They develop a plan and ground rules for moving forward. Individuals assume responsibility for leadership to move the work forward.

During this stage, questions refer to people as individuals or participants. By the time they move to Stage Two, these individuals have become a group.

During this stage, the group works toward short-term successes that can strengthen their relationships and demonstrate the potential of the group. The group often needs to work through embedded issues of race, class, and gender, and other identified issues to strengthen trust and relationships. It has generated sufficient trust and ownership in its shared work to begin to develop a strategic plan.

The collaborative's strategic plan includes approaches to: strengthen parent, consumer, and neighborhood participation; develop leaders and staff who can operate in new ways; and enhance its own capacity to fulfill its mission. The plan also describes how the collaborative will engage and inform the public about its work.

A collaborative will not necessarily address each element of systems reform in its initial strategic plan, given the complexity of the challenges it faces. Over time, however, the plan should address all of the elements of systems reform.

At the end of this stage, the collaborative completes its plan and moves toward implementation. The collaborative should be reviewing its organizational structure to ensure that it can effectively oversee implementation.

Performance data and parent and consumer feedback enable the collaborative to modify its plans and begin to address policies and practices that are obstacles to achieving its goals. Leadership and professional development activities strengthen the capacity of participating organizations to deliver more effective services, supports, and opportunities, and to build a foundation for expansion of its strategies.

In this stage, the collaborative, as a group, must: examine the involvement and commitment of its own members; seek new relationships with other similar initiatives; assess how the public, as well as parents, consumers, and neighborhood leaders perceive its work; more broadly pool and redeploy resources to achieve goals; and extend the emphasis on results- based accountability for its and others' actions. By building on its prior experiences, the collaborative can move toward broader and deeper implementation of what it has learned.

At this stage, the collaborative decision-making structures are formally recognized by local governing entities and private financing organizations. Parents, consumers, and neighbor hood leaders are participating actively in policy making and service delivery. A system of continuous professional and leadership development is in place. Accountability for results drives further refinements and reforms. Systems have been transformed and there have been measurable improvements in results for children, families, youth, and neighborhoods.

• Family-driven: The needs, strengths, and voices of families, youth, and neighborhood leaders must drive the changes that are made in systems. Systems must treat people as their customers, seeking continuing feedback about the quality and effectiveness of all services and supports that are provided. Families, youth, and neighborhood leaders must be represented where decisions are made that affect them.

• Respect for diversity and a commitment to equity: This respect and understanding must permeate the system -- from policy setting to front-line service delivery. This entails ensuring representation from diverse groups in decision-making; analyzing information in terms of the realities of different ethnic and racial groups; and designing services, supports, and opportunities that are appropriate to different cultures.

• A systemic focus: The challenges to achieving child, youth, family, and neighborhood goals cannot be met solely through better integration and delivery of publicly-provided services. They cannot be met by new services, supports, or opportunities "added on" to the existing array. All systems must be engaged in change -- public and private; formal and informal; economic, educational, social, psychological, physical, and environmental. The comprehensive wellness tool of change recognizes the need for a systemic focus in ensuring four key inter-related levels of activity:
  • assuring economic opportunity and social stability within all neighborhoods and communities;
  • establishing and supporting strong voluntary networks of support for all children and families at the neighborhood and community level;
  • assuring that publicly-funded service systems respond respectfully and holistically to children, youth, and families; and
  • assuring that the variety of needed publicly-financed services, supports, and opportunities are integrated, complementary, and sufficient to meet individual and community needs.

THEORIES OF CHANGE
Most participants in community collaborations do not spend the bulk of their time studying theories of change or digesting manuals on strategic planning. They respond in a pragmatic solution-oriented way to specific presenting issues, concerns, and opportunities. They take specific actions based upon general orientations and beliefs.

The questions in the wellness tool are designed to help participants better define the issues they need to address without having to construct and internalize elaborate theoretical constructs regarding change. At the same time, the wellness tool and its questions build upon organizational change and diffusion of innovation literature. From these frameworks, we have constructed our core beliefs about change:

• Change may occur through the design and development of new programs and services, with subsequent replication and adaptation of them throughout the community.

• Change may occur by radically shifting the culture, orientations, and practices within existing systems.

• Change may occur by encouraging risk-taking and innovation, and by building a management approach that produces learning organizations.

• Change may occur by building political support and momentum to address a need, whether or not a solution is immediately apparent.

• Change may occur because neighborhood residents organize to address their own concerns and ensure that these are addressed by larger institutions.

• Change may occur because community leadership works aggressively to achieve a shared vision.

• Change may occur because communities, states, and the nation have the political will to invest strategically in children, youth, families, and neighborhoods.

The questions, in one way or another, ask collaboratives to identify how they are planning to produce change, whether they are seeking to do so through new programs or initiatives changing organizational cultures and responses, fostering innovation, mobilizing public and political support -- or pursuing yet another path.