CHAPTER VII: COLLABORATION

Real change takes time. Have a two generational focus. Often parents must be nurtured to be able to nurture their children. ...Lisbeth Schoor, author of Common Purpose: Strengthening Families and Neighborhoods to Rebuild America, at the conference.

In March 1998, a working policy conference on comprehensive, community-based approaches to improve outcomes for children, youth and families was held.⁽¹³⁷⁾ Panelists and participants presented the following:

Youth Pilot Program (AB 1741): Blended Funding

Six designated counties are authorized to receive administrative and statutory waivers and blend categorical program funding in support of locally determined outcomes for improving services to children and families. The Program is entering its third year of operation and will continue through the Year 2000.

Examples of Uses:

Using an AB1741 waiver, Fresno County completely redesigned Human Services System is intended to be client-focused, decentralized, multi-disciplinary, and accountable for real improvement in life outcomes.

San Diego County has eliminated their departments of health and human services to form Children, Family, and Adult Services, which:

• has a single authority for finance;

• uses outcomes, incentives and enforcement of collaboration; and

• includes the former county departments of Temporary Employment and Community Health.

The county used the AB1741 process to accomplish this integration of services. San Diego tried to disengage categorical funding streams, but had not yet succeeded in March, so continuing to document funding streams categorically.

Restructuring at the county level is hard because the corresponding state departments are not redesigning themselves. The county found that they needed to restructure to be able to be partners with local schools, business, and non-profits. They found they could share what they are learning with other AB1741 programs, but that it is hard to share with the state.

Other Efforts at Restructuring

Northern California Council for the Community (NCCC) was founded in 1993 as a non-profit organization providing leadership in community building throughout the region and a clearing house for and proponent of "best practices" for creating and sustaining healthy, prosperous and self-sufficient communities. The organization suggests that:

Restructuring requires:

1. getting agreements from county governments and foundation to do study of all those on public assistance and unemployment to see how they are being served?

2. creating awareness of issues across disciplines

3. discussion of what system should look like, involving inter-county, state and federal participants.

4. forum for fed/county/state discipline

5. employment/private sector from all counties need to plan together

6. must solve the employment problem. It is the underpinning for all other solutions.

Bringing Pilot Projects to Scale (to serve all who need the service in the community)

Expansion requires figuring out how to spread what is learned to a larger area. People tend to separate what they know about neighborhoods from their technical knowledge. They need to connect the two. Those working to create viable neighborhoods need to have a Website to share information.

Barriers to Success:

Participants discussed the many barriers that impede collaboration success and presented their findings to a panel of legislators at the conclusion of the conference. These barriers include:

1. Communications. There is no clearing house to get ideas. We know that cloning programs does not work, but we need to be able to look at programs that work and extract the essence and principals to respond to the strengths and needs of the community we are trying to serve.

2. What funding is available is bound by categorical restrictions. Funding should be able to adapt to the needs rather than the child or community having to conform to the funding guidelines.

3. Sustainability. It takes time for relationships to grow, to develop trust between staffs of the different agencies and with the community. Too many projects are funded for two or three years as pilots, and just as they are getting it all together, they are defunded because the money runs out because the legislation was for a three year pilot and someone else wants to fund another pilot. The same money is there but valuable resources must be spent on writing another grant for another pilot for another source of funds to continue the same program.

(For more discussion on Collaboration, see Chapter II: Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect, sub-chapters on Substance Abuse and Domestic Violence; Chapter III: California Child Welfare Services, sub-chapter on Wraparound Services; and Chapter VI: Life After Foster Care.)

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