Results-Based Leadership Development Helps Promise Neighborhoods Deliver Results in Mississippi

Schools can’t do it alone when it comes to help­ing chil­dren live up to their promise — by enter­ing their first class­room ready to learn, by keep­ing up with class­work and grad­u­at­ing from high school to pre­pare for suc­cess­ful careers. This holds espe­cial­ly true in impov­er­ished com­mu­ni­ties with a his­to­ry of racial dis­par­i­ties not only in edu­ca­tion, but also in income, hous­ing and key health measures.

That real­i­ty under­lies the ambi­tious fed­er­al­ly fund­ed Promise Neigh­bor­hoods effort to tap schools, tutor­ing pro­grams, par­ent sup­port, com­mu­ni­ty men­tor­ing, health, child wel­fare and social ser­vices agen­cies and, at times, the juve­nile jus­tice sys­tem to improve the odds for kids. For four years, the Annie E. Casey Foun­da­tion has played a key role in nine Promise Neigh­bor­hoods efforts — from the Mis­sis­sip­pi Delta to Min­neapo­lis to Los Ange­les — by pro­vid­ing its sig­na­ture results-based lead­er­ship to assist these com­mu­ni­ties in achiev­ing results for chil­dren from cra­dle to career. The Foun­da­tion is cur­rent­ly work­ing with Promise Neigh­bor­hoods lead­ers in Min­neapo­lis and in Indi­anola, Mis­sis­sip­pi, a rur­al town of about 11,000.

In Indi­anola, where half the chil­dren live in pover­ty and only about half the adults have grad­u­at­ed from high school, lead­ers have been work­ing to make up for a long­stand­ing lack of coor­di­na­tion among the vast array of agen­cies and oth­er stake­hold­ers in children’s lives to bring about the best out­comes for kids and their families.

“This lead­er­ship work is impor­tant because there are mil­lions of chil­dren in this coun­try who lack oppor­tu­ni­ties and are with­out clear path­ways to suc­cess. Path­ways to high school grad­u­a­tion, to col­lege edu­ca­tion and well-pay­ing jobs,” said Ash­ley B. Stew­art, a Casey senior asso­ciate on the lead­er­ship devel­op­ment team. ​“The work that these Promise Neigh­bor­hoods orga­ni­za­tions are try­ing to do is help­ing pro­vide not only the resources and pro­grams, but also the pol­i­cy and sys­tems shifts nec­es­sary to help mit­i­gate racial bias and inequities that are root­ed in our country’s his­to­ry of entrenched pover­ty and racial seg­re­ga­tion. This requires exam­in­ing dis­ag­gre­gat­ed data and cur­rent efforts to see who is suc­ceed­ing and who is not — and to have the hard con­ver­sa­tions about why that is.”

The lead­er­ship pro­gram in Indi­anola has helped to con­tribute to impres­sive results. Kinder­garten­ers’ readi­ness to learn, a key pre­dic­tor of lat­er school per­for­mance, increased from 25% in 2013 to 52% last year. The pass rate for third-grade read­ers, anoth­er key indi­ca­tor of school suc­cess, rose from 36% last year to 59% this year, and the high school grad­u­a­tion rate climbed from 61% in the 2013–14 school year to 71% in 2014–15.

Casey’s work with Indi­anola stake­hold­ers focus­es not on tech­ni­cal train­ing such as devel­op­ment or man­age­ment, but on bring­ing togeth­er key play­ers to coor­di­nate resources and apply the com­pe­ten­cies of results-based lead­er­ship in ser­vice of a com­mon goal.

The Foun­da­tion con­ducts sev­en inten­sive sem­i­nars with Promise lead­ers, stress­ing work­ing close­ly and col­lab­o­ra­tive­ly with col­leagues to achieve high action and high align­ment. That’s a key tenet of results-based lead­er­ship devel­op­ment in which lead­ers’ efforts com­ple­ment and build on those of col­leagues to achieve the best out­comes. Lead­ers work with data to deter­mine which cur­rent strate­gies are con­tribut­ing to improved out­comes and to togeth­er adopt new strate­gies that will accel­er­ate the achieve­ment of their results.

Col­lab­o­ra­tion and com­mu­ni­ca­tion are espe­cial­ly crit­i­cal in a broad effort like Promise Neigh­bor­hoods, Stew­art said. ​“No one insti­tu­tion, no one agency actu­al­ly owns the rights to par­tic­u­lar results; it takes many dif­fer­ent actors in many dif­fer­ent sys­tems in the com­mu­ni­ty to ensure that kids become successful.”