The types of core capacities that can help a community to articulate and successfully pursue change aimed at improving outcomes for children, families and neighborhoods.
Approaches for developing these core capacities, including factors that can contribute to successful capacity building.
The challenges of sustaining and further enhancing these capacities over time.
The improvements in outcomes for children, families and neighborhoods that can result from the enhanced capacities.
The difficulties in moving to scale and achieving community-wide changes, even with improvements in a community’s core capacities.
This report describes, from the perspective of local stakeholders, the experience of several sites involved in Making Connections — the Foundation’s signature community change initiative of the 2000s — in developing and enhancing the core capacities essential for articulating and pursuing a local community change agenda. The report describes the conditions in the communities when Making Connections began; the core capacities built during the decade-long initiative; the factors that contributed to capacity building; the evidence of improved outcomes for children, families and neighborhoods resulting from the enhanced change capacities; the continuing challenges of sustaining those capacities; and key takeaways from the experience.
The importance of continuing funder support for building and sustaining core change capacities in a community
To a substantial degree … maintenance of enhanced capacities and/or continuous improvement and adoption of better practices will remain the focus of practitioners in a community only if funders (local and otherwise) continue to emphasize them as part of the normal way of doing business… Funders will set the tone, and if they don’t provide continuing reinforcement, many practitioners and other local stakeholders will simply slip back into old patterns of behavior.
Findings & Stats
Growing the Capacity for Change
All 19 local stakeholders (from the seven former Making Connections sites) who were interviewed for the study reported that their community’s overall capacity to articulate and implement a community-level change agenda and to achieve results had improved during the 10-year period of Making Connections.
Connecting Communities to Tools and Training
The 19 stakeholders identified the training and support provided by the Casey Foundation over the course of Making Connections as the most important factors contributing to the increases in capacity achieved. Specifically, the local stakeholders emphasized the information on best practices and tools and the leadership training provided by Casey.
The Complex Story of Change
The vast majority of the interviewed local stakeholders were able to provide concrete examples of what they reported as improved outcomes for children, families and neighborhoods that they felt had been fostered by the improved core change capacities. The examples covered a wide range of substantive areas. However, none of the local informants was able to provide evidence that their communities had yet been able to move the needle relative to population-level outcomes in the target neighborhoods, even with their enhanced core capacities.
Statements & Quotations
The Results-Based Accountability work that Casey brought … it became embedded in the city and leadership-in-action work around family economic success issues. From that, a number of [other] data [activities] arose. Universities and other groups with data capacities have started to play a bigger role and are sharing data….In the public sector, [officials] are making decisions based on data. They’re looking at what the status of the population is and what an effective intervention would be.
– Dennis Campa, San Antonio
There’s a legacy from Making Connections…that’s very much alive and now part of the culture in Louisville: the whole idea of resident engagement and resident voice…engaging residents in an ongoing way to guide neighborhood development. That value is incorporated into the community, into how we function and work. I don’t think you could do a significant reinvestment effort [now] without the community’s voice being engaged and involved.
– Carolyn Gatz, Louisville
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