The month of October was a busy one for Eastside Pathways’ staff. We began the month by traveling to Minneapolis, MN to participate in the 2015 StriveTogether National Cradle to Career Network Convening. The theme this year was that our mission is POSSIBLE and we are all agents of TRANSFORMATIONAL CHANGE. We went, we learned, we shared, and returned with concrete tools to assist us in achieving our mission.
Our key learnings were:
- The data piece is a challenge for everyone in the collective action network. We need to take a broader look at our data and the data that our partners have.
- Everyone has similar challenges when communicating and describing collective impact. There is a general consensus that one message doesn’t fit all – there may be a need to use multiple messages and messengers.
- Racial equity work is an important and “courageous conversation” to have not only in Bellevue but as a national undertaking. Glenn Singleton from the Pacific Educational Group provided a taste of the work that the Bellevue School District and Eastside Pathways have been doing for the past couple of years.
- Some communities have identified three tiers of skills a child needs: 1) social/emotional (home & school); 2) academic; and 3) project management, team learning, and internships. This reinforces the view that this work requires a community.
- Tap into resources that other organizations in the area have to help with initiatives/campaigns.
- Be on the lookout for bright spots. Calling out and celebrating bright spots that we have is SO important for momentum building. We have as much to learn from successes as we do from problems.
The Pacific Northwest was well-represented at the convening with the presence of All Hands Raised (Portland), Graduate Tacoma!, Excelerate Success (Spokane), and the Road Map Project (south Seattle and south King County). A few staff members from our partner organizations were also in attendance. Ted Dezember from King County Housing Authority described his experience as “empowering to be amongst other change agents and ‘trouble makers’ and I feel re-energized in my commitment to Eastside Pathways.” He is excited to bring this energy and learning back to the collaboratives as we continue to ensure that every student is ready for kindergarten, reading by third grade, and graduating high school on time.
For Susan Sullivan, this was her fourth trip to a StriveTogether National Convening. She observed that the collective impact movement has really changed and grown in that time. Now that so many communities are deep into the work and not just starting out, they have many valuable lessons and experiences to share with the rest of the network.
The keynote speaker was Dan Heath, a professor at Duke and co-author of the New York Timesbestseller Switch. He spoke about building on bright spots and emphasized that there is no reason to reinvent the wheel.
“It was a reminder to me to look at our community, to see where we are succeeding and to build on that,” said Susan. “Eastside Pathways partner organizations are working hard. Where are our bright spots?”
Take this question as an invitation to share those bright spots with the Eastside Pathways k2collaborative you are a part of. What is working? What challenge are you overcoming? How do you measure that success? How might we scale that across the community? Only by working together will we achieve our goal of mobilizing the entire community to support every child from cradle to career.
Article written by Nahyeli Mendivil, communications and operations manager at Eastside Pathways