“Digging in and taking action” is the theme for Eastside Pathways for 2017. What is it specifically that we are digging in to? Last fall, the partnership decided that efforts this year will focus in two areas:
- Partners allocate and align resources to improve community level outcomes
- The partnership facilitates the collection and connection of academic data across the cradle to career pipeline and among partners to enable continuous improvement.
At the January All-Partner Meeting, we had the chance to “dig in” to what those mean exactly. Let’s start with aligning and allocating resources. At the meeting, resources were defined as everything from people power, to space, services, products, or even actual cash. The idea is that we, the partners, contribute capacity to make our mutual goals, and the work of the partnership, happen.
That means that it’s not just about engaging investors. We need the budget of the backbone (or “anchor entity” in the graph to the left) and shared capacity from the partnership.
How is your organization contributing to the partnership either by providing time, treasure or talent? Are you sending somebody to the collaborative meetings and making sure he/she is connecting back in with the organization to fully align with the work? Are you providing leadership and direction to the collaboratives?
Our second focus, facilitating the connection of data across the cradle to career pipeline, can seem overwhelming. However, if we break it down, we can figure out what’s right for our needs.
Using a child as an example… as she grows and develops, she will move from one provider to another—providers who likely don’t share information and may work in silos. Having this data in silos hurts us at the micro and the macro level. Without connecting data across organizations, we lose the opportunity to not only serve this individual child as best we can by responding to her real-time needs, but also to spot trends across bigger groups of students over time. We have to dig in together and figure out how we could better serve an individual child by connecting at least two of these data sources. We should be asking ourselves where do we see an immediate opportunity to connect two or more partners around data and what can I contribute to help make that happen?
If you have time, talent or treasure you’d like to contribute to the work of the partnership or perhaps in data, please don’t be shy. Contact one of the staff from the backbone. It will take all of us working together to build systems of support for all children. We look forward to hearing from you!
Article written by Stephanie Cherrington, Executive Director of Eastside Pathways.