Collective Impact: Turning relationships into effective partnerships
At Youth Eastside Services (YES), the therapists were concerned. They had seen an unmistakable trend of increased adolescent depression and school refusal/absenteeism in the entire King County region. They knew too that the counselors at local high schools had a primary concern: were the students whom they encouraged to seek mental health counseling following through? Meanwhile, the counselors could just as easily imagine the students caught up in the stigma of asking for external help, or paralyzed by concerns about costs, accessibility, or privacy. Those were the last things an anxious teen needed.
These were the sorts of situations for which YES was originally founded in 1968, a time of great social change. Its mission was to mitigate how those societal stresses affected teen development and mental health. Recognizing that young people’s lives centered around schools, YES had early on established relationships with the Lake Washington and Bellevue School Districts.
In the 2010s, YES recognized that contemporary youth were struggling with a new set of stressors including academic pressure, social media, technology, and overdue calls for racial equity. The times had changed, but the effects on youth persisted: depression and anxiety leading to withdrawal, hopelessness, and escapism. As social emotional learning (SEL) became the new buzzword, providers throughout the community responded with their own programmatic changes: hotlines were established, social workers planned outreach programs, schools revised policies, and YES offered drop-in clinics. “There were a lot of people in the community doing this work, but there wasn’t a great way to organize our efforts,” recalls David Downing, longtime YES director and current CEO. “Rather than working together, it seemed that we were competing.”
And not only were service providers competing with each other, they often had unmet wishes and expectations of each other. A school district would wish that mental health providers would increase accessibility. A mental health provider may hope that a school would foster a more supportive school culture. But can either party really suggest how other organizations do their work, much less hold them to it?
Collective Impact = Together, we’re better
It was time to explore how the organizations could transform their relationship into a productive partnership, one which united a range of stakeholders from different sectors to purposefully address a specific problem. By using a framework known as collective impact, organizations like YES and the school districts could together tackle the challenges that are bigger than any one sector (healthcare, education) could address. From an equity standpoint, the approach makes sense: no one organization would have primacy in setting the agenda or making the decisions. Ground rules for participation ensured that decisions would be made collaboratively among organizations of vastly different sizes, budgets, and histories. And everyone would be responsible for taking action within the capacity of their own organization. Based on that hopeful understanding, in 2011 YES signed on to help establish Eastside Pathways, a backbone organization to support collective impact initiatives to improve the lives and futures of youth in east King County.
With the support of an Eastside Pathways facilitator, YES, the school districts, and a half dozen other partners committed to the Mental Health & Wellbeing Collaborative. The group sought to address the factors that hindered youth access to mental health counselors: transportation, convenience, cost, and privacy. The shared solution: designating a single contact for each school to provide more accurate referral information and to manage space for YES providers to serve students directly at the schools. Such solutions may sound simple, but the collaborative provided a platform for open communications, which meant that unspoken expectations were replaced with mutually reinforcing activities. The result was that more students were served more quickly and efficiently, an improvement that was measured by both quantitative and qualitative evaluation.
Says Downing, “As a group, we have put in place systems and processes that decrease overlap while simultaneously reaching all young people with the care and services they need. Partners are able to operate as a “think tank” for solving regional problems.” Downing came to see that solutions for complex issues work best when the influencers of the adjacent sectors are at the same table.
Relationships with more benefits
Collaborations aren’t just about problem-solving, they can also be a forum for sharing experiences in continuous improvement, such as to embed strategic priorities into an organization’s work. When statewide student outcome data showed a correlation between valid indicators of SEL and future graduation, the youth-focused organizations in East King County convened again. This time, they sought to explore an important question: How can programs for high schoolers support their SEL and academic outcomes as they progress towards their lives beyond high school? The knowledge gained in the resulting Mindsets, Essential Skills and Habits (MESH) project led to creation of a self-evaluation toolkit for organizations to measure their own progress towards creating a supportive culture for youth.
The results are seen at the individual organization level too. “We are able to serve our target audience – children, youth and families on the Eastside in a more integrated way with our partners,” explains Downing. The collective impact model shows the value of working together to align on the same vision and agenda to ensure every child has every opportunity to succeed. “As occupants of a shared space, we achieve more by working together than apart, especially in areas where we overlap.”
Moving forward
Perhaps the best thing about participating in collective impact is the shared belief among partners that the resources exist within the community to get things done. Everyone who signs on to the Partnership agrees to participate actively and contribute their own strengths to the table. The clear baseline of understanding allows efforts to be action-oriented and time-bound, rather than exploratory.
For YES, the importance of its partnership with Eastside Pathways has continued to grow, so much so that Eastside Pathways awarded it the 2022 Bill Henningsgaard grant, named for the organization’s late founder. “Bill spoke of an Eastside comprised of agencies, schools and programs collectively and collaboratively serving children and families from cradle to career in an efficient, sustainable way,” recalls Downing. Fittingly, YES will apply the award to support its Latine program, a multi-tiered initiative that promotes positive identity, belongingness, and safety for the Eastside’s growing population of Latine students through coordinated, culturally-relevant afterschool activities and 1:1 family involvement. It was developed through partnership – what else? – with local school districts, city governments, YMCAs, and advocacy organizations. With the work shared, progress is in the view of all involved now.