February 6, 2012 | Read Time: 8 minutes
Paul Schmitz has been a nonprofit executive in Milwaukee for 18 years, and in that time he has seen dozens of education groups set up shop and quickly start touting their accomplishments. But their work has not done much to rally city leaders and others to do what it takes to fix education problems. In 2010, Wisconsin’s black fourth graders had the worst reading scores in the country largely because of weak performance in Milwaukee.
Yet Milwaukee has made impressive progress in tackling another problem vexing the city, teenage pregnancy rates, with the birth rate for 15- to 17-year-olds declining by nearly a third in the past five years.
The difference, Mr. Schmitz believes, is that a broad coalition of charities, government officials, researchers, and donors all focused on ways to keep young girls from getting pregnant.
“We’ve become too focused on strong programs being the solution, rather than strong communities,” says Mr. Schmitz, chief executive of Public Allies, a charity that trains nonprofit leaders. “We have to think differently if we want results.”
Over the past decade, much of the emphasis in philanthropy has been on identifying high-performing organizations and helping them spread their programs throughout the country. But one of the hottest strategies these days runs counter to the notion that innovation from the outside can cure a community’s woes.
This week the White House Council for Community Solutions is releasing a report that describes broad collaborative efforts in 12 communities that are succeeding in fighting persistent problems like crime, high-school dropout rates, and teenage pregnancy. Among the efforts examined:
- In Memphis, Operation: Safe Community has helped cut violent crime by 27 percent in its five years of operation.
- In Nashville, high-school-graduation rates have risen more than 20 percentage points since 2002, thanks in part to the efforts of a coordinating group called Alignment Nashville.
- In Atlanta, the East Lake Foundation has worked closely with charities like the YMCA to transform the East Lake neighborhood, contributing to a 95 percent decline in violent crime since 1995.
Bridgespan Group, a nonprofit consulting organization that prepared the report, found more than 100 collaborations, and another 450 that are in the planning stages. But only the dozen efforts in the report managed to move key social indicators by 10 percent or more.
“That says something about how long it takes to do this,” says Willa Seldon, a Bridgespan partner and a co-author of the report, along with Mr. Schmitz and Michele Jolin, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. “It’s not fast work.”
Practices, Not Programs
The best-known example of community collaboration may be the Strive Partnership, in Cincinnati and northern Kentucky, which aims to put a higher percentage of students on the path to a college degree through efforts that start before youngsters begin kindergarten.
Strive, started by KnowledgeWorks, an education foundation, along with the local community foundation and United Way, identified 54 indicators that track whether students are succeeding. Since the effort began in 2006, 40 of the 54 indicators have moved in the right direction, and graduation rates in Cincinnati are up 10 percent.
“People often look for isolated programs—the ‘silver bullet’ that can somehow save the day,” says Jeff Edmondson, managing director of the Strive Network, which is helping 10 other cities adopt the process used by the Strive Partnership. “The leaders in Cincinnati ultimately realized that such programs don’t exist. It’s the practices—not the programs—that make the difference.”
Mr. Edmondson, who formerly headed the Strive Partnership, says community collaborations need four elements:
- a shared vision of improvement.
- desired results that can be measured.
- a commitment from government and other supporters that money will be available if the effort is successful.
- a full-time staff of at least one person.
“You have to have somebody waking up and thinking about it every day,” Mr. Edmondson says.
Designated Specialists
In Philadelphia, where a collaborative effort to improve graduation rates is beginning to produce results, Jenny Bogoni is that person.
Ms. Bogoni oversees Project U-Turn, a campaign that began in 2004, when only about half of the city’s high-school students were graduating on time.
The project’s 25-member steering committee has broad community representation—something the White House council’s report says is important. Each month, school-district and government officials, welfare case workers, literacy specialists, leaders of education charities, youth advocates, university researchers, and donorsmeet for two hours to analyze data and discuss strategies.
Ms. Bogoni says her job is to “herd all the cats.”
The William Penn Foundation gives about $1-million a year to the campaign, part of which pays the salaries of Ms. Bogoni and other staff members—including a data analyst, a policy analyst, and the director of a center that helps dropouts return to school.
Project U-Turn has advocated for more pathways to graduation for students on the verge of dropping out. The district has created 13 new “accelerated” high schools so that students who are over 17 but haven’t advanced beyond ninth-grade work can earn a diploma in two and a half years. Project U-Turn also advocated successfully for a center that supports educational stability and high-school completion for foster children, who often struggle when new family placements entail moving to a new neighborhood.
Years ago, the city’s Department of Human Services “would have said, ‘Education is not part of our mission—we’re about safety for young people,’” Ms. Bogoni says. “But when they saw that such a large percentage of their students were not graduating, they had to own that issue.”
The four-year graduation rate in Philadelphia is up 12 percentage points, to 61 percent, since Project U-Turn was established in 2006.
Driven by Data
Undertaking a broad community effort may not be as financially daunting as it seems.
“In most instances, what we saw wasn’t new money,” says Ms. Jolin, a co-author of the report and, like Mr. Schmitz, a member of the White House council. “Communities used the same resources, but began putting them in the right direction when they saw that the data was working.”
In Philadelphia, for example, the staffing for Project U-Turn costs a few hundred thousand dollars a year, but Ms. Bogoni says the effort has attracted more than $175-million in redirected dollars, new federal support, and small foundation grants.
Herkimer County, in New York, won a planning grant from the state in 1998 to better coordinate services for the working poor dispersed throughout the rural county. One of the first things the county noticed was that many children were being placed outside the home—and the high cost the county was bearing to care for them.
The county’s social-services department, along with Kids Herkimer, a charity that supports youth services, worked with family courts and local school districts to develop the Return Home Early Project, which identifies foster children who would be better served by receiving intensive services in their own homes. That effort has cut the number of children in the foster-care system by 54 percent—and saved the county and state $1.1-million.
As a result, the legislature continues to support the program.
“They understand that the dollars we’ve invested have gone for a good cause,” says Jim Wallace, the county administrator. “It’s all about being able to quantify what we’ve been able to save.”
Finding Common Ground
The intensive planning process required in community collaboration may uncover overlooked strategies. When the United Way of Greater Milwaukee gathered government officials, service providers, and others in 2006 to find a way to reduce one of the nation’s highest rates of teenage pregnancy, what jumped out was how great a contributing factor statutory rape was in the crisis. Half of the affected teenagers had been impregnated by men 18 years of age or older.
The coalition received more than $2-million in donated advertising. Many of the ads draw attention to sexual aggression as part of the problem. Teenage pregnancy can be a divisive issue—those called together by the United Way included representatives of Planned Parenthood and Baptist ministers who preached abstinence—but the effort to thwart statutory rape was something every group could rally around.
“People who were uncomfortable about the topic when they heard about it became more open to the campaign when the root cause came out,” says Nicole Angresano, the United Way’s vice president of community impact.
The number of pregnant teenagers has dropped 31 percent since 2006, and quarterly committee meetings are filled to capacity. “People like to be on a winning team,” says Mary Lou Young, the United Way’s CEO.
Now the city is hoping that a Strive-like approach to education, called Milwaukee Succeeds, will help fourth graders improve their reading scores. The effort was started by the Greater Milwaukee Foundation, but the United Way will oversee the early-childhood part of the collaboration.
“We’re optimistic,” Ms. Young says. “We think this effort will bear fruit as well.”
Keys to Success in Community-Wide Service Efforts
- Involve all diverse partners from the beginning. Leaders from government, philanthropy, business, and nonprofits should help develop the goals and vision for the collaboration, to ensure that money is available to carry out the plans.
- Include community members. Local people who stand to benefit from the efforts, and not just participants of focus groups, should be involved in shaping the community services.
- Use data based on local research to set the agenda and make adjustments. Some coalitions hire a dedicated analyst to oversee the data that guide collaborative decision making.
- Commit for the long term. Making even modest progress can be extremely difficult. A new report by the White House Council for Community Solutions found that only a dozen of roughly 80 community collaborations had managed to improve indicators of progress by 10 percent or more.
- Share credit for success. Operation Ceasefire, a successful community effort to stem youth violence in Boston in the 1990s, later stumbled when police, probation officers, social workers, and others all tried to claim responsibility for the achievement.
