 So today, we're going to build off of the material that we covered before, here is, I'm using this PowerPoint, here is sort of the goals for today's glass discussion. The defining the challenge section is like really just a brief, it's just a brief review of material that's been covered over the course of several weeks. And then we're going to define the concept of systems change and talk about some of the contemporary approaches to community development that are aiming for systems change. I'm going to focus on two, I'm going to focus on defining and explaining the use of comprehensive community initiatives that is a very prevalent form of community development that has been in place for several decades. And then I will talk about collective impact approaches, which is more recent in terms of a formal practice but really builds on prior community development practice and then employs a framework. And then we can have some question and answer. But again, as I mentioned, I'm fine with taking questions throughout the discussion if needed. So, defining the challenge very, very brief review this is material that the students, I think at this point are really familiar with so please anyone at any point he wants to weigh in or add anything I welcome that. So we've over the course of this semester have talked about the fundamental reality that where people live influences their opportunities and life outcomes and we benefited in this class from having a combination of both planning students and public health students so this has meaning both disciplines and it's it's been helpful to have discussion that links to both of those fields. What we mean by this is broadly the concept of housing quality, where are community members living do they have access to quality affordable housing stock that is really important in terms of playing out with their day to day as long as well as long term outcomes. If one doesn't have access to affordable housing, they risk being rent burdened or housing cost burdened and that limits their ability to spend important and critical resources on other aspects of their life that they need to be able to fund including food or education or health care. Similarly, if the housing stock is affordable but it's not high quality, or in any way, or it's dilapidated or not meeting sort of basic conditions of habitability that is also going to impose a lot of adverse impacts on the family or household that's living in that housing stock. So children, for example, that are exposed to lead paint face outcomes that are, you know, difficult health outcomes, whether there's lead in the water, whether there are there's pests or rats or other types of rodents in the property. These are all things that matter and shape both one's life now and at times in the future. Food access is another important element of understanding how our environment shapes our life. Do we have access to healthy affordable quality food? Is it within a reasonable distance from where we live? Can we walk to it if we had to? Or do we have access to quality transportation to get us to that food, that source of food or even other opportunities such as I'm going to go to the next slide here. Educational opportunities or economic opportunities. So do we have quality, do we have access to quality schools? Are we in close proximity to a strong job market? Are we living in a neighborhood where more people are unemployed or employed? What is the issue in terms, is there good proximity to training programs? Can we get access to opportunities for economic mobility by improving our skillset or acquiring new skills? What are the programs and opportunities that are in place and are they accessible to the residents within that place? And then there are things such as environmental health conditions, some of which I touched on in the housing context, but they can be bigger than just the house you live in. It can be in relationship to whether your neighborhood is in close proximity to an industry that is polluting your environment or are you living too close to a freeway? Is your air quality poor because you are in close proximity to, for example, you know, trucks driving by? Is there an overexposure to any other kind of environmentally harmful substance? Another element that we have to consider is the built environment, not just for environmental conditions in terms of health outcomes, but do we have access to quality open space? Do we have access to places in which we can walk comfortably outside safely? Is there a lot of violence in the area? Are there parks? Are the parks quality parks? Are there play spaces for children? Are there opportunities for community gardens and growing ones, you know, growing your own food and so on? These are all conditions that can influence how we live today as well as what our opportunities are for the future. There's an abundance of writing around this in multiple fields, both within planning and within public health as well as sociology. And over the course of the semester, as you know, we've covered a lot of material in this. So defining this challenge, I think, can also be explained using this graphic that actually comes out of public health. I think it's pretty effective at sort of illustrating the relationship between the various factors that we discuss. Hopefully you can see my pointer, but right here we're seeing land use refers to both housing and built environment. You have housing specifically here, transportation, the element of where we live in relationship to who we live near residential segregation schools are over here. We also understand there are larger factors that play a role that have to do with social inequities. And the point of this graphic is to illustrate that there are multiple factors that interact with inner individual behavior that can lead to these outcomes over here. And that I think is an excellent, I'm going to use this visualization a couple of times to explain some of the points that we're going through. But this is a great graphic to sort of define the challenge. Defining the concept of systems change. So I think as a starting point, it's sort of important to understand the distinct, you know, distinguishable to talk about systems change versus working to change a system. So what I mean by that is the concept of working to change a system could mean work to focus primarily on reforming education or work to address climate change. So thinking about systems change is something a little bit more than that. Here's a definition that comes out of the practice literature. And what this is sort of describing is that it's connecting to all of the different policies, processes and the relationship between these different elements and the power structures that are in place. And thinking of making a change that creates a pathway to improve, you know, social outcomes that are sustainable. And it connects with concepts of equity, improving health or reducing poverty, which as you know are large social problems. But using this graphic again, I think it's actually even more helpful at explaining this concept. I think this graphic sort of illustrates the concept of a system because it explains that there are multiple factors that lead to these outcomes here. So again, I'm sort of using my pointer to describe what is described in this, this health space as downstream. Right, the disease and injury impacts or the mortality outcomes with respect to infant mortality and life expectancy. But the fact is, is that the system of all of these different pieces feeds into these outcomes. And if one wants to attempt to improve these outcomes with the systems change effort, you're going to be thinking about how you can simultaneously address all of these different elements. So for example, systems change would contemplate how these multiple elements actually create an integrated whole. So you would as a practitioner contemplate the different elements within this graphic right you would look at the upstream factors and the midstream factors and see how they're interrelated and you would try to work to understand how they influence each other. And then the systems change work would involve thinking about what action, the, you know, the organization or the entities that are attempting this would take to impact the just, you know, the outcomes that are here in the downstream category. But then that has to think carefully about what types of investments are actually going to shift the policy and program side of this, as well as what kinds of elements of are going to influence the physical environment and generate individual interventions at the same time and individual behavior, all while being mindful of the social inequities right to improve the outcomes related to disease injury and mortality. You can call this, in addition to systems change work as systemic thinking you're thinking of an outcome within its context of a larger whole to understand the relationships between the different elements like the programs policies social inequities the physical environments and individual behaviors, and how they interact lead to specific outcomes like disparity and health outcomes right or rate to disease. What does this really mean for a planner or professional who's pursuing community development. Well, practically, I would argue that this involves work. That's focusing on a range of interrelated elements of a problem, rather than trying to narrowly define a project right so a contrast sometimes it's easier to define something by saying what it's not a narrowly defined project might be focusing exclusively for example on constructing affordable housing, but that's not what we're talking about here here we're talking about a planner who's intentionally trying to grapple with a really complex social problem, even if the work is located within a small geographic area, and is trying to craft solutions to the problem that really aren't going to be readily apparent at the outset, and even the obstacles and opportunities are not going to be obvious at the outset, they're going to emerge over time and they're probably going to be unpredictable. So it's a very different kind of practice in that sense. All right, so next slide. Some of the contemporary approaches to this sort of effort of systems change work in community development are called comprehensive community initiatives, and a collective impact approach. So, I'm going to walk you through both of those and again I invite you to sort of ask any questions or give thoughts or feedback about anything that sounds familiar to you from your prior reading or your own research or work. So, the first one I'm going to talk about comprehensive community initiatives. These have been around longer. These emerged definitely in the 1990s and have continued since they have some key characteristics, they're definitely what we would call place based strategies they involve multi issue large scale investment into a disadvantaged community. They do require substantial community participation so there's a lot of work that has to go into community building. They're very sort of distinguishable from earlier interventions that might have been a single intervention, like, like I mentioned before, constructing affordable housing, or improving an existing affordable housing development, or for example, saying, we really need to prioritize and invest in early childhood education and childcare. Instead, these are approaches that attempt comprehensive neighborhood, you know, improvements to address the complex issues of concentrated poverty, insufficient economic opportunity, poor schools, substandard housing. So, you can see takes on a lot and I want you to try to remember those points as I give you a couple of examples because I'd like to sort of push some of you to sort of think critically about what you might see as potential issues within the structure of what's happened. And I would also say that there's a real emphasis on community capacity building that's a term that again, I feel can sometimes be jargon so I'm going to just sort of define it for those that aren't familiar with it. It really just means working hard to build the capacity of local communities to develop implement and sustain their own solution to an identified problem. In other words, it's trying not it's trying to avoid a top down approach and instead really empower local residents to be able to develop a solution and sustain it to a problem that they help identify in the first place. But broadly speaking, these also can have funding that comes from the public sector and philanthropy and incorporate nonprofit organizations to implement strategies. And here are a couple more of, you know, that's what I just sort of explained in terms of key characteristics, in terms of who the actors are, but I think pretty important to acknowledge, although this might seem obvious, a key characteristic of Green is that their advancing systems change or working to do that. So, some examples of past community comprehensive community initiatives at different scales are listed on this slide. The first two are examples of strategies that were implemented through two different agencies in the federal government under the Obama administration that attempted play space systems change work in in the context of providing funding for planning grants and then implementation grants. And so I think this is where I would love if one or more of the students would love to go off of mute, and just think critically for a moment about what some of the obvious challenges might be of a strategy that's attempting systems change that sitting primarily in a housing specific, you know, a housing and community development traditional agency versus department of education. So if you're trying to tackle concentrated poverty insufficient economic opportunity for schools and subsender housing and some of that work is coming from one agency or is funded by it and some of it's coming from another, what might be some of the obvious challenges you might have, you know, you might predict would occur. Anybody want to volunteer. Would one of them be that, you know, transitions between different administrations with different priorities. For example, had under Obama versus had under Trump might pose a threat to the continuity, or, you know, even securing a funding for these programs. Absolutely. That's, that's a very important one. So, for example, if you were to go online and do some research into either of these you're going to find information that's dated and in relationship to the Obama administration you're not, you're not necessarily going to find more current information that seems to be a continuity of those prior initiatives in the way that you just described right and that's going to become relevant for a later part of this discussion. And that does anybody else. Does anybody else want to offer maybe a potential It could be described as both maybe an opportunity but also an obstacle depending on, you know, how, how it played out with the idea of having these originate with, you know, HUD or versus the Department of Education. If they're attempting comprehensive approach and systems change. I'm going to take a guess. I mean, think about it from this perspective. If systems change in many ways is trying in its in if a CCI is meant to be comprehensive. It's in many ways trying to work across multiple different disciplines, and many of these professional practices are sort of inherently siloed in their current form right so if it's sitting within a Department of Education or HUD. It's an attempt change that crosses over to another sector you can imagine at the outset that there might be some obstacles with the right kind of sort of collaboration and building the relationship between the different sectors, even at the local level right like if you're if you're funding and you're in your professionalism is been housed in HUD, and you're trying to also address school issues you could imagine that that's going to present a complexity. If you're trying to address schooling issues, which you understand there's a relationship between educational outcomes, and for example built environment housing quality and economic opportunity. You may however not necessarily have, you know, the relationships in place and so on, if you're coming out of the Department of Education, so you could see potentially there's obstacles there, but then simultaneously because these two programs were put in place at the same time. They were opportunities, because in another sense, it also created multiple funding streams for very similar work in the sense that they were funding opportunities to create local planning and implementation efforts so the same sort of neighborhoods or locations are within cities could apply for both, you know, grant funding for both processes and work together collaboratively and build off of that and have more resources to try to address or cross solutions right to address issues and create solutions. So sort of like in both, you know, obstacle opportunity, but that's one way you could describe a CCI right comes from the resources come from the federal government as well as other. Maybe they're pooling other resources, but the idea is it's a grant making opportunity where local communities apply for these planning and implementation grants, and they may operate at a very small geographic scale but it's open to everybody across the country. And there's clear and obvious public sector support and involvement. Another example that's at a different geographic scale and has like sort of a you know it has a very different sort of funding stream is something like the building healthy community strategy which was statewide in California. Another example of a CCI that is smaller in scale than the others in the sense that it's you know it's we're talking about a smaller geographic location that applies for the funding. It involved $1 billion being invested into 14 communities across the state of California exclusively. And the idea was to invest in these these 14 communities over a 10 year period to address chronic disinvestment in poor conditions that the California endowment recognized had deep relationship to health outcomes within those 14 communities. So, this is a different way to approach this in this context it's not that the public sector isn't involved. Right, if you were to look carefully at that approach you would see that there were some elements of, you know, very clearly defined engagement with the public sector. But you can see this is not a federally sponsored program right it's coming it's emerging from a foundation. Another sort of example of how these can work at a different geographic scale is the new communities program, which was an example of being used for a place based strategy in Chicago across 14 neighborhoods within that city. And this was sponsored by the Carther Foundation, and this work was working to address employment health housing and violence reduction. So these are just sort of different examples of how CCIs can work at a small geographic scale in terms of the place based strategy being linked to a neighborhood, but be sponsored by different kinds of entities whether it's a foundation or the federal government. In that context they can be either national scope in the sense that they could be sites that are across the country, or localized to single state or even to a single city. So, let me just make sure I don't I don't want I don't want to skip slides here we go. The key conditions that researchers have defined as necessary to succeed. So this is you know the literature on CCIs has grown over the years since they've been in place since the 90s. I think one of the first ones that's really complex of course is be realistic in scope and commit long term. Emilio you made a comment about transitions and administrations right so that has relevance in this context because success is tied to the ability to commit over the long term. The CCI strategy is funded by an initiated by one administration whether we're talking about a federal administration or a state level or any other sort of government administration, and that administration shifts. It may be that significantly disrupts the capacity for the strategy to be committed to the long term, right, it could limit the resources in many different ways not just financial but the ability for the program TV and continue operations. That also has relevance even when the funding and the resources and structure come from outside the government if you have a change in leadership and you know the direction of a foundation shifts that can play a huge role as well as to whether or not a strategy is going to be committed to the long term. I just wanted for a moment, I'm going to pick on the two public health students and just ask them to sort of weigh in for a moment and just venture a guess why is commitment to the long term likely very necessary to see any sort of success with these strategies. What do you think. Well progress just takes a long time in general. And so I think it just, I mean that's basically how it is for all situations all times it just takes a long time so you need to have this commitment and the plan needs to be strategic and. Yeah, no that's really covers like. Any thoughts. I would just add but like for a lot of, at least like when you look at a public health kind of standpoint, there needs to be a bit of like long standing infrastructure kind of like what Daniel was saying, and if it's not looked into like a long term implementation. It's too easy for like you're seeing new groups to come in kind of scale things back and then you don't actually make any progress. I was also thinking too about how do you even evaluate the next bullet point talks about creating an adaptive evaluation process and I was thinking, when you try to study outcomes I mean you can't necessarily test for outcomes for example in a 12 month period is easily you need time right you need time to be able to see whether you've had change in outcomes and then from from my planning students do you guys have any other thoughts as to why you know from the planning perspective why having a long term commitment might be particularly critical particularly if you're thinking about, you know, the community processes and we'll all talk some more about this but I'm just curious if any of you, you know in your studio work observed anything about it you. Well I think in our studio is one of the things we were trying to avoid was being quote drive by researchers or planners, you know just stopping by for a quick visit and not really contributing to the long term, either success or being invested, you know personally, financially or whatever in a community. I think if you want to see success at any level at any scale, you really have to at least express some interest or basic commitment to being in there for the long haul and you know seeing how your project or initiative whether it's the ups and downs of time. Absolutely right that's that's what I was hoping to talk about briefly from the planning perspective. I think that is one of the points that comes out repeatedly in in discussions about what hasn't has not worked you know residents can be very exhausted by researchers and planners and other professionals coming into their neighborhoods to explore an issue and propose a solution, but not stick around right I mean meeting people all the time to dissect study and maybe try to support resolving the same problem can be exhausting for residents. Another I also wanted to mention that it does take a long time to get by in on the political side and on the community side, which is extremely important to the success of any type of program whether that be public health or urban planning. I think that's actually absolutely right do you have any sort of, you know, thoughts as to why it takes so long what do you think are some of the factors that contribute to to why it takes so long to get by in. I think on the community side, especially in public health and in the government sometimes you question if they have your best interest in mind. And so you really need to work with the community or based organizations on the ground that have this influence in this power to kind of like coalesce together and make sure that what you want to do and what the community needs aligns and on the government side really for on the political side they have to make sure that what you're doing is going to get them reelected. So, yeah. I think I think you're you're calling out some important part. It was going to say part of the reason for the complexity and challenges if you are doing work in a neighborhood and you are not a resident of that neighborhood just automatically you're an outsider right and you are not necessarily going to have the same understanding of you may have an academic understanding of the issue that you're working to tackle but you don't live within that circumstance you don't live within the neighborhood you don't have a personal connection to the space. And even if you move into the neighborhood, you know, for example, you're still in that sense sort of a newcomer to the situation. And it speaks really to something else that I'll get to in a late slide but it's to the value and importance of local knowledge in both defining a problem, as well as a strategy to create a solution. Right. I mean I think that something we'll talk about developing buy in taking a long time is it's very real and it's absolutely true that it does take quite a bit of time to develop the trust that you need to have with residents in the space for them to feel that you are invested in an outcome that they want to see occur. And then some other sort of points that have come out of the relevant literature that describe necessary conditions for CCI success is this idea of an adaptive evaluation process. And that again like I think I think again that starts to sound like jargon so let me just sort of break this down into different discrete elements. I noted at the beginning of talking about systems change that system changes unpredictable work. You have to walk into the process recognizing it's unpredictable that's where the term adaptive come into play right you need to evaluate the process you need to do it in multiple times you need rigorous evaluation methods. You need to work across different groups, including with residents to define what it is that you're looking for in terms of indicators or outcomes that you should be looking for. You need to think carefully about the methods you need to recognize at the outset that getting the data is going to be hard to do. But you also need to be able to adapt to constantly changing circumstances, changing circumstances circumstances can come from changing funding sources. For example, if there are changes in allocations resources if there's changes in the government structure for relevant government organizations are involved in some way. There's a whole host of reasons why the circumstances can shift conditions can also shift because of larger regional economic changes. For example, you know we've seen over time that neighborhoods in the urban core that have historically been disadvantaged. You know they can the conditions can shift where you may have poor performing schools, you may have limited food access. You may have all of the critical issues we described in terms of built environment you may have issues of concentrated poverty, and all of a sudden you start to see escalating land costs. And it's a relatively recent phenomenon that could be a significant change in the conditions and then you need to adapt to how the strategy is going to, you know, work within that changing context and your evaluation tools may need to then shift as well. Another factor that I think connects in with what the actually the next two really connect in with what Danielle was highlighting, assessing the political context of a place and targeting places where there's political will that's aligned is also really, really important. So what that means is understanding that you need to have, you need to have, you need to recognize that you need to have some partners at the local level. You may not necessarily have have already synced up with the approach that this strategy is working towards, but they must. There must be somebody who has the political will and enthusiasm to see the outcomes you're you're attempting to reach right within the geographic space you're in it's very difficult to do this work. If you don't have a lot of different levels of community, I'm referring to residents and local political leadership and local public agency institutions involved. So for example, if you're trying to address something like poor performing schools, if you don't have buy in and some political will from the part of the school leadership, it's going to be very difficult to make the improvements in the schools that you would like to make just like if you're trying to address something that relates to the built environment, it's going to likely implicate some kind of land use system that is probably going to have some sort of law attached to it that is very much influenced by local politics. So understanding whether what the political context is of a place whether there's already existing relationships and collaborations between entities or whether or not there's tension is important. Then seeing where there's actually political will that's aligned with the goals of the CCI is pretty fruitful in terms of determining whether or not there are conditions there to really succeed. And if if there isn't then there can be substantial work at the outset to try to get to that. Oh, so sorry, it looks like this duplicated. That was an Apollo apologies it looks like I, when I made edits I accidentally duplicated so I'm going to move to the next slide but I'll talk to you about some of the other elements the other components though that are pretty important in terms of conditions for success. I just want to conclude thinking about some of the themes that have sort of already emerged in the conversation we mentioned of course that there is building the trust, and making sure that they're, you know, over the long run, and being realistic and scope and so on but that is also developing grassroots leadership. It's pretty important that your strategy, not be top down. That's extremely difficult work. I'm just going to point this out that you know here all of us on this, you know, in our class, we're either professionals or pursuing, you know, a degree track that will lead us to becoming professionals potentially in this space. And trying to do this work in that context always sort of risks that we could implement what we might describe as a top down strategy right like we take, we take this professional knowledge to a place and we say this is what we think needs to work out. What we need to do to make this work out and we share it with local residents, but the point of developing grassroots leadership is recognizing that top down strategies are not going to really succeed and that's not that's not actually going to implement the change or lead to the improved outcomes. In fact, what you really need to get to that long term sort of sustainability and success is you need to have substantial grassroots sort of organizing happening even before the initiative happens and this, this is actually leading to sort of the idea of getting not just buying in but also the long term sort of sustainability in whatever it is whatever change it is that the group is is trying to work toward right so you have to have a little leaders people I think Danielle mentioned community based organizations right you have to have local leaders that already have trust with residents that residents are actually part of those organizations and or leaders within those organizations, playing a critical role in the implementation, we have to support the organizing development of that prior to the initiative, even beginning. So that's one of the other factors and another one that's deeply related to that that unfortunately got cut off in my, my effort to edit the slides is creating, you know, an opportunity to share power through decision making. That's really difficult. And I'll explain more as to what some of the challenges are but committing to working to share as much power is really impossible is really important. And it's part of connecting in with this idea of, you know, sustained long term commitment and getting buy in. It's really vocal for residents and for members of a community to buy into a process that they can't actually shape or make decisions, you know, to see certain outcomes or certain processes that would lead to certain outcomes. That's, it's very, very hard, like nobody really wants to just be told what their problem is, and then been told and then told how to fix it. Often, people who are dealing with different kinds of complexities want to play a role in defining the challenge. Interestingly, so you can you can kind of connect to your own personal experiences, so how you would feel if somebody were to come to you and define a problem you feel that you're experiencing without your input. So those are, you know, those are the, the different sort of key conditions for success. So, in terms of the challenges that have emerged, you know, as well, and that are often discussed in, you know, current evaluations and literature around this. The fact is, is long term is long term, and it means that there's a lot of time and effort and investment is going in so it's monetary in time. This one that I have the first bullet I have the significant time and effort investment. I'm not even thinking about the foundation or the government, the public sector. Who do you think I'm thinking about here. If I'm not talking about the foundation and I'm not talking about the public sector, who might I be talking about private sector or nonprofits. Certainly there's a lot of time and effort investment, but who's the most vulnerable out of all of the different stakeholders that we might be discussing intuitively. The community themselves. Exactly. So, Daniel for just sort of following up on that. Thank you for volunteering and now I'm going to pick on you with the follow up question. Can you describe a community member in terms of their, you know, their situation as compared to the professional who works for the nonprofit, or the government agency personnel the bureaucrat, or the foundation program officer. What's each of them are going to give time and effort, but how might the community member be differently situated in your mind. I think for the community member. If they were to be given a place at the decision making table that's really different and no experience for them. They may not know kind of like the bureaucracy that you're supposed to go through and I think a lot of times when you don't know that you have these really big overarching obstacles and oftentimes it could get like slowly knocked down so that the hope that you have sometimes gets like diminished by the end of going through the entire processes and then on top of that, being a person of the community and with less power and with less resources, you might have other things that you need to take care of that does not prioritize like these current community initiatives. I would like to build out that last point. Can you just sort of hypothesize for a moment, the complexity of having other competing, you know, things on your time and like anybody want to sort of venture to guess the different situation you might be if your community matters so say you're going to have regular convenings to make decisions on both on each element of a CCI strategy. You're going to set up those meetings during normal business hours because let's describe multiple stakeholders that are going to be around for the, you know, for the course that meeting, you're going to have a bureaucrat government bureaucrat. You're going to have a program officer from a foundation. You're going to have a. You're going to have a community based organization nonprofit, you know, member, and maybe you're also going to have a political representative, either the political elective of the space, or their representative right those are four of the stakeholders and the fifth is going to be a resident from the community. Those first four so are calling for a meeting between 9 and 5pm 9am and 5pm Monday through Friday, likely because this is a part of their actual workflow, right, they're getting paid for their participation in some way or another. That resident, however, maybe they're given an opportunity to participate, maybe this is one of the first times that they've gotten an opportunity to sit at the table and help contribute to making decisions, but they're not they're not actually, you know, maybe the structure is compensating them for their time but more importantly that scheduling it between 9 and 5. They may have another job right or a job just a job right like this is not their job this is this is where they live, they want to have a say so when an opportunity to participate, but if the scheduling for example requires them to commit time they need to take that time away from some aspect of their life right. So all the other individuals if they were to give time outside of their normal business hours, yes they might be intruding into their evening time with their families and so on, but it's very likely that with the resident, they're going to be intruding on some other obligation no matter when the time of day is scheduled that is that is usually, you know, the different situation that resident participation, you know, that can create right so this this comes up all the time when you're even just thinking about community engagement strategies, how can you create robust opportunities for community members to participate recognizing all the community demands competing demands on their time, or for example, if they have children. Do they have the means for childcare to participate right are you constructing a space for somebody else to watch their children so they can participate. Creating translation opportunities for someone to participate if you're working with a community where English is not the native language right there's so many layers to this. And the significant time and effort investment on that bullet point is really referring to the fact that from the resident perspective from a disadvantaged community. The time and effort investment is huge, you are likely taking time away from some other essential activity, and you may not be compensated for your time. And in fact, it may even cost you something to participate right. So if it doesn't succeed. It's a really big deal. And if there's no long term sort of investment into that space that's a really big deal but also asking that of residents is a really big deal. I think that's another sort of component to why you know these initiatives have to invest in the grassroots leadership grassroots meaning that residents investing in residents and organizing residents and organizing with community based organizations that are deeply involved with local residents before the initiative begins. It's not just sort of thinking about making sure that the design of the initiative is the most responsive and the best possible design. It's also just to sort of create that structure to have it in place where you have residents who have been able you know you can recognize what it is they need for them to participate and you sort of have a system in place to allow people to regularly participate. That's something that doesn't always happen and it does create obstacles for success. Another really big issue is missing out on everything I just described from the outset and throughout the initiative because you're overlooking the value of local knowledge altogether. In other words, there's always a risk when we come into this work particularly from our professional backgrounds that we emphasize our own technical expertise. For example, we define a problem within a neighborhood based on the reading we've done about the issue. Like maybe we've read everything there is to read about neighborhood effects or we've read everything there is to read about the challenges of constructing affordable housing in particular geographic region. Or maybe we have read everything about what leads to childhood obesity in particular types of neighborhoods or something like that. So we come into the problem with our technical expertise but we fail completely to talk to the local residents about how they define the problem as well as the factors that they believe contribute to the problem. And that's a very big problem within this work. It's easy to overlook local knowledge. It's easy to emphasize the value of the degrees behind our names and the expertise that confers. But we have to remember that understanding a problem always begins with how we define the problem in the first place. And defining the problem is more than just defining it based on what the relevant literature says. It's very important to actually talk to residents in a space to understand what they define the problem to be. And then to also talk to them about what they see the potential solutions to be and what they think are the contributing factors because the fact is it's the only way you're going to ever get a sense of the true local context in which that broader problem is being described because we know this from our own reading. Everything we read is qualified by the facts of that particular case that might have been explored if it was a case study or if we were looking at a cross sectional study that's pulling a lot of data from a bunch of different places. It's still qualified by the point in time that it's you know that that study was conducted or if it's exploring statistical statistically significant relationships between various, you know, variables or something. It's still limited by the fact that it can't fully define the causal relationship between one factor and another. Right. So you have to go to residents just to even gather more information about the local context because they are the ones that hold that information. You probably will never find it in a book. There could be the rare circumstance where you're doing work in a geographic location that you know has been substantially written about so you might be able to acquire a good amount of historical information and other information from those readings on that location, but it's still no guarantee. Right. It's no guarantee that you'll get everything you need from reading so super important not to overlook local knowledge, but a very common mistake. Another problem is that I think it's really easy when crafting comprehensive systems change strategies to be completely unrealistic in scope to create a short timeline and think, you know, but we've resourced it this way right like we maybe we've even funded it at a very large level. But that's not necessarily that's not necessarily going to lead to the improvement in outcomes. And I think I think after the reading we've completed over the past months. I think everyone in the class would agree. The challenges that we've been describing and discussing in this course. They emerged over a long period of time and are the consequence of multiple elements right this concept of systems change in this idea of an integrated whole. It's I'm certain very familiar to all of you because everything we've been talking about in terms of the complexity of the challenges, breaking apart elements of an integrated whole right understanding that housing affordable housing and poor education and poor health outcomes and environmental conditions and concentrated poverty and job opportunities are also interrelated. That's work we've been doing for months now. And I think the complexity we face in designing these place based strategies is understanding that you're trying to tackle something overnight right it's related to a system that has emerged over many, many, many, many years and over multiple systems at different levels of government at different, you know, so a single place a single neighborhood is influenced by multiple systems that sit in different kinds of you know parts of our society right there's programs and policies that are public policy and then there are conditions that are related to the this that particular space and history of that space. There are elements that are in relationship to the resources available to different levels of government that may impact that space and so on there's so many different. You know, components to the challenge that creating an unrealistic scope is something that's easy to fall into and thinking you're going to you know design a strategy over a short timeline with a lot of resources to attack all of that very easy to fall into. But I think, given the readings we've done. I would venture to guess that all of you would probably agree that a short timeline even with a lot of money isn't going to be the only fix right it's it's very complicated to undo some of these different things and so we have to try to think very carefully about realistic scopes and we have to work in many ways you could stay over time with intermittent milestones and achieve goals at different levels right and constantly be working at different levels. That's the concept of systems change right you have to keep working towards making shifts at the local level with an immediate geographic area. I'm also thinking about how you could shift policy maybe at a higher level that touches and impacts that geographic space that neighborhood, but in fact requires work for example, at the state government level, as well as the federal level right there's multiple strategies that have to be implemented at the same time. Another challenge is developing indicators. Another challenge is that people sometimes develop indicators for success. You know for the purposes of evaluation I mentioned how important evaluation is for success but they develop the indicators completely without community input. That's a huge mistake. And does anybody want to sort of offer their thoughts as to why they think that might be a big mistake. Generally. Oh, sorry. No great Dana thank you. Generally if you're doing something for the community and like it goes back to saying that defining the problem. I mean, understanding the problem would mean defining the problem and the best way to do that is to get the communities like take on the problem. So it doesn't really make sense to develop indicators to fix that community if the community isn't involved. That's who are you fixing it for. Like what's the overall agenda. Who are you fixing it for. Are you fixing it for the foundation. Are you fixing it for the government entity that's providing the grants, or are you fixing it for the residents and really, you can't really fix it for them. Any problem that you're trying to attack has to be done with them, right. And therefore if you have to do the work with them, and you law and long term you need it to be sustainable where they can continue the work. You need to define the indicators with them. And so I think those are those that's that's an important issue that comes up. Another one is that Daniel I think you touched on this a little bit and that is that the political context itself could be, you know, an issue. And what I mean by that is there could be a situation in which the local political context really challenges the ability for cross sector collaboration. So for example, what if the local school leadership and the local city leadership. Don't get along, or the local parks leadership and the local school leadership don't get along, or, you know, if what if local CBOs are working in and have some conflict with each other, your, your best work the best work in this space is going to come from collaboration and from across sectors. But if there's if that local political context is sort of feeding into conflict, you're going to be challenged in this work. And so if that's the case, at the outset, there has to be a fair amount of work that's done before the initiative to try and improve relationships. Because if you don't have cross sector collaboration, you probably won't see any success with a comprehensive approach right you might be able to achieve, you know, a limited improvement in a, you know, single issue work in that kind of context but very, very difficult to see improvements across multiple issues, given that they're so interrelated or any substantial improvement. If you actually don't have cooperation between the various groups that are responsible. You know, for for managing those issues. So I'm going to move now into more recent approaches. This is something that really builds in many ways. Off of the same strategies. It's, it's not so different. There's a little bit of a nuances to the difference, but this concept of the collective impact approach. It's a little more contemporary. It's really building off of past practices, but, and it also involves across sector collaboration to advance systems change. It does formally always include government as one of the collaborators philanthropy and businesses, but it's a little bit different in that it employs a formal framework and what I mean by that is that it there's a like there's a there's a body of literature between the practice area that describes a discipline framework to to employ and this is the framework framework that a collective collective impact approach takes it will involve the use of a common agenda. So that allows for something that's defined, you know, between the different groups a common agenda basically means that there's always going to be some disagreement, you know, between parties it's not that there won't be, but there is going to be all the leaders agreeing on the primary goals of the collaborative initiative, right. So it's not that everybody is going to be identical in their ambitions or their, their primary goals, but they have overlap over some of their goals and and have recognized that and formally recognize that the shared measurement system means that there is data that's going to be systematically collected and reported on a set of indicators that the parties have agreed about that can be used to constantly assess the progress and encourage learning and accountability. So I want to sort of emphasize that this is a component that sort of recognizing from what we just described before how critical constant evaluation is. And it's also recognizing that it has to be rigorous and it has to be a set of indicators that the groups agree to. In a moment though I want you if you're noticing a missing ingredient, I want you to keep that in your mind I'm going to point it out in a second. There's going to be also the presence of mutually reinforcing activities. What that means is that different partners are going to recognize that they play different roles in the systems change work right so their activities are going to be strategically linked to the overarching plan that is a common agenda that they all agreed to and it's determined collaboratively but they might be working in their individual spaces to all achieve that a common agenda. In some sense you could say that that makes sense because that's how a lot of this work is done right you can understand that schools for example, operate in a particular manner to influence what comes into place whereas you know a local county health agency does different work or you know the city government may manage parks and recreation like each of these entities. They manage a different component of all of the different features that are going to be relevant for example, for improving a neighborhood. An important component is continuous communication, which really refers to basically being able to support regular face to face and web based interactions I'm putting in the web based because we now understand like, it may not be so simple to always have face to face meetings. And in this context is where partners are constantly building relationships with each other and trust and share a shared vocabulary that share vocabulary is pretty pretty important. I can even sort of supplement that was saying in my own observations I think that transitioning some of that common agenda shared measurement tools and continuous communication into, for example, a memorandum of understanding that maybe even routinely update it's sort of a written document it's not a contract, but it does offer sort of a written format in which these different parties can come together and define their, you know the respective roles within the work, and what their different goals are, and what their shared goals are and they can keep coming back to that document to sort of keep, you know the momentum going is not a bad idea I've seen that be very successful to keep things moving over time. And finally, and this is a part this is a component of this that I think is pretty critical. There always has to be a backbone support system and what that means is an actual sort of infrastructure in place an organization that's dedicated, you know that's dedicated staff that's really independent of each of the partners that are part of the collective to actually coordinate facilitate support guide and mediate this collaboration and in other words if somebody whose role is entirely about keeping this collaboration intact, because if you think about the complexities that go with a constant continuous communication, and making sure that there's a common agenda, and improving relationships and, you know, that's it's really hard work so dedicating resources, money, and staff that is super important. Another part of the existing literature has sort of described that there are actually some key conditions that are necessary to you know for success that actually have to happen before even implementation of a collective impact approach. And that is there has to be the presence of an influential champion. And what that's referring to is this idea that you have to have somebody who, you know, has the kind of resources. You would describe is, I mean, we're not just talking about financial resources in this context right they have they have the ability to sort of keep momentum and going. And that's, that's something that people are saying is sort of a, a precondition to success. There's this idea that you have to have someone within different organizations that's going to sort of keep people enthusiastic. So they're influential in keeping an organization committed, or keeping a partnership in place. You certainly have to have adequate financial resources you have to go into the work knowing it's expensive knowing it could be more expensive than even anticipated. And at the same time in order to sort of really have it take off. There has to be a sense of urgency for change among the party, you know the partners. Those are some of the different preconditions for success that the literature isn't defined. Another important sort of two conditions that have emerged as well as this concept of having strong informal relationships this idea that the ability to have constant communication and positive working environments. Is in the sense connected to the strength of informal relationships right so the presence of informal relationships, strong ones in particular can do a lot to help smooth over potential conflicts that could emerge right so there's that there's that factor and And then I think the other one is this idea of engaging community. This is something that's also I'm going to describe some of the things that have not worked well and so right now I'm sort of flipping it though and saying this is a pretty important condition for success. Everything I described in terms of that initial framework, none of that referenced engaging community, as you can see, right, I mean it was, it was describing a framework that involved leadership from different different sort of partner organizations a private sector of government, and you know you had also the idea of businesses local businesses and so on but at the end of the day, just as it is true with the comprehensive community initiative. The fact is is that I think when you're dealing with collective impact. You have to have substantial community engagement in order for that to even work. So I think that's that's something that's really important, and I'm going to sort of talk about it in the context right now of of what the challenges are. I think one of the obstacles to success is that the structure itself, at least at the outset, it really describes convening established organizational leaders and decision makers. It's, it's very much overlooking the value of local knowledge. It's completely missing the importance of having residents at the table. It's missing the value of also assessing the capacity for shared decision making with those residents. Now, more recently in a lot of the writing there's been a fair amount of discussion about how important it is in a collective impact strategy to have community residents at the table to share power with them wherever possible to think about think critically about collective impact work, even maybe from a lens of what is distinguishable from community organizing work and to recognize the value of organizing residents prior to the implementation of a collective impact approach and how to integrate community voices into the process throughout the collective impact approach. I would say that in the literature, one of the issues that I've observed that's a challenge is that particularly from my own practice experience is that it's it's also important not to just articulate a goal of sharing decision making power it's actually really important to do a full assessment of the actual capacity to share decision making power and I say that because the collective impact approach which is different from the prior approach we described so the prior approach the CCI approach I gave you four examples, two of them. Definitely involved grant making that came from the federal government so there's no question that the government was a formal partner in that sense. The other two were sponsored by foundations and it is true that in those contexts there can be involvement and engagement of local government but the CCI approach the collective impact approach to avoid an acronym formally includes the public sector as one of the key collaborators. When you involve the public sector as a collaborator a government agency and for the issues we're just typically dealing with in the community development field. It is very often that that agency is going to be a local agency. There may be limitations on that local government entities decision making they may be subject to a higher level of government in terms of oversight. There also may be limitations on which components of decision making particularly around funding allocation or land use or so on that can be shared with community residents or even other collaborators at the table. This must be assessed at the outset or it is likely a lot of conflict will emerge between collaborators and partners for the CI approach and between those collaborators and community residents. It should always be the goal to share decision making power with community residents as much as possible, but it must always also be assessed exactly how much power can be shared. And if that is not assessed at the outset, there's a risk that partners at the table will misrepresent what is possible, and that will create more conflict than there might have been otherwise. And that's that's that's something I can get into a little bit more in detail. The strengths of these two approaches though broadly speaking is that you know these are not single issue efforts right. We've been just discussing over the course of the semester. The complexity of challenges that emerge in the field of community development and that they are related to systems right so they're these elements are very difficult to sort of tease out in isolation. You can't correct for example the issue of schools and think that you will resolve all issues for a neighborhood. If other issues around housing, environmental conditions, air quality or other pollutants, violence, economic opportunity are not also resolved right everything is intertwined and interrelated. So it's, it's great that these strategies employ a comprehensive approach. It's also really good that they prioritize collaboration. They, they're aiming for systems change which necessitates collaboration necessitates that professionals break out of their silos right that we don't just work in our individual spaces and instead, you know, move between fields and understand what other people do, and understand how our work relates to another discipline and learn something about that other discipline and vice versa. It's also really good that they are increasingly aiming to collaborate directly with community residents. And, and those are all positives of both approaches also really important is that they're adaptive right I think at the outset I described systems change work if you're a planning professional or in the case of a public health professional who wants to work at the community level. I would describe, you know, public policy planning public health professionals at work in these spaces is very much all sort of in this community development practice. The fact is, is that you need to be adaptive right and to again define that term and not just use jargon, but that means is be prepared for the fact that the challenge will be unpredictable. The solutions will not be obvious. Even all the obstacles that will emerge may not be obvious to you at the outset that however does not mean they won't be obvious to residents, which again speaks to why you want to prioritize early community and ongoing community engagement because local residents are going to know so much right they're going to be important partners in the process. But the persistent challenges of course that exist within this work is that the relationship building component between these collaborators and with the community takes long term investment. And as earlier in the discussion, Emilio pointed out, you know, there could be a change in administration. And Danielle talked a little bit about some of the challenges with trying to get by and it takes so much time. And there's, you know, she mentioned different groups like there's resident perspectives versus political electives. Dana you called out some of the complexities of, of what it means to not, you know, that we were not just doing work for a group but it's important that they participate in designing a solution and contributing to indicators. All of these things require a long term investment. That means you need to have resources in terms of people, money and time. Means that any sort of initiative and strategy is something that can't be embarked upon without thinking about a long period of time. That's a challenge sometimes even for philanthropy. You know, it's not necessarily easy to craft funding and resources for a 10 year or more investment into a place. And particularly if you have funders that want to see certain outcomes, you know, so then designing metrics that are both rigorous but also providing intermittent evaluations is complicated work. Another, you know, element of this that's hard is I just described it from the professional sector, but long term investment on the part of residents is also really difficult. They need to live their lives they need to go to work and go to school they need to take care of their children they need to get food they need to do what they need to do. And asking them to stay committed to, you know, implementing a strategy that's going to take time is hard work as well. You know, it's like, it's one thing to give up a couple hours, you know, for a couple months from work to participate in decision that's another thing to do regularly year in year out for for a decade. Another part of this work that can be very very challenging is both initiating community engagement at the right time. It's not uncommon that many of these strategies initiate community engagement way too late. That is one of the most common mistakes is that community engagement follows the design of the initiative and the initial implementation. That's extremely hard. Think about it from your own sort of professional expertise that you've gained up until this point from your own perspective why you think it could be really hard to initiate community engagement before you even implement a strategy. Practically speaking, anybody want to volunteer guests. Like, it'll be hard or not hard but the community wouldn't really know how this is going to turn out to help them in the future in the long run. So it's kind of hard to gain that type of trust. And I would sort of add to it, it might even be hard for you to describe what you're going to be working on in a space if you're engaging people before the implementation. Right, you're going to have a forming notion a forming idea but the point of early engagement prior to implementation is to inform the strategy. So you have to think carefully about how you engage community in a way where it says, here's something for me to talk about with you, but I actually want your input this is not final this is not a final form right that's a delicate thing to balance I think each of you in your own studies. You know, even where you're out with your own studies could imagine how challenging it is to juggle that right like to, to just to have this balancing between, oh, you know I have I have an emerging idea, I would like your input on it, but I do have something to actually present to you. Right, I mean I think it's, it's not easy to do as a professional it's much easier to engage somebody. Put it this way, it is easier as a professional to inform community about what it is you're doing then to engage community about what you're doing. Right, it's really easy to disseminate information. I mean it's not necessarily easy to come up with all the different communication strategies I think, for example, we can recognize that we have to think about translation and format and so on but that's, that's one body of work what I'm talking about is actually the substance of the communication not the communication channel, but actually thinking about how you open up dialogue in a way to allow for meaningful input to come back in very difficult to do at the early stages and yet super critical. So it presents a persistent challenge. Another component to this is understanding the idea that you actually have to engage multiple levels of community at the outset what do you think I mean by multiple levels of community. You know community leaders and you know obvious stakeholders but also you know just ordinary residents might take the form of going door to door or kind of engaging with folks at a meeting of some sort. That's right. And here's the thing that you can flip it and you can also say not just residents but also local leaders right like sometimes people are really good at engaging local leaders but miss residents sometimes sometimes people work really well at engaging community based organizations and residents but do a horrible job of engaging political leadership or sometimes they engage some political leadership, but don't anticipate that other political leadership will have some say so. Over a particular component of the strategy. It's therefore important to just be as inclusive as possible. Anyone who touches the space, the geographic space that you're working on anyone who has any relationship to that place is worth engaging because you can't even fully anticipate the issues or the conflicts that might emerge right you can't assume. Oh well that political leader over there has no jurisdiction over the issues we're going to tackle you don't know that at the outset, because as I mentioned multiple times when you're dealing with systems work and you're dealing with a comprehensive approach. You're dealing with unpredictability. You don't know at the beginning, all of the various obstacles that will emerge you don't even know who all the players will be in terms of the most dominant voices that need to be, you know engaged who who has sort of say so over a particular issue you don't know who you're going to need cooperation from in order to see a successful strategy and implementation right you can't know that at the outset, you don't even fully know how to define the problem at the outset until you engage all these different stakeholders. And the fact is they all hold their different perspective. And within the each of those perspectives lies, you know some truth to what will influence the outcomes. You know it's not it's not that one group is necessarily white right and one group is necessarily completely completely incorrect it's often that you have multiple people that are touching a particular place, and they're going to see the issue from different perspectives and you have to gather all of them to try to craft and define an issue. You also have to recognize that you have to engage and sustain that engagement of different levels of community with the full recognition of existing power dynamics and work to try to address the power dynamics what do you think I mean by that. How could different stakeholders be differently empowered. Anybody want to venture I guess. Would it just be like even the makeup of the stakeholder group or like kind of the resources they have available to them I think we're kind of like stratify them differently and how much power they would have. Absolutely. So we're a formal or informal relationship to the issue, but absolutely resources so even if for example within a single stakeholder group, Tory could you imagine that different residents might be differently empowered and if so could you venture a hypothetical where you could see different residents being differently empowered in the process. Well, I think like it depends on the type of like community that you're looking at like I think. It depends on the like residential makeup and if there's like, maybe not necessarily like a very good mix but like if there are people of differences to economic levels, you might have people who have to work multiple jobs so they can't come and take time to join in this like stakeholder group whereas you have people who are like I don't know like stay at home moms or something for able to kind of come out and talk for what they want and it kind of makes a power imbalance within the stakeholder group of the community, possibly. Absolutely. And I'm just going to sort of describe this within, it's sort of a universal truth in the land use context for example, in the United States that you will find that people who can participate in public processes around important decisions for land use are often retired white and male homeowners. Right, they're differently situated than maybe and this is this could be at a city level right or a political district level as well but in particular at a city level that there are different groups that are differently empowered but even at a neighborhood level. I think to where you're speaking to it even even in a context of a single neighborhood and maybe the process is in a formal public process like a land use hearing the what I just crossed you know reference. You're still just talking about a neighborhood that is where where unfortunately you know there's concentrated poverty and high joblessness, but you're still differently situated. If you are retired right versus somebody who has a young child and you're working to jobs. One person has more time than the other to participate in a process has more time than the other to make sure their voices heard. You're also differently empowered if one person is a native English speaker. So you could have a community, a neighborhood right where you have multiple ethnic groups, multiple racial groups, and they are all maybe similarly situated in terms of their economic situation. Right, they could be defined as one group if you are looking at them in terms of rate of poverty, but it's distinct groups in terms of relationship to process with respect to language access or immigration status right that places people in different in different, you know categories in terms of power dynamics, which group feels most empowered to contribute information and or participate in a process. So if you're thinking about initiating and sustaining community engagement and multiple levels of community, you must constantly be thinking about power dynamics and how to reach groups that are vulnerable and vulnerable in different ways, or less empowered under our current systems right how do we increase language access. How do we hold community engagement events at times of the day that will reach populations that have to work during these hours and you have to think about that creatively. Sometimes people work swing ships right sometimes they work during the day you have to create different opportunities for engagement, you have to create childcare opportunities also you may need to make sure you're providing food. Right, there's so many different things and it's not just about trying to create an opportunity for a space to be desirable for somebody to come to but actually thinking about essential services that are necessary in order for community residents to even be able to participate right. These are these are important components of community engagement, and you're definitely thinking beyond traditional practices that are associated with public processes and just to kind of call out. One of the things I apologize for that interruption. Um, I, I think it's really important to sort of recognize this is an indistinguishing characteristic of why public processes sometimes fail public processes can very often focus on transparency, but not necessarily focus on improving participation and actually making sure people have access. And that's, that's the distinction between community development work that focuses on engagement engagement is more than transparency around the initiative that you're implementing. It's meant to try and incorporate voices into the process. So, sorry about that, I actually thought I did a block caller, it's a kindergartner that's constantly calling my son, and I blocked his number but it's not working on other systems, and I'm going to keep declining but that is really frustrating. So persistent challenges that we also see is that we are dealing with a necessity of substantial and long term financial investment so I just described challenges that will exist for various stakeholders but at the end of the day, you're going to need the public sector and philanthropy and other partners whether it's the private sector to commit money, right, to the process of community, you know, development in these spaces that usually involves costs that grow. I think that in my own practice I've observed that people start out with one budget and what ends up happening is that there, there is constantly a growing unpredictable budget. Often very difficult. It's certainly difficult for the public sector, as you can imagine, and sometimes can be difficult even for the foundations. I'm going to just now move to the have a couple sort of takeaway slides for you. You're not exhaustive at all, but sort of connecting in with the readings that exist on these spaces but also sort of thinking about my own practice experience in this area. I wanted to just share with you some sort of practical takeaways right so all of you are like I said you're all sort of studying different material and on a track to towards a professional practice that may or may not involve community development planning but in the event that this is the direction you wanted to go into or if you're going to do work that in some ways connects in with community development planning. I thought I should give you a few essential takeaways that I think are probably the most important in my mind and the first one that I think you've heard me sort of emphasize this over and over again is prioritizing work to understand the local context at the outset recognizing that local knowledge is critical. It is critical to understanding the problem. It is critical to designing an intervention. It is critical to implementing any kind of evaluation tool. It is critical to even understanding how to collect data. I mean there's so many layers to why local knowledge is important. You have to recognize, and I mentioned this before, you have to recognize that your degree even as important as it is in all the materials you've read up into the point of walking into a space. It confers some information but it is completely insufficient. It is not by itself enough to understand how the problem that you're trying to address within that local context will operate. So for example, you may have read a ton, as I mentioned before, I may have read a ton about the impacts, the adverse outcomes associated with racial residential segregation and low performing schools. And I may even be working in a space that I have some sort of personal relationship to but I have not lived within that particular neighborhood. If I have not spent time in that particular neighborhood, I can't possibly begin to speak to the complexity of the challenge that I'm trying to address. If I am not of the group that I am working to serve, again, you have to come in with a certain amount of humility understanding that technical expertise is just that it's technical. It's built off of a body of knowledge that in some ways is an abstraction because it's coming out of a professional space where as for a resident it is a lived experience that is nuanced by their day to day lives, right? Like you have to understand it from their perspective as much as possible, which means you have to prioritize listening to them, engaging them at the outset, working with them to define terms within the perspective that they hold. You need to incorporate them from the outset. And again, I have to emphasize long before an initiative begins. You also have to keep striving to incorporate them as partners in decision making, sometimes recognizing that there will be limitations to how you can do that. Particularly, I want to say you're pursuing a collective impact approach, which I think has a tremendous number of strengths. I think it's also valuable that the public sector is a formal partner. You must directly recognize the limitations of where any partner can act, including residents can share in decision making at the outset. You need to, you need to speak about that openly. You need to be upfront about the limitations and then look for creative ways to incorporate residents. And that's, and there are ways to do that. And I, this is actually kind of leading into the next one. When we talk about community engagement, we are often, I think, thinking about what can the program officers and the foundation or the community based organization professionals or the bureaucrats that are working for a government agency do to engage community members. And I gave you a few moments ago, a few minutes ago, an example, when I was talking about different power structures, I was talking about a formal land use process briefly as an example. And I mentioned that more often than not you have white retired white males, right that can participate, or you have people that are retired generally who can participate or homeowners who might be able to participate. What I, what I want to mention here is that there is value to improving processes generally process can be as important as an outcome in a particular place. There could be a long history in a neighborhood of being completely excluded both formally and informally from all past public processes that led to the adverse for example environmental health conditions that attached to a particular neighborhood, or have led to a differentiation of, you know, what we call less desirable land uses in close proximity to where in the, you know, those residents live, or that have led to lack of resources being dedicated to a particular school in that neighborhood, or other elements of the built environment that are extremely important for children and families to thrive. Performing process is work in and of itself and what I mean by processes I'm talking now about public processes. There are ways that the public processes can be substantially improved to move past just notice and information or transparency around important public decisions and can be improved to shift power dynamics to be more inclusive for example, moving away from just having your, you know, required noticed agenda and put up online, for example, but moving meeting times to where they are, you know, going to be broadly accessible. Having translation services in part, you know, in place, maybe even creating a space where one meeting is at a more accessible date and time for the majority of the residents in a particular location. But all of that, I just just threw out just random ideas. Fundamentally, it's best if the process is that the reform in the public process can be co constructed with the residents as much as possible, because they will know what the best time and place, you know, might be for accessing a public hearing. They will know whether or not posting minutes exclusively on the internet is sufficient access for that population. For example, in past work that I did, there was a growing Yemeni population in particular neighborhood, and the residents said the best way to reach would be just do some fundamental information and then make sure that you have somebody who can go to the school sites to reach the families and verbally share the information or send telephone recorded messages about the information in terms of a date and time for a hearing. But the point is the ideas that came from the neighborhood itself because they had had a practice and an experience of engaging with this new and important growing population group within the neighborhood and knew what worked and what didn't work right in terms of reaching them. The point is, is you want residents to help can co construct those processes and that can be really an important outcome in and of itself is improving public processes to make them more accessible so that the neighborhood can be more directly involved in all of the important local public decisions that impact the place in which they lived. And in that itself is actually a lot of work. It takes a lot of resources and I can tell you it's not uncommon that in places where you're doing this work, the local public agency that may even be responsible for these processes may not be very financially involved. And that's where, you know, the other partners, business and philanthropy and the nonprofits have to think creatively about the resources that are going to be needed to invest in improving public processes in order to help address some of the power dynamics. Another component of this that I think is extremely important to emphasize again, there must be rigorous evaluation. How do we even know any of these strategies that I just described work. How do we know we don't know unless there's evaluation at multiple points in the implementation of the strategy. And it's also important that it's rigorous and that it actually recognizes that the outset is very difficult to collect the data at a community level. You have to be prepared for the data collection challenges and come up with different ways of understanding how to collect that data that often has to involve working with residents in terms of collecting data. So creating, for example, the indicators isn't something you just partner with residents around you actually sometimes need to think about the strategies in which you're going to actually collect the data itself. You know, I think you can look for example to if you want to if this was something of interest to you and you want to have a better understanding of it. You could go for example to like the Boston Foundation and look at their community index and look at examples of some of the work done there to understand the impact of different implementation strategies. But the point is you must must must must have rigorous evaluation and it must be conducted at multiple intervals in the implementation because at the outset of all of this, I described a challenge that is unpredictable. So if it's unpredictable and it's complex. That means you need to be able to you need to be able to measure it at different points in time to understand how you need to adapt and change and maybe shift directions and be responsive. This is also an area where you could construct your evaluation in a way that that has elements of what we call participatory research. Does anybody want to describe anybody who's familiar with participatory research when you describe what that means. Anybody willing to send me willing to offer. Is that for the term once but it's jargon but it connects with a lot of the things that we discussed some of which you definitely describe Dana so go ahead and offer an intuitive I think it's about like doing research on participation. It's a little different and it's more connected to what you said before about when you're when you include residents in identifying a problem. Constructing a solution you're actually also including them in designing the research so for example, you, it's not that by the way I just want to be very clear participatory research doesn't mean the work isn't empirical. It doesn't mean you're not rigorous. It doesn't mean you're not designing a method that meets expectations in terms of maybe the research or academic community. What it means is that you are connecting with residents to define the problem you're going to study to think critically about what data points you might want to collect and maybe be working with residents to collect that data. And that's particularly important if you if you want to have access to some data points that you can't get through, for example, an existing administrative data set right because if you're trying to get neighborhood level data that's very hard to do. If you're trying to get access to a robust or qualitative data set or constructing a robust qualitative data set very hard to do like if you want to do interviews, getting access to vulnerable residents communicating with them in their language. I mean, you know, some, some people who are in this practice have have the gift of multiple languages and can directly communicate with residents across different languages. But if you're working in a space with a diverse population, you may not necessarily speak all of the different languages of the different groups, but if you're working with residents who are great intermediaries that can be very helpful. There's a lot of different ways in which participatory research can engage residents that forms all elements of it, but probably the most important component of it is that you're not, you're not defining the research problem that you're going to study or you're not describing the hypothesis in terms that are an abstraction for the residents. Everything is meant to connect with the concerns of the residents themselves. I see somebody has raised their hand but they're muted. I don't, do you want to unmute yourself and ask a question? I think it's Francisco. Yeah, with the moment. I can hear you. Yeah. Did you want to ask a question? Yeah, we don't know each other. I'm teaching in the UP studio with webbing. Oh, wonderful. Okay. I'd just like to share my experience because I work in informal settlement in Manila. I found your lectures really inspiring because I'm, I mean, I have challenged as you described and just to show an example of participatory research is because when we went to this community in Manila, actually, it was one of the biggest informal settlement there. There's no any data available. So for example, we try to design a floating map of the district. And we ask, let's say the community and the NGO to show exactly where at the place where they're floating. So we went with them and we just map on a piece of paper and we translate this on a map that my student did for a workshop, a summer workshop. So I think this is a kind of participatory process. I think it's, it's just fit what you say. No. Yes, I agree. And it's, and I think you're describing how it's critical to the work. It's essential. Yeah. And then one more things that because we used to work in the district since two years and a way a strategy to initiate the engagement, an engagement process. I use my academic research and my teaching classes. So we went to the students and we collect no local knowledge. So I think as a first step with the academia, it's easy to enter and to know the community a little bit better. So we are realized maps, drawings. You know, we went to interview the community a step by step you gain confidence. And you know, we went last year. So let's say the first workshop was focused on mapping and analysis. The second year we gain knowledge and confidence and we build prototypes for the community small prototype micro interventions. And after that, they ask us to have a more comprehensive work. And I think sometimes you need time because the, let's say the local government was not involved before. And then with our works, something is going on. So we are the delineating and upgrading process step by step. So I just appreciate your class and draw a lot. Well, I appreciate two points. I think you just highlighted that we've been emphasizing through the duration of this discussion, the necessity for long term commitment to a space and the relationship between investing long term and building trust within a place with the residents and you're also describing not just the residents as a critical stakeholder. I think you're connecting and with the point Danielle that you made earlier, which is you may not at the outset even have the trust of the local political electives. Right, you have to, you have to develop relationships with multiple stakeholders within a place to achieve success. And that comes with time and it comes with people senior commitment to a place. And it also connects in Amelia with what you described, you know, no one really wants to see drive by research, like they, they get exhausted by it. So when you return to a place year after year, it does a lot to build goodwill. And so I think that's, thank you for highlighting the work you've done in your own studio. Thank you so much. Now you know, the next step we are doing now, we ask, because we cannot go there this summer. So we asked the leader of the community to provide us names of the family that won't improve this their housing. So basically we will receive both sides and the house condition now, I will ask my students to create construction drawings and to create, let's say, upgrading the house of the community. Of course, they will do by their own, but we will provide a sort of expertise that they can use or not. But I think it's a kind of online engagement process. I don't know how is the outcome. But we will check and I will let you engage. Yeah, I mean, we're kind of in a new space now, because I do think that historically a lot of the best practices out of community engagement definitely were in the face to face context. I think that's even true for building very effective collaborations across multiple sectors within a collective impact approach or even a CCI, a comprehensive community initiative. And now that we are in a place right now where we need to move almost all communication, if not all communication to an online format or a telephone call and so on or email that challenges the practice, right. And so we have to see what kind of new innovations and strategies can emerge from this to help build still build relationships maintain them to foster trust to increase to continue to work towards increasing inclusivity. I mean, it's, it's historically my own practice. I found that reaching certain groups required face to face efforts, even if I was approaching them without language skills, even if I was partnered with somebody who had the language skills that was still far more effective than any other method. Right. And so I, I wonder, you know, with what we're dealing with right now how that's going to influence this work and that's a question I can't even fully answer. And, you know, we're all sort of, we're all grappling with that. And it will, I think we'll, we'll come from this right with, with absolutely some, some, I guess you could say, new learning. I got, I think there might have been a, I got like some kind of notice on this, maybe even. I'm not, I just, I had a one more it's a chat maybe that somebody. Oh, Tory. Sorry. Yes, Tory, we can connect after class. No problem. Sorry, Tory, I didn't mean to. I'm navigating the different elements of this system. No worries. Also, we, we have a few more minutes and this is sort of the section of the course where I just really wanted to open it up to any additional questions that might be lingering for anybody or, or comments or thoughts about any, you know, elements of this, including the other, the best that's not in the class if you had any thoughts or questions that you wanted to ask. I see everyone is muted. So I will take that as, as an indication that, that no one has any questions. So I would, I'll just offer a summary then. Again, in these last 10 minutes of what I think we want to sort of walk away from this material with which is, I think it's just very important that we have, we, we have a, you know, the complexity already that existed in this space of everything we're talking about that we've been talking about through the course this semester is the complicit complex challenges that we face in terms of social problems of persistent concentrated poverty, inequitable health and life outcomes that are tethered to multiple elements, including the ones, you know, what kind of housing, do they have access to what kind of transit, do they have access to what is the built environment, what are the environmental health components of the built environment, what are the educational and employment opportunities available to them. Is there even sufficient sufficient training to allow for economic mobility, is it in proximity to where they live. What is the violence in the area, what is the food access, like all of those are interrelated pieces, right, they, they are, they create a complex whole, and then they are influenced, of course, by other larger conditions and social inequities the history of a place discrimination is today, but is, you know, historical discrimination, structural racism, we've talked a lot about in the course, all of these things are very, very significant, and we've talked about the complexity in this, in this class of issues around immigration, and particularly in the United States, and the different legal statuses that populations may have, and how that influences outcomes and access to even some of the different opportunities to try to correct for all of the different, you know, elements that we just described. And there's a, there's something very inviting and positive about trying to design a comprehensive approach that attempts systems change that acknowledges these interactive, you know, these pieces that interact with each other, that they are elements of an integrated whole. But with that comes tremendous work, right, it's, it's not a simple task, it's something that any practitioner that wants to enter into it, must enter into it with a measure of humility, no matter what their training or their experience, even if they've had decades of experience, you have to enter the work with humility because each time you enter it into any local context, it is a new local community. There could be consistency across issues in these different places, but these local contexts are still going to offer some unique aspects. And that's why, again, I'll emphasize probably, you know, that one of the most important things that the is the engagement work because you need to learn from the community you're trying to work within, and then you need to develop ways and tools in order to evaluate the success of the work you're doing over time, recognizing that you can't just for example, implement a strategy to address or to aim for systems change, and then come back in a decade later and think you can evaluate it then, and see you know what types of improvements or outcomes you have to measure it at different milestones, because you will have to adapt and shift with changing conditions, and those changing conditions can come from so many different places. So, you know, they can come from changes and resources change in political governance they can come from, you know, change in market conditions, economic regional economic conditions. There are so many variables, neighborhood change can occur, not necessarily just because of gentrification you can have an influx of different populations into a space that changes the conditions that's very true in some of the communities I've worked in where maybe it was once historically only African American, but now the community is both African American Latin X, and has you know, other other like I was mentioning one community that also has like a growing Yemeni population all have very different experiences within that same geographic place, and they interact with the institutions that serve that place in different ways, and one group has native English speaking skills, and the other two do not. And then you have to ask important questions about how you're going to grapple with all that and how you're going to reach all those different stakeholders when you're designing your engagement strategies, and how you incorporate their needs and their concerns and their voices into the process, how you build relationships, how you can help foster relationships between the institutions. And I think the other, you know, sort of driver, again, is this one here I just this this to me I think it is really hard sometimes to to see as you do the situation over time, you may not see, for example, some of the outcomes you're hoping for a long term emerge at different intervals and milestones and the way you would like I mean you're going to. Ideally you're designing them with residents and residents will tell you what they would see as as change that they're hoping to see, but I think you can also prioritize important work around shifting processes and co constructing formal processes with residents as much as possible to shift the system in that way, you in that sense you're actually doing work at a local level to change policy and implementation of policy by changing public processes and that that in of itself. It's something you can do in the short term that can have meaningful impact and help make incremental change over the long term, because you can help incorporate important voices in the processes that have been historically excluded or marginalized. And that's, that's pretty, that's pretty important work. So those are all of the points that I have to share today. And I want to just thank you all for, you know, joining and for the couple of guests I appreciate your, your participation in our class today and I appreciate the additional I appreciate the different the different insight you provided from an international context. It's very helpful. And then just sort of going forward. And next week for the students in the class, we are going to absolutely be covering the materials that I put in the folder will be talking to sort of the people versus place discussion and talking about these strategies and, and that same some of the same strategies talked today, but in the context of those writings, and, you know, moving forward the material and you should if you have questions about your paper projects, you can reach out to me and we can set up a separate time.