It's the economy, stupid.

With the debt ceiling deadline looming and in these generally harsh fiscal times, specific domestic policy issues don't generally get a lot of traction. The way to capture the attention of the American public, it seems, is by telling a good story.

Last night, I had the opportunity to attend an informal discussion with Racquel Russell, Special Assistant to the President for Mobility and Opportunity at the Domestic Policy Council. She spoke very briefly about her work on a range of issues at the White House related to widening the social safety net and improving systems supporting children and families, but she spent the majority of the session answering questions. The main takeaway seemed to be about messaging. In this economic climate, we have to get creative about funding -- leveraging public-private partnerships has the opportunity to multiply investments in an unprecedented way. At the end of the day, though, telling the right stories well is an important part of how to change the way we think about any issue.

NPR has been running a short series this week on how school dropout rates add to the nation's fiscal burden. The story is familiar to anyone in the field: failing to address the dropout crisis costs taxpayers billions of dollars in lost wages, increased use of social services like health care and welfare, and higher incarceration costs -- not to mention the more intangible costs to personal well-being, community connectedness, and overall civic health. Inaction is perilous, yet little has changed. The features highlight stories of the faces behind the numbers.

Whichever philosophy you prefer -- whether to focus on helping those who are already disconnected from education and the workforce (intervention) or those who are at risk of becoming disconnected (prevention) -- the message is plainly and simply that we have an economic imperative to address community challenges that are leaving behind so many young people every year, costing them and the nation billions of dollars.

Earlier this week, the Task Force on Job Creation highlighted youth unemployment as a key area to address the jobs crisis. One of the pull-quotes in the report rings true to the relevance of the Council's near-term focus on disconnected youth: 

Young people who do not have a successful work experience by age 25 are at a greatly increased risk of lifelong poverty.

Commentary this week by Algernon Austin in the Spotlight on Poverty and Opportunity only reiterates this point:

Once youth get into the habit of working, they become less likely to stop. Making an investment in teens now will ensure they have a better chance of continuing to work throughout their lifetimes.

The quantitative case to the nation has been made, and reiterated again. The qualitative case to the nation has been made, and reiterated again. The question remains to be seen whether community leaders will act on this message and do their part to support this so-often forgotten population with untapped potential.

Totally unashamed of my giddiness...

This evening, thanks to one of my wonderful CNCS/WHCCS colleagues, I got to go bowling at the White House!

The Bowling Alley is underneath the EEOB,
but that's the West Wing!

The entrance to the bowling alley.

The backdrop of the two lanes has a a pretty awesome illustration
of fireworks behind the White House. There are also photographs
of Presidents and First Ladies playing all around the room.

Take a step back and refresh everything.

It's absurdly hot in DC this week. Looking out of the window from one our office rooms, I felt bad for the construction workers outside somehow working through the midday heat. Meanwhile, I was inside all day.

Since I work in an office, there aren't usually that many things to document in images. When I'm not at my computer, what I'm looking at is usually something like this --- scrawled notes on Corporation for the National and Community Service stationery with my Global Engagement Summit "engage." water bottle nearby [and more often than not, an unnecessarily purchased chai].

The first item on my work calendar this morning was a "Whiteboard Brainstorming Session" with the Executive Director and the four of us who support her. As a follow-up from last week's public conference call where the Council presented its proposed interim recommendations to the White House, we started to work on delineating a clearer and more detailed work plan that would outline the work that the Council could accomplish to support the interim recommendations. In doing so, we realized that we needed to rethink (again?) how the various ideas were organized and what the broader umbrella announcement / recommendation / big idea really is.

Thus, the brainstorming session.

Four hours, a few bagels, and many iterations later, we ended up with this:

And then we turned that into understandable words.

One hand knowing what the other is doing

I surprisedly ran into a former classmate while waiting for the bus this morning. When I told her that I'm supporting the Council's work, she asked me whether I work with the other White House Councils (two of our classmates work on the White House Council on Environmental Quality). Funnily enough, just today our Executive Director attended a meeting of the designated federal officers of all the White House Councils!

Navigating all of the cross-agency
initiatives can get a little confusing.

There's always an incredible amount of overlap in policy since at some level, the challenges and opportunities facing communities, our nation, and the world are interconnected.  In this example, the various White House Councils were all created for specific reasons, but they have some natural overlap. Our Council's efforts on skill development for youth who are neither in school nor in the workforce naturally align with some of the work of the President's Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, which was created by executive order just one month after the Council for Community Solutions was created.

As I've mentioned before, the Council is currently working on its interim recommendations to the President. Part of this effort has involved outreach to federal agencies whose work is relevant to youth policy and community development. This afternoon, we hosted a conference call with staff from a few cabinet-level agencies to gather their feedback. My main takeaway from the call was that there is a great deal of ongoing interagency collaboration in just these areas where policy areas align. Still, there was some mention -- and detailed description -- of initiatives in which the Corporation for National and Community Service is a key partner. With so many cross-agency efforts, lines are easily blurred and crossed.

Collaboration across institutions is difficult -- and it takes time. As the Council works to create a framework for how communities can collaborate more effectively across sectors, one ongoing challenge is to what degree organizations in collaborative efforts should have an inclusive big tent that encompasses everything and everyone while still having enough specificity to make a tangible impact.  I read a new 99% tip yesterday on "How to Break Through Bureaucracy to Keep Projects Moving" that suggests how innovation can surface regardless of organizational size, process, and procedures. While that is definitely true, I still wonder how to successfully build collaborative systems that avoid the need for a body that coordinates the coordinating bodies.

Public Meeting Success!

Note: This was supposed to be posted yesterday, but for some reason it didn't go through.

Our work this week
required brain food
like donuts and chai.

This afternoon, the Council had a public meeting to review the Council's proposed activities and interim recommendations to the President. The main outcome of the meeting was for the Council to come to consensus on the recommendation options and proposed next steps. This took a lot of behind-the-scenes work, and the public conference call was the culmination of a great deal of work on our end for the past month or so.

The Council consists of twenty-six CEOs and high-profile representatives of youth-serving organizations, foundations, corporations, universities, and more. These are all incredibly brilliant individuals and they bring with them smart staff members as well. Together, we had to work together across a variety of locations across the US and the world over the past few weeks to move from a laundry list of brainstormed ideas to big idea generation to consolidated work streams to a cohesive holistic recommendation. It took many conference calls, strings of emails, and negotiation to find order from apparent chaos and frame a range of ideas into something that really will drive the critical goal of "all citizens, all sectors, working together."

Here's a link to the document I created to share with the public before the conference call. Even with its lack of extreme detail, it demonstrates how much progress the Council has made over the past few weeks. Hopefully it'll give you a taste of what the Council aims to do, pending White House authorization. The public meeting went without a hitch, and a full consensus of the Council approved the direction of our drafted interim recommendations to the President. Twenty-six sets of strong and valid opinions have found one voice in these interim recommendations.

"No matter where you start, you end up talking about everything."

Blurry secret photo taken
of the floor of the
elevator at HHS.
It has the seal! 

Yesterday morning I took a field trip to the Department of Health and Human Services to meet with the Chair of the Interagency Working Group on Youth Programs and some of her associates who are working on the Strategic Plan for Federal Youth Policy. I've probably mentioned FindYouthInfo.gov, but it's a project of the Interagency Working Group that's working to coordinate programs that support youth by serving as a one-stop shop for interactive tools and resources to help youth-serving organizations and community partnerships plan and implement effective programs for youth. The reason I asked to meet with them was for some guidance on a project I'm working on for the Council.

To help communities collaborate more effectively across sectors to reduce their populations of disconnected youth, we wanted to find some communities across the country that might answer a clarion call to collaborate to serve disconnected youth. I first mapped the country to determine where large populations of disconnected youth reside, and then I attempted to gauge which communities have enough existing capacity and resources that could be galvanized into collective impact. I played with a few different criteria and landed on a combination of past or current evidence of effective collaboration, high-impact federal, state and local resources, and strong community leadership. The intersection point of these areas of need and areas of opportunity may be potential opportunity zones for the Council to engage.

When I talked with the staff of the Interagency Working Group, they had some good examples of "best practices" communities like Philadelphia, which has Project U-Turn. They also mentioned their current work on the Strategic Plan for Youth Policy, which further reiterates how silo-ed disconnected efforts alone cannot move the needle. Apparently they hosted public listening sessions for comment on the Strategic Plan and although some sessions for focused on a particular issue like education, health, or housing, inevitably, the session would end up covering everything. Moments like those give me hope that our collective mindset is shifting away from individual programs to collective action.

Vox populi

Tami Taylor, played by Connie Britton

I recently started watching Friday Night Lights, and in an episode in the first season, Tami Taylor the guidance counselor says to one of her students, "It's part of my job to make sure that you don't grow up stupid. It's bad for the world." Indeed.

One way to ensure that young people do not "grow up stupid" is to cultivate healthy informed communities. A couple of weeks ago, the Knight Commission released a policy paper entitled Civic Engagement and Community Information: Five Strategies to Revive Civic Communication.

The first strategy -- Create a Civic Information Corps using the nation's "service" infrastructure to generate knowledge -- is an exemplar of why service should be a core strategy in our quest to address the world's most challenging public problems. The proposed Corps would invite young people to responsibly use digital media to create and publicize local information to connect people within communities.

I remember being skeptical of Patch when I first heard about it when my first Northwestern roommate started working there, primarily because the community-specific news platform seemed to exist only in upper-middle class white suburban neighborhoods like Winnetka and Kenilworth, IL. When Patch fully embraces its civic mission -- taking lessons from the now sadly defunct Residents' Journal, a magazine written for and by public housing tenants in Chicago, as just one example -- local communities of all ranges of connectedness might build the civic infrastructure that is imagined and advocated by the Knight Commission.

Creative voice has been an important part of my journey into public service. Whether singing in a community choir, performing in musicals and plays, listening to oral histories of residents at retirement homes, or writing and orating persuasive speeches through forensics, voice and performance were building blocks for my thinking about the world at large. One of my first career aspirations was to be a journalist because I viewed it as a way to enact change by showcasing the voice of the people.

Sally Prouty reminded us recently of why public service in general and national service in particular is such an important opportunity to do good work for communities while passing along skills, leadership, training, and empowerment opportunities to transitioning people of all ages:

There is no need more deserving of our attention. No greater cause than providing America's youth with life skills, education and good jobs. No greater importance for our nation than to develop our future problem solvers, innovators and leaders.

Aiming High

I've been working in the Executive Branch, so I can use that as the excuse for not haven't written at all here about activity in the other two branches of the federal government. However, a bill recently reintroduced in the Senate is too good to be mention. Sadly, it's very unlikely to become law in the foreseeable future (it has died in committee twice before), so it's a little too good to be true.

The Reengaging Americans in Serious Education by Uniting Programs Act (RAISE UP) is a dropout recovery bill that aims to help communities build cross-sector systems to support the 3-5 million disconnected youth across the nation. The Act would authorize the Secretary of Labor to work with the Departments of Education, Health and Human Services, and Housing and Urban Development as well as the Federal Youth Development Council and the US Attorney General to award competitive grants to entities developing strategies to identify and support disconnected youth, with a particular focus on integration and community involvement.

Leveraging the resources of multiple organizations towards a shared vision has immense opportunity for impact. I'm currently working on a project to determine some of the overlap in federal funding in innovation and collaboration around youth development and school and career readiness. Really exciting programs are funded across a wide spectrum of federal agencies, including ones you might not think of as prioritizing education and youth workforce development. The benefits multiply when combined with local efforts like mayoral efforts through Cities of Service and impact volunteering supported by the Corporation's State Service Commissions. Then, there's the layer of philanthropic funding and non-governmental work from the large enterprises of Living Cities and Ready by 21 to smaller community-based organizations like Chicago's Eden Place Nature Center and Inspiration Cafe.

America's final space-shuttle launch may be this later week, but we definitely haven't finished dreaming of a future beyond the final frontier. Regardless of whether RAISE UP becomes law, cross-sector efforts with the support of the federal government will continue to take shape across the nation. The question is whether our legislators will demonstrate some leadership here instead of leaving much of the heavy lifting to community based organizations and philanthropists.