"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.