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.

Happy birthday!

Happy five-year anniversary, Education Sector!

Two summers ago, I was a Policy & Communications Research Assistant at Education Sector, a fantastic forward-thinking education policy think tank situated at the intersection of policy, research, and practice. My thinking about urban education policy developed a lot while working at Education Sector, and I'm grateful to the wonderful mentors I had there who helped me translate my policy research into my senior thesis at Northwestern and helped guide my decisions about what I should do post-college.

Although my recent work has shifted more towards asset-based community development and civic engagement at a larger level within city governance structures, my heart will always be in urban education policy. It was wonderful to reconnect with my former colleagues who are still driving the thought leadership on K-12 education, higher education, and the transition between the two institutions.

Thank you, and happy birthday!

Disconnected communities

Yesterday, I had the opportunity to meet Richard Murphy, the founding direct of the Rheedlen Center for Children and Families (that would go on to become Harlem's Children Zone) and the creator of iMapAmerica. iMapAmerica is an innovative project that channels some of the best aspects of asset-based community development, service-learning, and deliberative democracy. 

First, iMapAmerica uses a curriculum to train teenagers to map their communities to uncover the resources that are available and useful to them. Then, it sends out youth volunteers to map their communities, which leads to information that populates dynamic "ilivehere.info" websites. New Orleans, one of the pilot cities, has a great website.

The way that Murphy talks about his work is that children are only in school for 15% of life; outside of school accounts for 85% of life. That said, we can't expect schools to be the silver bullet. Focusing on community solutions and reconnecting and revitalizing communities is the missing link in school reform but also in community revitalization more generally. 

The New Orleans "I Live Here" website seems incredibly useful for youth
looking for resources, but also for youth-serving organizations to
connect more effectively with one another.

Murphy imagines the next evolution beyond mapping pilot cities as a Mapping America Week every two years where youth across the country would walk their neighborhoods and report back on what resources they have -- and, sometimes more importantly, what resources they lack. This information would help state and local governments as well as youth-serving organizations respond to real demand-driven community needs. 

City-based initiatives like Cities of Service are working to re-engage citizens to volunteer their talents and skills to serve their communities and meaningful and mutually beneficial ways. Paired with a broader launch of iMapAmerica and greater support for connecting across sectors within communities could yield incredible impact.

Civic engagement is taking root in more ways than just volunteerism. Perhaps we won't be bowling alone anymore after all. 

Do we spend too much time re-learning?

I spent most of the day at a conference on the elongation of the transition to adulthood hosted by the American Youth Policy Forum and the Future of Children. AYPF is focused on bridging the gaps among the spheres of research, policy, and practice -- an arena close to my heart given my past work relating to translating theory into practice on the subject of improving teaching quality in Chicago Public Schools through learning from what works in professional development and rethinking how teaching is conceived as a profession.

My boss was slated to speak at one of the panels of the conference from the perspective of federal policymaking and the coordination of federal agencies around policies for at-risk/disconnected/vulnerable youth (there seems to be no asset-based term to describe this population of 4-6 million young people who have been failed by societal institutions to the degree that they are both out of school and out of work -- any ideas?). The inter-agency working group on federal programs for youth connects 12 federal agencies to coordinate policies and build a strategic plan for children's policies -- their website maps resources and strategies in a pretty cool way -- and the White House Council aims to take work like this to the next level in terms of promoting public-private partnership networks and making recommendations on federal policy changes.

Each panel of the conference today had a researcher, a practitioner, and a policymaker, and the interplay among them made for some thought-provoking commentary. Some of my takeaways:

• We don't need to create new institutions. We need to move existing institutions to go out on a limb together to change the opportunity structure for young people since upward mobility and social inclusion are what's at stake.
• The silence was deafening in response to a question on the role of businesses and the private sector, which made me glad to know that one arm of the Council's work will be around building sustainable partnerships among businesses, education and credentialing institutions, and youth-serving organizations within communities. 
• Without a shared set of consistent outcomes and a plan for sustainability, we cannot expect collective impact to take shape. Collective responsibility must yield collective accountability for high impact.
• If the systems that punish have accepted that it takes years to change [e.g.: the length of prison sentences], why have the systems that help remain tied to an instant gratification timeline?
• National service is an incredible opportunity to empower youth from all backgrounds to develop the skills to improve their own lives through education and training, while engaging with and improving institutions and local communities.

Despite all of this wisdom and knowledge-sharing, I sensed a bit of frustration around the idea of praxis. One panelist commented that if we don't change the incentive structures that drive diverse sets of institutions that support youth, we'll just perpetuate the isolated "silo-ed" efforts and still be talking about the same issues of the need for collaboration, shared language, and collective impact decades from now.

The cynical part of me is reminded here of David Tyack and Larry Cuban's Tinkering Toward Utopia: A Century of Public School Reform, which reminds us that it's incredibly challenging to change institutions like school systems since even after a century of reform cycles, the basic structure of the school system has basically remained the same.

Yes, reform may be cyclical, but I wonder if some time is wasted trying to carve out a niche, trying to be unique, trying to create new organizations and enterprises rather than connecting what already exists. After all, creativity is about connecting things that already exist.

Do we spend a bit too much time relearning and repackaging existing knowledge instead of taking action on the understanding of what works? Obviously, it's not that simple, but it was a wake up call for thinking about where I envision my potential role -- spend a little less time thinking about creating new theories of change, flashy terminology, and new ways to delineate key elements for success and a little more time connecting potential change-makers and leveraging the existing knowledge and resources to take action.