LWV California Voter. Juvenile Justice in California.

	California Voter	Juvenile Justice in California
	Fostering a More Supportive Society

The League of Women Voters of California

Fall 1999

In this section...
FOSTERING A MORE SUPPORTIVE SOCIETY
Strengthening Families and Neighborhoods
How Do We Change Smaller Cities?
Building Communities with Help from the Press
Using Data to Strengthen Communities and Improve Services
Forging the Essential Connections Between Schools and Work
School-to-Work Update
Young Men as Fathers
Drug Prevention Education Conference
TOC TABLE OF CONTENTS

This section describes some ways in which professionals and community members, working together, have changed their programs, schools and neighborhoods to be more supportive of children, youth and their families.

Strengthening Families and Neighborhoods

In her book, Common Purpose: Strengthening Families and Neighborhoods to Rebuild America, Lisbeth Schorr writes:

"We now know what children need from their immediate surroundings if they are to develop into healthy adults. They need adults (at least one, and preferably two) who are consistently nurturing, enjoying, teaching, coping and loving; adults who take responsibility for their children and hold their children's well-being to be as important as their own. They need to have their physical needs provided for, to be protected from harm and to have the early experiences that leave them eager for school learning and diligent enough to succeed. The inner-city youngsters growing up surrounded by people who haven't made it need mature adults who can convince them they have a future worth struggling for.

"Society must be able to count on parents to have the moral sense, the beliefs and the capacity to assume those responsibilities. But, as we give heavy weight to relying on parents to carry out their obligations, we must also be aware that individual parents cannot meet their responsibilities in our complex, twenty-first-century world without support from outside. Collectively, we must make sure that the societal structures that can support families, and that can strengthen communities, are in place. Our society is in jeopardy because not enough of our arrangements for providing those supports are in place and working.

"Whether a home visitor comes to relieve the anxieties of a new mother, whether high-quality child care is available when both parents go to work, whether parents can get jobs that pay enough for decent housing and food, whether a competent doctor can be quickly reached when the baby has a fever, whether the neighborhood is safe from gunfire and gangs, whether a depressed mother can find the help that will allow her to care for her children, whether an addicted father can get treatment, whether there is reason for children to work hard at school, whether an adolescent has somewhere to go in the afternoon that doesn't automatically propel him or her into trouble, whether there is a path to follow that leads from school to work, whether there is reason for youngsters to be confident of a productive future are all determined beyond the four walls where parenting takes place. All require collective, and often governmental, action. All require us to ... think instead about how government can function effectively, often in partnership with the private sector, to enable parents and communities to function effectively.

"This analysis leads us to embrace the conservative tenet of personal responsibility and obligation while, at the same time, we embrace the liberal tenet that there are common purposes we cannot achieve without government. And we embrace simultaneously the nonpartisan tenet that if government doesn't work, it must be made to work.

"And where is the money to come from? Part of the answer ... [is] that many of the interventions portrayed in [Common Purpose] save many times their cost in the long run. The other part of the answer lies in coming to see that we may have to reorder our spending priorities, because we dare not write off any of America's children, families and inner-city communities."

What Makes Programs Successful?

Elsewhere in her book, Schorr lists attributes of programs in the governmental and private sectors which function effectively.

"Successful programs are comprehensive, flexible, responsive, and persevering with staff that are ... compassionate, ... committed to [their clients], ... and are allowed a great degree of discretion.... Staff help families strengthen bonds with neighbors and churches and other natural networks of support. They respond to the needs of families at places and times that make sense to the family—often at home, at school, or in neighborhood centers and at odd hours. In some programs staff are available twenty-four hours a day so that family members can ... turn [to them] in a time of crisis. Many successful programs provide their front-line staffs with a pool of flexible funds that they can use at their discretion to help a family buy a wheelchair or a washing machine or to get the car repaired.

"Successful programs see children in the context of their families. They know that strong families are the key to healthy children, so they work with two and often three generations in a household. [One program director said:] `We nurture parents so they can nurture their children.' These programs focus on family strengths ... are aware that whether children's emotional and intellectual needs will be met usually depends on their parents' coping abilities, mental health and social and economic resources.

"Schools increasingly recognize the need for deeper parent involvement. They are aware that enlisting the overwhelmed and overstressed parents of today as collaborators requires ... skill and ingenuity. In many communities the new partnership transforms schools into community centers. In others, schools join forces with community institutions to help strengthen families, be it through family support services, school-based health or social services, the child welfare system or churches. Successful programs ... do not substitute for strong families, but they have the ability to support families' capacities to raise strong children.

"Successful programs deal with families as parts of neighborhoods and communities. Successful programs grow deep roots in the community and respond to the needs identified by the community.... Successful programs are shaped to respond to the needs of local populations and to assure that local communities have a genuine sense of ownership, ... reflect the character of its people, ... build capacity in people and in neighborhoods, ... and mobilize community members to participate as more than clients.

"Successful programs have a long-term, preventive orientation, a clear mission, and continue to evolve over time. Many programs are successful because they attack the preventable risk factors that occur at an early age and are implicated in later outcomes of too early childbearing, school failure and delinquency.... [They] focus on the period from pregnancy through elementary school as the most productive time to intervene.... [P]rograms that work with young adults in difficulty also try to work with their children.

"Successful programs create an organizational culture that is outcome oriented rather than rule bound. They combine a highly flexible mode of operation with a clear sense of mission, which everyone associated with the organization can articulate in simple terms. The programs evolve in response to the changing needs of individuals, families and community, and to feedback from both front-line staff and participants.

"Successful programs are well managed by competent and committed individuals with clearly identifiable skills. Managers of successful programs ... use identifiable management techniques to create a coherent, outcome oriented organizational culture. They inspire their staffs with a shared view of the validity and value of the organization's principal goals and tasks. Many successful initiatives have found that when their mission is inspiring, they are able to attract people with the courage, ingenuity and skills the jobs call for.

" ... [L]eaders of prize-winning public programs have many skills in common that ... can be learned. These include the willingness to experiment and take risks; to manage by `groping along'; to tolerate ambiguity; to win the trust simultaneously of line workers, politicians, and the public; to respond to demands for prompt, tangible evidence of results; to be collaborative in working with staff; and to allow staff discretion at the front lines.

"Managers of successful programs create supportive settings stable enough to permit staff to learn from the latest research—and from their own mistakes. Front-line workers in these programs receive the same respect, nurturing and support from their managers that they are expected to extend to those they serve.

"Staffs of successful programs are trained and supported to provide high-quality, responsive services. Effective programs are aware that the greater discretion given to front-line staff, the greater the importance of excellent training, monitoring and supervision—to ensure that the discretion is exercised in keeping with mission goals and high standards of quality. Successful programs recognize that competence and quality are the crux of effective services. Versatility and flexibility build on competence.

"Successful programs operate in settings that encourage practitioners to build strong relationships based on mutual trust and respect. It is the quality of these relationships that most profoundly differentiates effective from ineffective programs and institutions."

According to Schorr, studies have shown that:

"Programs that [have] been effective with adolescents growing up in high-risk environments [provide] the opportunity to develop sustained, trusting relationships with caring adults.

"Relationship issues are particularly important among low-income people who have given up on helping systems.

"To improve the prospects of minority youth, [to help them] `incur the costs and take the risks that pursuing conventional success may require,' [they] need a close relationship with an adult who combines caring about him or her with being an effective confidant, guide, broker, advocate and disciplinarian. Caring relationships are critical to efforts to change life trajectories because they compensate, in some degree, for lost affiliation and influence with the old peer group.

"Head Start staff [are successful when they] enter into a compassionate partnership with each Head Start parent to shape the future of their Head Start child. Case managers find that families known to an alphabet soup of agencies remain unhelped until someone finally is there long enough and is close enough and persevering enough to forge the kind of authentic relationship that helps to turn lives around.

"Teachers' ability to connect with their students' families and life outside of school [matters] more than any other single factor in students' willingness to work hard toward academic goals and in improving student achievement. (A fourth grader told) ... researchers, `If a teacher doesn't care about you, it affects your mind.'

"Effective mentoring requires program structures that support mentors in their efforts to build trust and develop positive relationships with youth. Programs must provide the infrastructure—including screening, training and ongoing supervision—to foster the development of effective relationships.

"Smallness of scale at the point where professionals interact with their pupils or clients or participants helps a lot. Large schools, large classes, massive outpatient clinics and large caseloads vastly complicate the job of personalizing interventions.

"Settings that encourage trusting relationships provide a warm, welcoming climate that conveys a sense of safety and security, although clear rules and discipline provide predictability often missing in the lives of high-risk young people."

How Do We Rebuild Communities?

In the final chapter of her book, Common Purpose: Strengthening Families and Neighborhoods to Rebuild America, Schorr describes four neighborhood transformation initiatives and what they had in common that made them successful. "Successful community-rebuilding:

combine[s] action in the economic, service, education, physical development and community-building domains;

rel[ies] on a community's own resources and strengths as the foundation for designing change initiatives;

draw[s] extensively on outside resources, including public and private funds, professional expertise and new partnerships that bring [funding] clout and [technical assistance]; and

[is] designed and operated on the basis of one or more plausible theories of change."

Schorr lists eight strategies for bringing about change at the institutional level:

"Recognize the Seven Attributes of Highly Effective Programs and the environments that will support them.

"In spreading what works, distinguish thoughtfully between the essentials that can indeed be replicated and the components that must be adapted locally.... Create the conditions in which effective interventions will thrive.

"Find ways to surmount obstacles to fundamental systems change so that the attributes of successful demonstrations can become the norms of mainstream systems. Tame bureaucracies by finding new ways to balance bureaucratic protections against the imperative of accomplishing public purposes.

"In undertaking major initiatives, make sure that funders, managers, front-line staff and program participants agree on valued outcomes. Make sure that all stakeholders understand how the initiative's activities and investments are related to outcomes, so that they will be able to use results to judge success.

"Look for opportunities to impact a neighborhood or a neighborhood institution, not just opportunities to impact a circumscribed problem with a circumscribed solution. Take a broader view.

"Forget about getting results overnight and be prepared to build for a future your generation may not see. Take a longer view.

"Recognize that intensity and critical mass may be crucial. Especially in areas of concentrated disadvantage, make sure interventions operate at a high enough level of intensity and with a broad enough scope to capture the imagination of participants and the public.

"Effective neighborhood transformation requires that community-based organizations be able to draw on funding, expertise and influence from outside, and that outsiders be able to draw on information, expertise and wisdom that can come only from the neighborhood itself."

How Do We Change Smaller Cities?

In the September/October 1997 issue of The National Voter of the League of Women Voters, Suzanne W. Morse of the Pew Partnership for Civic Change listed six findings that the Partnership learned were important in bringing about change in smaller U. S. cities.

Finding One: Smaller communities are laboratories for workable urban strategies, demonstrating the capacity of citizens to solve the nation's most intractable problems.

Finding Two: Collaborative efforts solve problems and create lasting change by building new partnerships to address community-wide issues.

Finding Three: Civic change occurs when discrete projects and actions become catalysts for broader and more intentional citizen involvement and leadership.

Finding Four: The missions of community mediating institutions such as religious organizations, schools and libraries must be broadened to include a civic dimension.

Finding Five: Communication among and between partners and citizens about collaborative efforts and their intended outcomes is critical for systemic change.

Finding Six: Communities must broaden and deepen local leadership capacity.

Building Communities with Help from the Press

At a plenary session of the 1998 Children's Defense Fund Annual National Conference, Geoffrey Cowan, Dean of Annenberg School for Communications, University of Southern California discussed "Building Communities." Cowan said that community leaders need to work with the press to get the word out, to change public attitudes and get support. Community activists need ongoing relationships with members of the media who will tell their story many times. Leaders should develop the story of their community with an anecdotal component, which illustrates the hard data, and give both to the press. Do not let others interpret the data. Tell your own story, in sound bites. Present data graphically to make it visual.

Experts in using the press to change public attitudes also recommend approaching small town and regional free newspapers and small cable TV stations for coverage of your stories. The smaller operations need material and are accessed by large numbers in their local communities.