Transforming Together: Implementation Guide
Building the Blueprint: How One County Mapped its Cross-Agency Meetings When a new leadership team stepped into place at the Alameda County Office of Education (ACOE), they found themselves As the spreadsheet grew, so did its value. “What it is evolving into is a tool that allows us to look at efficiency and if we’re utilizing
navigating a long list of inter-agency partnerships and meetings to which the office had previously committed. With a new superintendent, a fresh student services division, and many new leaders across divisions, the team wanted clarity about what to prioritize and what collaborative efforts were most critical. “We were really trying to understand the existing landscape around cross-agency work and meetings within the county,” recalled Chaun Powell, Senior Chief of Student Services. “That was really the catalyst for it.” As a first step, team members created a single spreadsheet that identified every cross-system/ cross-agency meeting that they knew existed, which agencies were attending them, a description of the meeting, and which ones they believed required ACOE’s presence. “We sent it out to each of our division leads that we knew led in areas connected to the system of care, or other county agencies (First 5) and had them populate the meetings they were part of,” Powell explained. “Then we still questioned if we had it all.” To fill any gaps, Powell and her colleagues brought the draft to the county’s newly formed Interagency Coordinating Council (ICC), which included leaders from probation, child welfare, social services, and First 5, as well as the county office of education. “We asked them, ‘Do we even have all the meetings here?’” Powell said. “The document evolved into a compilation of all the different cross-systems meetings happening.”
time in the best way possible,” Powell shared. The map revealed redundancies, such as multiple prevention-focused teams working in silos, often with the same attendees cycling through back-to-back meetings. “One day, I had three meetings. I walked into the first one, saw the people, then we all left early for the next meeting— and it was the same people again. Three times in a row. I thought, ‘what is going on?’” This visibility sparked important conversations about consolidation and coherence. For example, the county created a unified health steering committee after identifying duplication among health-related meetings. “We actually used that as a pilot to consolidate,” Powell said. Despite its eventual success, the process hasn’t been without challenges. “We were all new. We didn’t even know if we were talking to the right people,” Powell admitted. Getting others to prioritize the work required explaining the “why”—a critical step she now emphasizes to others. “If I could do it again, I would make the purpose and objectives clear from the beginning and put some real timelines in place.” Now, the spreadsheet is a living tool that continues to evolve. With regional centers and Alameda County Health recently added to the ICC, the team plans to refine the spreadsheet further. “Our next step is to explore opportunities to further simplify the structure where and if it makes sense—to combine more meetings and maximize time,” Powell said. “It’s all about creating coherence and better alignment for our systems (Big S) ecosystem of care.”
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