Transforming Together: Implementation Guide
Including Youth, Families, and Community Experts in County Leadership Teams California has rich resources and supports that provide an endless font of wisdom and living experience supporting shared leadership. Parents and youth with lived expertise can be found in all parts of the ecosystem and may be particularly present in local community-based organizations. Many systems use titles such as Peer Navigators, Cultural Brokers, Parent Partners or Youth Advocates, and in many cases, these experts’ capacities are grounded in and supported by evidence-informed practices, such as Promotoras or Promotoras de Salud. Authentic inclusion of parents, youth, and community experts requires attention to many factors. Research suggests that these guidelines can be helpful when forming or strengthening ILT and EAC efforts to ensure they include a broader community perspective: 5 ● Establish shared decision-making responsibility with youth, parents, tribal representatives, and community experts who have equal power in setting priorities and making decisions; ● Identify where partners in the system are already present and meaningfully incorporating parent and youth voices regarding system quality improvement and leadership. ● Identify potential revenues to expand and fund parent and youth voices in county system leadership (See Chapter 4 for additional details about shared governance funding). ● Adapt or create job descriptions for parent and youth participation and roles. Please see here for examples of Parent and Youth Job Descriptions. ● Identify potential persons with lived experience in the county/region/systems who, with proper support, might be interested and able to join the leadership team. ● Adapt agency processes to honor community communication styles and decision-making approaches. Provide training for agency staff on how to participate respectfully in community-led conversations and gatherings ● Develop a means to collect, analyze, and act on, in an ongoing way, youth and family input about the efficacy of the county/regional ecosystem towards identified shared goals and outcomes. ● C 6 reate a consistent method to orient youth and parents as they assume responsibilities and roles in the leadership structure. ● Community voice should be present from the very start. They should be included when determining the leadership groups’ purpose, scope, initial objectives, and goals. ● Ensure equitable and appropriate compensation for time, expertise and emotional labor; critically examine what the equity practice can and should look like in this compensation model. ● Ask: How do meeting formats, timing, and decision-making processes accommodate different cultural approaches, including Indigenous talking circles, African American call-
and-response dialogue, and Latino plática conversation styles? For additional guidance on Shared Governance, see Chapter 2.
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