Transforming Together: Implementation Guide
Using Data and Community Engagement to Assess Needs and Gaps, Identify Priorities, and Measure Progress Introduction Chapter 1 describes how county leaders–when they set a new vision and commit to creating a new ecosystem of care–build structures to facilitate their cross-agency coordination and decision-making. Setting a shared vision for delivering child and family services differently is just the beginning. For a vision to lead to change, it must be coupled with a clear articulation of priorities and with concrete goals to measure progress. In addition, implementation is more successful when communities being served help co-create these priorities and goals–thus helping to ensure any new system reflects what is most needed. The What While most government leaders routinely consult with community members, set goals, measure impact, and use data and information to inform improvements and establish accountability within their own agencies, doing so as part of a cross-agency structure– and doing so in ways that ask community members to be co-designers and close partners–is inherently more challenging and complicated. Today, many government-sponsored child, youth, and family services in California use a variety of approaches to try and identify community and population needs, including even using nearly identical community assessments. The result: The efforts of
many agencies to identify community needs are often redundant and inefficient; indeed, families and youth often are asked to share and re-share the same information and background with each new agency from which they seek support. The How Shared Data Inventory Creating a new ecosystem of care, and working to better coordinate county services and collaborate across different county agencies and systems, is an opportunity to do better. One first step for county leaders is to take stock of the “macrodata” they can access from across all agency partners. Macrodata is information about service utilization, service or population gaps, trends, overall outcomes, etc. With macrodata from multiple agencies, leaders can ask: • What data do various state, county and education agencies already collect about our target populations? • Looking across all these data comprehensively, what do they suggest about needs and gaps? In particular, by looking at data from different agencies about the same populations or measuring similar outcomes at the same time, do any patterns or new insights emerge? • What do non-government partners–and the children, youth, and families they engage with and serve–identify as the biggest challenges in their communities? • How can all collaborating partners best measure, assess, monitor, and account for meeting these priorities? Integration of Both Qualitative and Quantitative Data In addition, consideration should be taken to incorporate both qualitative and quantitative
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