Implementation Guide for Community Change: Tools from First 5 Marin

Abstract

Implementation Guide for Community Change: Tools from First 5 MarinCommunity change initiatives (CCIs) are longterm, place-based efforts that offer comprehensive services to residents of poor communities. They seek transformational change by replacing piecemeal approaches to social problems with broader efforts designed to strengthen a community socially, educationally, economically, physically, and culturally.CCIs have been around for many years, at least since the 1980s, and have been funded by both the public and private sectors. Supporters have included federal, state, and city governments, as well as many private foundations like the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, Annie E. Casey Foundation, and Ford Foundation. Some of these efforts have been deemed more successful than others, but a belief has persisted for more than three decades in the power of community-based systems change as a mechanism for transforming communities and their residents (Kubisch, Auspos, Brown, & Dewar, 2010).There is no such thing as a typical CCI. In fact, they do not even have a consistent label. Some are called comprehensive community initiatives, others place-based initiatives, and still others community development efforts. However, almost all have some things in common. For example, they feature long-term strategies that build on community assets and needs; incorporate local participation and leadership; aim for increased collaboration among social agencies; and seek change at multiple levels - individual, family, neighborhood, and systems. This means that even though community change initiatives have different structures, services, and funding, they share common implementation and evaluation challenges.The Implementation Guide for Community Change: Tools from First 5 Marin1 offers practical advice for those engaged in the day-to-day challenges of funding, implementing, or evaluating community change efforts in all of their diversity and complexity. It distills 13 years of useful structures and tools from First 5 Marin, a community change effort in California's Marin County that uses state dollars from a tobacco surtax to improve the health and well being of children ages birth to 5. While an earlier article in the Fall 2012 issue of The Foundation Review (Coffey, Farkouh, & Reisch, 2012) offered lessons learned from this effort in the context of the broader community change field, this resource is about the nuts and bolts of the community change process.The 67-page Implementation Guide, developed by First 5 Marin's long-term evaluation team at jdcPartnerships in collaboration with First 5 Marin's executive director, is organized to be easily accessible. While the reader would benefit from reading it cover to cover in order to get familiar with its range and depth, the guide can be referenced quickly as distinct implementation and evaluation needs or challenges arise during the community change process.The guide has six chapters. The first two briefly cover foundational elements and overarching lessons for a CCI - core elements, challenges, and pitfalls. As these issues have been covered in depth in other articles by the same authors, the remaining four chapters are the real meat of the guide, organized by the initiative's developmental stages - launch and start up, specializing and standardizing, integrating and disseminating, and finally renewing and regenerating.Chapters 3 through 6 begin with a brief context of what happened during each of First 5 Marin's developmental stages and why, and then quickly get practical. …