How the Lab Supports Changemakers to Achieve Sustainability
The Lab encourages changemakers to:
- think about their work in the context of the broader system of services and resources supporting children and families, rather than in isolation; and
- as a strategy evolving on a continuum, as opposed to as a tactic working toward a static end goal.
Both of these strategies encourage changemakers to embrace the two observations highlighted earlier – that sustainability is a process requiring organizations to remain current and that resources are not simply financial. These observations are particularly beneficial to organizations as they anticipate and manage the multi-faceted impacts of COVID-19.
For some changemakers, these strategies and observations make sense and they readily embrace them, while for others, they represent a new way of thinking that requires a shift in culture, mindset, and processes that can be challenging. Regardless of their response, the Lab is prepared to support changemakers so that together, we can help all children prosper.
The Lab collaborates with changemakers to advance innovative strategies as they pursue their desired level of impact. First, we engage changemakers in a mastermind session to learn about the innovative strategy and their efforts to date. The changemaker provides an overview of the strategy to a panel of advisors and then participates in a semi-structured conversation focused on key content areas, including model, evidence and evaluation, stakeholder engagement, resources, communications, quality improvement and reflection, and a systems and policy approach. Next, the Lab compiles and shares feedback and recommendations from advisors. The Lab and changemaker then work together to develop a customized plan to implement the recommendations and advance the innovation toward the changemaker’s desired level of impact.
In doing our work, the Lab facilitates targeted conversations about the innovation’s model and resources needed to support planning, implementation, and evaluation. The Lab encourages changemakers to define their innovations by identifying core components, which are the internal conditions or activities that are the essence of an innovative strategy, and structural requirements, which are the external conditions required for successful implementation. Read Good Program Definition and Defining Innovations to Foster Success to learn more about these concepts. Defining innovative strategies in this way provides enough specificity for us to operationalize the work, but enough flexibility to allow for community context. This approach also allows organizations to modify and pivot their approach in order to remain current and responsive, especially in uncertain times such as we now face, while not losing sight of their objective and goals.
Also during this process, we challenge changemakers to not only think about resources in terms of finances and funding, but instead to think about resources more holistically by identifying what is needed to support implementation and evaluation. We also encourage changemakers to think about the resources that they currently have access to and the additional resources they will need to access in order to reach their desired level of impact. In addition, we ideate strategies to help secure those resources, which could include but are not limited to skills, knowledge, expertise, human capital/staff, and technology.
