“Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.”
-Voltaire
For the Healthy Jeffco Alliance, Voltaire’s words anchored their effort to reimagine collaboration over the past two years. Rather than making decisions for their community, the Alliance worked to work with the very people who would benefit from a healthier Jefferson County. Over the course of their partnership with The Civic Canopy, the Alliance found that the moment they let go of the perfect, the good they’d been searching started to arrive.
The Healthy Jeffco Alliance (formerly the Jefferson County Health Alliance) emerged in 2019 as an effort to promote deeper collaboration and collective impact. An initial group of institutional partners had originally formed a “hotspotting alliance” to serve people with co-morbid chronic health issues who were overutilizing emergency departments. Now, these representatives from public health, mental health, human services, schools, and hospitals wanted to think bigger, bolder, and broader about community health and well-being. Looking to the model of Livewell San Diego, they committed to adopting a collective impact approach and to “cultivate health and opportunity in our communities.” With funding from the Community First Foundation, the alliance invited the Canopy to provide support as they embarked on this journey.
To start, the Alliance surveyed hundreds of community members from diverse backgrounds about their vision for Jefferson County and what was needed to achieve that vision. The results of the survey were powerful. Even more than the need for specific services, such as food, housing and health care, people prioritized a stronger sense of connection among community members and greater collaboration among community institutions. If connection and collaboration increased, other goals would be more achievable.
With that clear mandate, the Alliance pulled together available data on the levels of connection and collaboration in the county, and in February 2020 around 100 people came together to review the data and ask what would “turn the curve” on these trends. Hundreds of ideas were shared, and from this initial brainstorm, the participants identified the following five strategies.
- Foster a culture of connection
- Center work in the community
- Encourage collaborative funding
- Collaborate on technology
- Leverage assessment and planning
After a pause to let the pandemic settle into its uncertain rhythms, the Alliance began hosting conversation teams to explore these five strategy areas – developing relationships and discovering the work already taking place, the lessons learned and the opportunities to do more. While each team has its own story and influenced the work of the others, the concepts and lessons from centering work in the community is filtering throughout all the teams and the Alliance itself. It is shaping the Alliance as a growing and emerging partnership committed to a connected, thriving community where health and opportunities are possible for all.
Centering work in community is more than the framing of the work, it is also about increasing the capacity for community to be equal in decision-making. To work toward this, the Alliance staff and governing committee are learning to cede the defining of objectives and activities to the partners in action teams, staff are adopting structures to facilitate the leveling of power among partners and partners are constantly striving toward greater understanding of each other.
Power sharing can be an unfamiliar space for partners and funders alike and the Alliance is constantly striking a balance between taking measurable steps toward our vision and creating space for the emergence of action steps by the partners themselves. In 2021 the Center in Community action team was deep into planning it’s second training for organizational partners on community inclusion, when the community members on the team said, “Thanks, but no thanks.” Planning a training for others wasn’t a good use of their time. For them, there was so much that needed done in their community that talking and providing trainings didn’t provide the action that was meaningful to them. The Team reflected on the Alliance’s core beliefs and bravely chose to walk their talk. If community were to be leaders in the Alliance, then it could not hold a training that wasn’t meaningful to the community. The Alliance canceled the training, and the Center in Community action team continued its journey, eventually deciding on a new project. The new project resulted in a 110% increase in Hispanic participants in a vaccine clinic, due in no small part to the trust that was beginning to develop in the team.
For the Alliance, centering work in community is more than just listening. It is acting on what is said and what is important to our community member partners. It requires continual reflection, championing community member priorities, and a willingness to zig and zag a bit toward reaching its goals. Within its culture of humility, the Alliance will continue to learn as new partners, particularly more partners with lived experience, join and strengthen the Alliance’s capacity for community to be equal in decision making.