Volume 3


MA Adult Basic Education Community Planning 2002 - 2003
Community Planning in Action

A collection of the experiences of
Program Community Planning Coordinators and Partnership Members

A Collaborative Effort of SABES West & SABES Central
SABES is funded by the Massachusetts Department of Education

Introduction

Community Planning in Action is a collection of community planning coordinators and their partnerships’ experiences in the third year of the five-year Massachusetts Department of Education grant cycle, from summer 2002 to 2003.

You will see evidence of the commitment, flexibility, and creativity of community planning coordinators and the community planning partnerships in this collection. Over the past few years, Adult Basic Education programs and community planning coordinators have been instrumental in creating and redefining partnerships in their communities. Partnership members have worked on community assessments that have helped provide direction to their work, defined agendas, expanded and diversified their membership, and carried out activities that support their mission. They are now in the midst of a strategic planning process.

Section I, Narratives and Interviews, contains in depth descriptions by community planning coordinators of their partnerships, their accomplishments, and their challenges. These descriptions are from interviews with community planning coordinators and personal narratives.

Section II contains Partnership Profiles. The profiles contain brief descriptions of the partnerships and their activities, accomplishments, and challenges. This section is organized in alphabetical order by program or partnership name.

Section III Resources contains references to print and online resources that relate to strategic planning and partnership development.

We would like to extend our heartfelt appreciation to Community Planning Coordinators who contributed to Community Planning in Action.

Thank you.

Lisa Deyo, SABES West & Cathy Gannon, SABES Central

 

Table of Contents

Section 1: Interviews & Narratives

Cape Cod Partnership - Andrea Strout
Holyoke JUNTOS ABE Collaborative - Paul Hyry
Massachusetts Career Development Institute/Westfield - Sheila Kelly & Larry Bay
Somerville Adult Literacy Community Planning Partnership - Susan Rile


Section 2: Partnership Profiles
(See separate profiles document)

ACCCESS
Action for Boston Community Development/Downtown Adult Literacy Program
Cambridge Adult Education Community Planning Group
Central Berkshire County ABE Community Coalition
Everett Literacy Program
Hampshire and Franklin County ABE Community Partnership
Holyoke JUNTOS ABE Collaborative
Immigrant Learning Center, Inc. (The)
Jamaica Plain Community Centers/Adult Learning Program
Lawrence Adult Learning Center
Lowell Adult Education Center
Massachusetts Career Development Institute/Westfield
Mount Wachusett Community College ABE Program, Community Planning Collaborative (CPC)
NECC Amesbury Adult Learning Center
SCALE
Webster Adult Basic Education
Worcester Adult Learning Center, Quinsigamond Community College, Mass Job Training, Inc.
YMCA International Learning Center – Boston Fenway Program

Resources
(see separate document)

Strategic Planning
Strengthening & Expanding Partnerships


Section 1
Interviews & Narratives

City of Boston Partnerships
Citywide Community Planning Advisory Council, ABCD Downtown & JP Community Centers

Interview with Mary Mello, ABCD Downtown & Sandy Goodman,
Jamaica Plain Community Centers

The Adult Basic Education programs in the City of Boston have found themselves in a unique situation. Twenty-six programs in the city have funding for community planning from the Massachusetts Department of Education. Because of their large number, the programs established the Community Planning Advisory Council (CPAC). CPAC acts as a central coordinating committee at the city level to support the programs’ community planning work in their neighborhoods and coordinate programs’ efforts city-wide. Each year, five programs are selected to represent the larger ABE community in the advisory council. The programs hired a consultant to convene the council and move the community planning process forward.

In addition to CPAC, the 26 Boston programs meet bimonthly. This body, called the Adult Literacy Initiative, was created a number of years prior to the start up of the community planning initiative. The Adult Literacy Initiative serves an important role in the community planning process. Along with the citywide work, each program site is active in a local coalition.

In 2002 and 2003, Mary Mello, the Adult Education Coordinator of ABCD LearningWorks, and Sandy Goodman, director of the Adult Learning Program of Jamaica Plain Community Centers, shared their perspectives on community planning. Mary served on the Community Planning Advisory Council (CPAC) in 2003 and is currently a member of the Downtown Initiative for Adult Literacy (DIAL). Sandy served on CPAC in 2001 and joined again in September 2003; she is also member/chair of a local partnership in Jamaica Plain. Mary and Sandy spoke about the work of CPAC, the relationship that this coordinating body has with the neighborhood coalitions and partnerships, and their own work in their neighborhood coalitions. What follows are the highlights of our conversations, with a focus on their work over the past year.

What roles have the Community Planning Advisory Council and the Adult Literacy Initiative taken in the Boston community planning process?

Mary & Sandy: The Massachusetts Department of Education, in recognition that the resources and assets and needs are shared, wanted something that came from the city of Boston. The function of the Community Planning Advisory Council was initially to develop a job description for a consultant to work with each coalition and pull the neighborhood pieces together. Every program contributes a portion of its Department of Education (DOE) community planning money into a citywide pool to hire a consultant to facilitate CPAC’s work.

Mary: The consultant also comes to the Adult Literacy Initiative bimonthly meetings of all the Boston DOE-funded programs. He provides updates and tells us, “This is what we are going to do next.” The announcements that he mails out remind us about issues we will be discussing and making decisions about in the next meeting of the 26 Boston-wide programs. He has due dates for everything and reports to CPAC about which neighborhoods are on or off track. Part of his job has been to call folks if those due dates lapse. This kind of system was set up because Boston stands or falls together.

The Adult Literacy Initiative meetings were not originally meant to be a citywide community planning meeting. When the city of Boston began to receive DOE money, the city became responsible for holding these bimonthly meetings. The providers who have been attending these meetings have been doing community planning in that we share information as providers already and have this vehicle for doing so. Sometimes you do not count what you are already doing.

Sandy: The bimonthly meetings have been a good vehicle for us to share information about what local partnerships are doing and give us a place to make administrative decisions about Boston-wide community planning matters. However, the focus on community planning has supplanted any other sort of work, information sharing or guest speakers that we might have.

How did the Boston programs coordinate their community assessment work?

Mary: The final draft of the Boston community assessment of assets and needs was due in June 2003. The advisory council worked with the consultant to ensure that the secondary data made sense and that this data and the data from our work in the neighborhoods which needed to be incorporated into the citywide report were flush. This work took place in a bimonthly meeting of the Adult Literacy Initiative.

Sandy: That was a fairly remarkable process. The qualitative data from the research done by the 26 programs were compiled. For the citywide report, the consultant had carried out staff surveys and compiled demographic information on our students that we were not necessarily going to put in our own reports. There was a lot for the Adult Literacy Initiative members to look at, mull over, and negotiate wording. The consultant had created a streamlined process. He asked, “Does everyone here agree with that? Let’s move on. Does anyone disagree? If so, then what? How do you want to see it worded?”

Mary: It was very important that the community assessment was a product of everyone, not just a small group. Everyone agreed that it was a priority. The process took time and effort, and there was a lot of hashing things out.

Sandy: There was also a pool of money to pay the consultant for a few hours of technical assistance to the different coalitions. It was great that people were available to help with the final writing for the community assessments in the neighborhoods.

What is the strategic planning process that you are using in Boston?

Mary: The Community Planning Advisory Council has always urged programs to think one or two steps ahead. The consultant with whom the advisory council is working has asked us to think about how the data collected in our community assessments are going to be used in formulating our strategic plans and how the strategic plans are going to inform our upcoming five-year grants. I think that is why a lot of groups in Boston kept moving along because the consultant was there pushing us.

Before the end of the fiscal year, CPAC started working on the goals and objectives for the strategic plan for Boston-wide community planning. We worked on a draft, then presented it to the Adult Literacy Initiative. The group gave us feedback. We worked on it again. And that went around a couple times. We developed four goals with objectives for Boston citywide (See chart on following page).

At an ALI meeting, each DOE-funded program made a commitment to work on one of the four goals. And at the last ALI meeting, we physically broke into three different groups. The fourth goal was to include a neighborhood that does not have any DOE funding. Navin Associates (the consultant) and CPAC took responsibility for the fourth.

Each goal has a working group. Each working group has a consultant working with it, which I think is vital. They have set up their first meeting, and they are going to develop a plan. Because objectives and goals do not a plan make.

It is up to the members of the Adult Literacy Initiative to make a plan. The advisory council did not want to make a plan because this group is not going to be doing the work. Programs throughout the city are going to make this work.

How are the neighborhood coalitions organized?

Sandy: In some neighborhoods, there is only one DOE funded site. In other neighborhoods there are more than one DOE funded site. Some programs have sites in different neighborhoods. There are strengths and challenges to these different scenarios. The programs that have sites in different neighborhoods did not get additional money for community planning although they might participate in more than one neighborhood coalition.

In neighborhoods where there are more than one DOE funded site, programs have money to pool if they choose to. In neighborhoods where there is only one DOE funded site, programs carry more of a burden of balancing what the partnership wants to do in the neighborhood and what is required of you. For example, in a place like Jamaica Plain where we have been the only funded program until very recently, it is even more important to let the group decide the direction. I prefer to be part of a coalition that determines its own direction, but I still feel the pressure to fulfill the DOE requirements. Ultimately it has fallen on me to make sure we are on track with the requirements.

Adult Literacy Initiative Goals and Objectives
for the Boston area

Goal I: Improve the coordination of the Adult Education and Literacy system in Boston and its neighborhoods

Objective 1: Improve linkages among Adult Education and Literacy providers
Find ways to share information about open slots

Objective 2: Improve linkages to job placement and job training providers.
Form one or more working groups as to ways to improve linkages

Objective 3: Improve linkages to employers
Provide training for coalitions on how to develop stronger linkages to employers

Objective 4: Improve linkages to the Higher Education system

Goal II: Increase the resources for the Adult Education and Literacy system in Boston and its neighborhoods

Objective 1: Advocate for maintaining and increasing existing resources such as English for New Bostonians and other such private/public partnerships

Objective 2: Promote corporate literacy campaigns such as the Verizon Foundation’s check off campaign if money raised is earmarked for Boston programs

Objective 3: Improve linkages to employers
Provide training for coalitions on how to develop stronger linkages to employers

Goal III: Increase public awareness of the need for Adult Education and Literacy services in Boston.

Objective 1: Assist coalitions as needed in developing their strategic plans
Objective 2: Provide technical assistance to coalitions in carrying out their strategic plans
Objective 3: Explore ways to involve/include Mattapan stakeholders in the community planning process

June 2003


What challenges do you see coming up? For neighborhoods and CPAC?

Mary: We shall see. We have no experience doing this kind of thing in Boston.

The way that community planning is set up in Boston means that programs are going to be working with their own local coalitions’ strategic plans and the city-wide strategic planning. We will be doing double duty, working on a city-wide strategic plan and our neighborhood plans. Our downtown coalition is including our citywide work as a goal so that we document our work all in one place.

It’s important that somebody realizes that Boston is different. The people in the room are usually not the power brokers in this community. If you look at the way that community planning is supposed to go according to our guidelines, the partnership membership includes a mayor and police chief, and school superintendent …not in Boston. The partnership members lack the authority to make the decisions to make this a meaningful exercise. I do not know how you get around that. That is my concern about moving forward, whether or not it is realistic.
City of Boston Partnership, ABCD Downtown Coalition

Interview with Mary Mello

Year three

At the end of year 2, the partnership planned to survey the Downtown Crossing Association, whose membership includes businesses and nonprofits in our neighborhood, at their annual meeting. We were on the agenda, and we planned to distribute a one-page survey to the people attending the meeting. The previous year, there were about 300 in attendance.

We geared up to make a presentation about our community planning work. We were working with their staff people and were going to give a 10-minute presentation in which we explained Adult Basic Education and community planning. We planned to ask how we all can work together to improve services in the downtown area. We also planned to ask everyone to fill out a survey at the meeting. Then the Downtown Crossing Association did not have an annual meeting for 18 months. At the last annual meeting, everything was taken off the agenda because the Democratic Convention was coming to Boston. We sent out the survey to all the 800 or so members by email. But how many responses are you going to get?

What have you done to build the partnership?

We have been able to reach out in a concrete way to people downtown because we were all struggling. We asked ourselves, “What are we asking people to do? Are we just asking them to come to a monthly meeting?” People, I think, respond much better when you say, “This is what we need.” I made a lot of follow-up calls. We asked them to read the community assessment, comment on the data, and to sign off on the report. A lot of people said, “Sure, we will do that.” I do not think they would ever say, “I’ll sit down and write this whole thing.”

We were able to build our coalition that way, just by having something bottom line for these business, union, and non-profit folks downtown to work with. Many of the people who signed off on the assessment have advised me in the past and helped with different pieces of the data. Now we have a core group of nonprofits and businesses. I think people need to know what community planning and the strategic plan are about and what they want to do. Knowing what the partnership is about does not mean, “Oh we’ll all get together to improve the adult education services.” It is much more tangible than that. Hopefully, once they have something increasingly concrete, they will be able to work more with the process.

How do you see yourself building the partnership in the coming year? What challenges do you foresee?

Populations that are not being served to the extent that we want them to be served is my first concern. I do not see resources in the form of funding forthcoming. Nonprofits and the state are all cutting back.

In downtown, there are five Department of Education-funded sites that are mandated to be in the partnership and one DOE-funded program that participates voluntarily. One goal of the partnership has been to increase collaboration between DOE-funded programs. We are asking these questions – Rather than have part-time volunteer coordinators, counselors, could we share full-time employees? It would be wonderful, but then we think, “Who will be the financial conduit? Will my agency agree to share a staff member with that agency?” These agencies have been downtown for years and competed for the same money for years and years. That makes a difference.

We are working on a draft of the strategic plan. The question is, “What will our agencies allow us to do?” Even though we may think it is a wonderful idea to collaborate and share with other downtown agencies, we are all parts of larger agencies and do not have the authority to make the decision for our agencies. That is going to be a big challenge that has already come up.

However, if we do not think through these logical steps, then it is just an academic exercise. In theory, this is something that you can do without increased resources.


City of Boston Partnership, Adult Learning Program, Jamaica Plain Community Centers

Interview with Sandy Goodman

What was the focus of your coalition in the first two years?

A human service provider in the community initiated the coalition in Jamaica Plain (JP) in 2000. The Adult Learning Program at Jamaica Plain Community Centers has taken on a lot of the leadership since then. We invited everybody that we knew who did some adult education, which was and is still defined pretty broadly. In that first year, we had a meeting just to put together a brochure that promotes the adult education services in the community.

Some programs are not working in adult education exactly, but their work is related. They are interested in the intersection; that is why they keep attending. I send monthly updates of our coalition work and invitations to around 17 people who mainly work in workforce development and adult education in JP. We do not want to replicate a multi-service, multi-disciplinary coalition, so we made sure we had some connection to the larger, more multi-disciplinary coalitions that already exist in JP. We have representation from these larger coalitions in our ABE partnership. A small core group representing the library branches, Head Start, community-based youth and family programs, neighborhood/workforce development and Early Intervention regularly attend.

Our coalition has been more family literacy-focused, given the mix of members. The natural intersection with parents has been fruitful, e.g. for data gathering and surveys. For the people who come to the meetings, they are getting the same things out of it that I am. They are networking more and making connections. Their ideas are stimulated. There is a potential for funding down the road.

Another partnership link is the JP Neighborhood Development Corporation. This organization is what I hope to be our best link to the employers because they do so much workforce development. The employers have been harder to reach.

In fall 2002 we completed our community assessment report. We did not find anything that was new or surprising in our research, neither the secondary data that the consultants collected nor the primary that we collected in the community. Perhaps if full-time professional researchers did a comprehensive primary data collection research project, they might find something different. But a small group of non-professional researchers doing this work on top of their other duties and responsibilities is not going to be able to dig very deep. It is not that we skewed the data. It is just that we are in the community a certain way; there are certain people that our partners or we have contact with and can get the surveys to. Four hundred people in the community complete surveys, and twenty participated in focus groups.

After the community assessment was submitted to the Massachusetts Department of Education, our coalition lost some focus. We were reeling from the task and waited for feedback, which came many months later. It is not that we could not move forward without the feedback, but it would have given us something concrete to go back to and look at together.

What work has your coalition been doing in the third year?

There was a lot going on late spring into summer 2003. The coalition had to regroup and start the strategic planning process. A number of us went to strategic planning training that was offered in the Boston area. Some other coalition members and I started talking with Chris Navin, the Boston consultant for community planning, about working with us on strategic planning in the coming year.

There is a tension between saying, “Let’s not create a plan for our community without more involvement” and getting people more involved in something when you can say, “This is what we’ve done. This is a concrete piece of work.” When we finished gathering our primary data last year, we felt that we had not gotten input from as many different sectors as we would have wanted. We felt that this was okay; we did not have to stop doing research just because we completed the community assessment.

For the strategic planning process we wanted more input from the non-profits and community service groups in Jamaica Plain. We wanted to get feedback from their perspective as both providers of services and employers. Human service agencies and health centers are the largest employers in Jamaica Plain. We also wanted to expand our partnership. The partnership has remained solid in the couple of years that we’ve been doing this work. We haven’t gotten as professionally diverse a group as we would like.

In May and June 2003, we sent out a survey to about 300 human service and health care providers in Jamaica Plain with a cover letter introducing our partnership. We enclosed the executive summary of the community assessment and a brief overview of our work over the last few years. The letter informed them that we were starting work on strategic planning and still needed their input in the process. We encouraged them to become a part of the process and invited them to a forum to look at the results of the survey and work on the vision statement together.

There is always a problem, especially with limited resources and staffing, that the list you updated a year ago is no longer up-to-date. There was not enough time to double-check the contact names and addresses. As a result, many surveys came back undeliverable, and we received few completed surveys. We followed up with phone calls and tried to complete surveys over the phone. We had more success with this method. The survey had three questions. The questions were:

1) In your agency or program, how do limited reading, writing, numeric, and basic
English skills of your employees reduce their effectiveness? Please be specific.
Example: Direct service staff do not have the writing skills to adequately complete
incident report forms.
2) In your agency or program, how do limited reading, writing, numeric, and basic English skills of your clients, residents, constituents or patients reduce your agency’s ability to serve them most effectively? Please be specific.
Example: Patients that do not read English are unable to follow medication
instructions or are reluctant to travel to unfamiliar areas of the city to follow up on a
referral.

3) What are 3 things about adult basic education and literacy that you would like to learn or
discuss at the forum on July 23rd and/or at subsequent forums? Please be specific.

We were able to complete 36 surveys by phone. Our conversations were very interesting. People wanted to hear more about the meeting, and we faxed out flyers. It was interesting that some people talked about the limited writing ability of their college educated employees and the supervision efforts that go along with that issue.

Navin Associates compiled the results of the survey, and we held a forum in July. Everyone on the mailing list and the people who participated in the phone survey were invited. About 18 people attended, more than I imagined. We presented the findings and Executive Summary of our community assessment and distributed and reviewed the results of the recent survey.

We specifically asked the adult education providers who were not coalition members to attend; we wanted to showcase these providers. People at the meeting wanted to know what resources were available for their clients and employees. The people who did not work in adult education wanted to know more about our work. Then we broke up into small groups to review our draft vision statement and give feedback. We reconvened the large group to record the work of the breakout groups. I sent the notes from this meeting to everyone who participated in the July meeting or the survey inviting them to attend our September meeting and continue work on the strategic plan.

What are some next steps for your coalition?

We will continue to work on the strategic plan. In the near future I plan to send out the meeting minutes to the larger group and invite them to the next meeting. We were able to recruit one new member, who is an adult education provider. If we work on our strategic plan all fall and we do not diversify the coalition, I want to remember that there is still the opportunity to pull people together and review the document. One way we thought to broaden our core group is by using the strategic plan once it is created to call people back to present it.

What are some challenges for you?

When I am not involved in a group, there is a point where I do not want to keep getting information from them, even though I know it can be important. I am never sure when to stop the larger group mailing, start assuming that people are not going to get involved if they have not already, and just send mailings to the core group. I have a hard time sending things out to people who are not interested – it seems like wasted resources – paper, postage, time. However, this is a good time to keep everybody updated as we develop the strategic plan.

Another challenge for me is having the resources, time and the flexibility of staff to develop the partnership. Most of our funding is not flexible. The funding is not necessarily developed out of collaboration at a state or at a federal level so it makes it very difficult on the ground to be flexible and creative with money that is not flexible and creative. People who run programs all have different requirements. We cannot expect them to work around what is required for our program and collaborate when they have their own set of mandates.

My understanding is that these partnerships are really supposed to prepare us for designing our services when we come to do our refunding proposals, whether or not our partnership is made up of DOE funded programs. First, I do not think we are at that level to really share the resources that way. And second, the Department of Education does not fund most of the programs on our coalition, and members have lots of great ideas. They look to our program as the one with DOE money and come up with suggestions to do one thing or another. It is not exactly that the funding is not there. The difficulty lies in how the funding is structured.

We may be engaged in an exercise in envisioning what is not necessarily allowable or possible with the resources available. It is true that another goal of the coalition is to leverage and find more resources. However, the resources are shrinking right now. As a result, most of the burden will fall on the DOE-funded programs to provide the resources, with very limited dollars and minimal flexibility to determine program design/how they are spent.

Cape Cod Partnership

Interview with Andrea Strout, ACCCESS

What is a significant achievement for your partnership last year?

Our biggest achievement was completing the needs and assets report with the involvement of the partnership members. The partnership members were very involved in the “prework” – identifying the data needed, collecting the data, and analyzing it. The actual work of writing the report and putting everything together was the work of the community planning coordinators (Andrea Strout, Susan Ridenour and Terri Huff). That was a big job.

Another achievement this year is the direction that the Human Condition Project is now taking. There are now working groups, and the work is not being driven solely by the county. The Literacy Team, our partnership, is one of those working groups.

We have continued to find that the best way to keep our partners involved is to divide our work into projects that have a beginning and an end. A survey project that we conducted helped us to evaluate our membership and invite some new partners.

What were key factors in making this an achievement?

Considering our most significant achievement was completing the assets and needs assessment, a key factor in our success was that we talked to each other (partnership members and community planning coordinators). We discussed what we were discovering, what we needed to know, and made sure that the assessment findings and the report itself were clear. The factor that made us feel that this was a real achievement was that we got it done! It was a big job!

What are some important next steps for your partnership – in strategic planning and partnership development?

It is time for us to regroup as a partnership. The members of the Literacy Team have been working hard on the Human Condition Project and now have the partnership positioned as a workgroup of this project. We want to get back to the original mission of the partnership and make sure that it fits with what we have become. We have been working together for a long time and have a strategic plan that directs our work. We will look critically at our success in following our plan and then update it to move us forward.

What are some challenges that you foresee for the coming year?

Our biggest challenge continues to be TIME – we just do not have enough of it. The work of the partnership continues to be driven by the community planning coordinators. Being just part time with such a large area we are coordinating, we never have enough time to tend to all that needs to be taken care of.

In addition to time, project development, including strategic planning, will challenge the commitment of our partnership this year. Any strategic planning process, if done effectively, moves an initiative forward according to the mission and vision of the group and by challenging the facilitators and the process. There is always an issue about the level of participation in any organization. Do we have the right partners involved? If not, how do we get them to the table? How much time can/will they give to the partnership? Have we developed our skills of persuasion to the level where we can “sell” Adult Education Community Planning and Project Development to the business community? It is our hope that at the end of this year we will answer a resounding YES to the questions that we ask ourselves each year.

There is really nothing we can do about the time limitations. We are going to continue to work hard to have the partnership set priorities and take on more responsibilities.

HOLYOKE JUNTOS ABE Collaborative

Interview with Paul Hyry, Holyoke Public Schools

What are some accomplishments for the Juntos ABE Collaborative this past year?

This was a year in which a lot of the work we had done in building the Juntos partnership paid off in terms of public recognition. First, the Hampden County Regional Employment Board awarded Juntos its 2002 “Literacy Partnership Award” (the first such award it has given) at its annual meeting, which also served as a regional summit on workforce development. The mayor of Holyoke presented the award. The Regional Employment Board’s increasing interest in literacy was reflected in this gesture, as well as its sense that a collaborative like Juntos is contributing to workforce development. This recognition was helpful in building our own credibility and visibility and also, I believe, reflected the growing importance of the ABE system.

A second area of recognition for Juntos was its selection by the Office of Vocational and Adult Education (OVAE) at the U.S. Department of Education as one of 12 model “Community Partnerships for Adult Literacy” in the country. We had an intensive 2 ½ day meeting with them, showing them the programs that make up Juntos and the partnership. Their documentation will go up on the Community Partnerships for Adult Learning website - http://www.c-pal.net - and the exposure will be another boost for us locally. The visit was also good developmentally for Juntos because we had to ‘get it together’ for their visit.

Our Mass DOE program monitoring visit was important in that we were monitored as a collaborative. The monitors spent time at every program site, and they also spent time with the leadership group. The fact that the DOE is talking to the partnership instead of individual programs is a nice precedent. People from the schools were interviewed for monitoring and the OVAE visit. Higher level administrators became well versed in Juntos’ work and heard positive feedback from our monitors and visitors about what we are doing. Out of those accomplishments, along with the completion of the Holyoke community assessment, significant steps were made in the continuing process of the wider community seeing ABE as a system and Juntos as the local ABE partnership primarily constitutive of the system.

Our affiliation with an intern, Jennifer Mutchler, from the UMass Center for Public Policy & Administration assigned to the Holyoke Mayor’s office, was another event that parlayed nicely in terms of visibility. Her assignment was to prepare a policy paper and accompanying brief on an issue in Holyoke. The mayor chose ABE as the issue. Our community assessment of assets and needs benefited from her interviews with stakeholders and quantitative research. Juntos’ perspectives and conclusions were, in turn, melded into her project, which she presented to the Holyoke School Committee and in a community forum. The latter presentation resulted in some fairly hot discussion about racial and ethnic politics and how we talk about these issues in a community report about Holyoke.
Information from the community assessment is getting put back out into the community in different ways. This is very important. For example, a four-page excerpt from the community assessment makes a bold and stark case, comparing the 325 or so seats in ABE programs against the estimated need of 9,000 to 13,000 people.

The work that was started on workforce development collaboration last year also continues. Career Point and Juntos direct staff, with Eileen Zewski from the Holyoke Employment Partnership at the Chamber of Commerce as facilitator, are meeting to share what we do, talk about what is hard with our work, and build a common agenda for future collaboration. In the first meeting, we met in small groups to discuss case studies. These were examples of difficult cases involving potential students and job seekers. ABE & Career Center folks shared how each would work with the potential student or job seeker in each case study and what they learned from the conversation. At the second meeting, staff members gave a presentation on workforce related curricula. About 30 people attend meetings: teachers, counselors, curriculum developers, and administrators. We think such a large turnout is crucial, because effective collaborative relationships need to come at the level of practitioners, not just administrators.

Holyoke Community College received a grant from the Kellogg Foundation to do a major community planning project to strengthen education for Latinos in Holyoke. Unlike similar initiatives across the country, Holyoke’s project, ¡Avanza!, has fully included Adult Basic Education from the very beginning. The statistics they used to get the grant came out of the Holyoke Employment Partnership workforce development audit. From the beginning, there has been a sense that HCC needs to be accountable to workforce development and the ABE communities as they develop their project. Because the ABE need is so significant in Holyoke, we cannot just look at Latino education without looking at adult need. We have ABE people on every committee.

Finally, we need to mention family literacy. Unlike a year ago, we now have two family literacy grants funded and a working family literacy coalition in Holyoke that is focused on coordination and integration of services to families and has a lot of overlap with Juntos and our work.

What are your plans for this year?

Obviously, we need to write a strategic plan. This involves getting our advisory council, which hasn’t met for a few months, together and re-focused on this task now that the DOE strategic planning guidelines have come out. One key piece is looking at long-term goals. We’ve got to have some kind of numeric goals that are a stretch but not totally beyond the pale. One developmental goal we have been kicking around is to get up to serving 10 percent of the estimated need in Holyoke at any given time (from the 3% to 4% we can now serve). This would mean 900 slots for different kinds of programs and times of day rather than the 325 we have now.

In doing the strategic plan we need to think carefully about both priorities and political realities. The biggest example is that Native Language Literacy is so desperately needed, and at the same time public support for Spanish language programming is shaky. We have got to be very savvy, but at the same time develop a clear blueprint that says: if we could have an annual increase of $100,000 (which buys a sequence of three classes) for the next few years, what new sequence would we add each year? What programming and at what center? If we can get this, we know what our priorities are, even if funding opportunities do not always match these priorities. Hopefully, the ¡Avanza! initiative will provide some impetus for bringing in funds.

For the strategic plan, we want to keep figuring out our relationships to other partnerships and initiatives in the city, looking for resources and seeing what comes down the pike. There are nine or ten active community coalitions in Holyoke with which we need to keep figuring out our relationships because people from other constituencies need to have opportunities to give feedback on the community assessment. We are talking about putting together a coalition coordinators’ meeting as a starting point. Our strategic plan needs to be linked to ¡Avanza!, family literacy, and what the other initiatives in the community are doing. Here is an example of why this can be complicated: the four ¡Avanza! committees are parent/family involvement, academic excellence, partnerships and resources, and anti-oppression. So—which committees does family literacy go in? Or plain old ABE, for that matter? All of them, right? Or should they all be subgroups of the family literacy initiative? What is the relationship between a committee and the family literacy coalition, the various issue-specific partnerships, and our coordination of services? Those are big questions that we are beginning to figure out, and that can only be figured out in practice (i.e., designer models about how it “should” happen from an efficiency standpoint do not just get magically transformed into practical realities).

There are people who I am not necessarily going to try to bring to our meetings just because we go to their meetings. That is, there is engagement, and it is not necessarily expressed through the meetings. Our advisory council plays a crucial role. It does not need to have the same membership as the governing bodies of these other coalitions. We do not need people from all these different areas at our table all the time.

We will also continue working to strengthen our collaboration with workforce development. The partnerships in Holyoke are quite solid, although we need to keep paying attention to make sure they continue to expand. Things are a little more complicated at the regional level. We need to stay in dialogue, internally within Juntos and externally, about how best to work with the REB and its LiteracyWorks initiative. Those are substantive, complex conversations.

Student involvement, at the widest level, also continues to be a challenge for our Advisory Board/community planning leadership group. Through last fall, when we were hot and heavy on the assessment, we had students at most meetings. However, there was a lot of turnover and we did not have any one or two students who were there the whole time or in central leadership roles. Student involvement is hard because many of the long-standing members like to chime in a lot and think and talk in certain ways, and I think it can be both boring and intimidating for many of our students to be in these meetings.
It would be great if we could focus on all these things and not spend two months on crisis advocacy around the budget again this year. Of course this is beyond anyone’s control, and we will always do advocacy—I just would love a break (like everyone!) from “backed-against-the-wall” advocacy. Regardless, we will continue to organize our advocacy work through email. Each Juntos partner has a list of people that s/he calls on as ABE advocacy allies. I get the Massachusetts Coalition for Adult Education (MCAE) spot by email, “Call so-and-so today with this message and get back to us on how it went.” and send it to each of our partners with a call for help. They forward the MCAE announcement with their own personal messages added to it. This really worked this past year—our local state representative kept telling callers that ABE was by far the number one issue that his office had been hearing about. And, several statewide officials told callers that Holyoke was the city they had been hearing from most at different points in the past year’s campaign. There is no doubt that this is a strength that has been built out of this partnership.

Massachusetts Career Development Institute (MCDI)/Westfield

By Sheila Kelly & Larry Bay

What is an accomplishment for your partnership this year?

Getting our Community Assessment of Assets and Need report approved by the Massachusetts Department of Education on the first try so that we did not have to redo anything! That was great because we could move on to the next step right away. And how did we do that? We have great community partners in Westfield who have always been willing to share. We also hired two consultants to integrate the information and come out with the great report that we have.

Above and beyond the official approval of the Community Assessment, the development of the document was hugely helpful in gathering partners who shared the vision of strategic planning and provision of services. All partners recognized the need for better interagency coordination.

How were you able to create a partnership in which members are willing to share and trust?

It comes from having a smaller community to work with. We have some very caring people and political leadership that care about the targeted population. People are willing to go that extra mile to help everybody in the community and address their concerns.

All of our partners are trying to reach out to each other to help the targeted population. It is the best thing about Westfield. Everyone is so willing to cooperate. This is one of the reasons why it is so great working in Westfield. We have great leaders and that makes a huge difference.

One of the beauties of living and working in a small city is the informality that fosters a comfortable working relationship between agencies. While a structured referral process is a necessary thing, service providers in Westfield have had the option of picking up the phone and expecting and receiving immediate action on behalf of their clientele. This has created a mutual respect among service providers that in many ways made the formation of this partnership much easier than those in larger communities.

What are your plans for the strategic planning process?

We have begun the strategic planning process. We are working on our goals. We have talked about breaking up the larger partnership into three separate committees.

Our plan is to develop subcommittees to explore the needs of workforce development, adult basic education, and family literacy. These subcommittees will then meet together to develop a strategy which will best be able to address the widest range of needs while taking advantage of each partner’s strengths. As this group evolves, more partners can be added and a greater geographic area covered, including the hilltowns around Westfield.

The partnership believes that workforce development is the single most obvious need to be addressed. By its very nature, it will affect everyone in the community. Given the current economic climate, this is an extremely difficult time to get private industry to buy into this endeavor in any way that will impact its bottom line in the short term. The Regional Employment Board, Career Point, and city government will need to be active players.

One of the long-term goals is to try to open a Career Center satellite program here. Holyoke is such a long way off. It has been suggested that we attend some of their meetings to let them know who we are and what we do. Another challenge would be to try to find some money to expand our services or add an ESL class in the evening.

What are some plans for your partnership this coming year?

We are trying to recruit additional partners. I do not mean to say we need a bigger group, but certainly expanding the membership of subcommittees dealing with certain goals and issues would be appropriate. I did recruitment at a Health Fair sponsored by Head Start for parents, and the Salvation Army from Westfield was there. Gail, a representative from the Salvation Army, is someone I have known for many years. We both agreed that we should be sitting down at the same table. We should all know what is going on within the city for education, grants that would benefit our students, etc. She is a very enthusiastic partner. We are also trying to get separate groups that are striving towards similar goals to sit down at our table.

There is a downtown revitalization group in Westfield. This group is concerned about business revitalization. An Adult Basic Education program located in downtown Westfield should be considered part of this group. Our students are also their customers. I think the business community should look at our students as part of the solution.

The Community Development Corporation Director came to our last meeting. The Director shared some valuable information, and mentioned some ways that our partnership could branch out to different organizations.

MCDI was invited to a meeting at the Westfield School Department concerning Special Education needs. Because no one from MCDI could attend the meeting, one of our partners from the Westfield Schools shared the DOE’s goal template with the group. The template is in line with what the Westfield School Department is trying to accomplish with their Special Education Department. I think that this was a nice link. “Here’s the template. All you have to do is follow it. It is coming from the group of community planners.” It is an example of another group in Westfield that is trying to identify the priority needs and goals of the community. Being invited to that group was another step in the process. Having a community partner share our resources with that group – it is Community Planning at work. We are going to try to keep that contact.
It is not only others coming to our group; we are going to their groups. We have some key people that are helping us meet our goals. We are going to try to do a little bit of everything. Whatever it takes to make this work.

Somerville Adult Literacy Community Planning Partnership (SALCPP)

By Susan Riley, SCALE

What is a significant achievement for your partnership last year? What were key factors in making this an achievement?

A great deal of discussion, research, writing, and collaboration was required to complete our assets and needs reports. Listening to the opinions of different board members regarding priorities for Somerville was enlightening and often fascinating. Oftentimes, it was amazing to see the extent to which people sometimes do not understand how other organizations are structured and, in brief, how things “work” in the city. For example, some board members did not understand the extent to which the Somerville Public Schools support SCALE’s activities.

After doing our best to familiarize each board member with the activities of the other organizations represented on the board, we turned our attention to producing a report that would paint a picture of Somerville that would be clear even for those who are not familiar with the city. The report involved a sustained effort of several people who had a good grasp of how to locate the necessary data, interpret it, and make thoughtful prognostications from the data.

What are some important next steps for your partnership—in strategic planning, partnership development, and so on?

At our last meeting, the consensus of the group was that our primary goal would be to develop native language literacy programming for the Haitian population. We need to revisit this goal, recheck the supporting demographics, and determine if this is still the most important goal for the board.

What are some challenges that you foresee for the coming year? What strategies will you use to take on these challenges?

As in previous years, the composition of the board is somewhat fluid due to the number of participants who have left their Somerville-based jobs. Regrettably, once the job link disappears, the connection to the board withers. We continue to have a core group of members, and through this group we are attempting to re-fill the board. This is a time-consuming task, however, and time is more than ever at a real premium for everyone. Potential new members need a guarantee that their involvement will actually lead to something important and that their time cannot be better spent elsewhere. This is a particularly acute issue in Somerville where there is already significant overlap in the mission and activities of many groups.

We have set our meeting schedule for the year, and we hope to have a full group at each meeting. We need to be more flexible in eliciting input from various interested parties. Perhaps we can develop a questionnaire through which community people can provide input without the need to attend the meetings. Simply stated, we need to get our work done more quickly and efficiently. I am not convinced that the community planning model endorsed by the Department of Education is the best one for a field that is already filled with people doing extra jobs. This extends past the adult education community to actual and potential board members from community colleges, transitional assistance, and human services.