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Comprehensive Community Initiatives, Improving the lives of youth and families through systems change, a toolkit for federal managers
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How the toolkit was created What is a CCI? CCI Tools for Federal Staff
Develop your CCI Project
Guidelines to form Federal Partnerships
5. When Federal policies and practices make it difficult for sites to make use of resources, engage partners in systems change at the Federal level.
What strategies have Federal partners found effective to overcome incompatible policies and practices across agencies?
To overcome incompatible policies and practices across agencies…
  • Be alert for incompatible policies and practices, and bring them to the table quickly.
  • Work with partners to generate options and agree on recommended solutions.
  • Engage high-level decisionmakers.
  • Model the systems change you want communities to undertake.

Be alert for incompatible policies and practices, and bring them to the table quickly. Some incompatibilities will come to light early on as you conceptualize the initiative and create a logic model. Others will become apparent only during implementation.

Work with partners to generate options and agree on recommended solutions. Identify all stakeholders who will be impacted by the changes in policy or practice. See an example (pages 9-12).

Engage decisionmakers at a high enough level to have the authority and clout to put changes into effect. If necessary, involve general counsel, the budget office, and political leadership. To get buy-in from decisionmakers, be prepared to point out exactly how they and their agency will benefit by the change.

Model the systems change you want communities to undertake. (See Guideline #4).

Shay Bilchik explained that it was a barrier to say to a community, "Look, we've got multiple funding streams here." It was far better to say, "Here's an opportunity for you to apply for this initiative and bring us all together and, in one application, do what we would have done in our own individual silos. Form your multisystems team. Plan for this grant."

All the money came together as a package. The highest levels of success required this kind of collaboration (Goldstein, 2004).
What can be done when each Federal partner has its own performance measures and reporting schedule?

There are two options.

Meld disparate performance measures into a common set so that sites will have to meet only one set of expectations. Because partnership agencies usually have target populations and goals in common, you can work from these commonalities to determine what needs to be measured. If you choose this option, it’s wise to involve an evaluator from the very beginning.

Agree on a single agency to administer the CCI. Use just that agency’s performance measures and reporting requirements.

References

Goldstein, I. 2004. Collaboration Redefined: The Federal Safe Schools/Healthy Students Initiative. Washington, DC.