19 - Putting Communities First: Lessons from a Collaborative Landscape Analysis

Abstract Information: Nebraska Children and Families Foundation (NCFF) is a public-private partnership charged with preventing entrance into the Child Welfare and Juvenile Justice systems. To fulfill this mission, NCFF has developed a statewide network of 23 Community Collaboratives (CCs) covering 83 of 93 Nebraska counties and 99.2% of the state’s population. Each CC, led by a coordinator, along with additional support staff, connects families to local community resources/services, coordinates services across the community, provides concrete support (e.g., cash, rental assistance), and advocates for policy changes in their communities. NCFF supports the CCs with the financial and knowledge resources needed to meet their individual goals and provides statewide administration support to the CCs. Currently, the collaborative bodies have some overlapping goals/functions and target audiences related to supporting children and families, but a comprehensive ‘crosswalk’ on how they can more effectively and efficiently work together to align with and lift up the state’s priorities has not been attempted. In 2024, NCFF obtained funding through the Federal Preschool Development Grant (PDG) to conduct a Landscape Assessment to understand how well services and families are connected to support children, families, and individuals. In collaboration with the Munroe-Meyer Institute at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, this effort is aimed at gathering data through community conversations, surveys, and secondary data analysis to guide future programming efforts in the communities. In this presentation, we will share the key efforts undertaken by the evaluation team to put the communities first in the planning and conduct of the landscape assessment. To collect information about the collaborative’s efforts, the evaluation team decided to conduct in-person community conservations in place of focus groups. A focus group usually involves a predetermined set of questions that an evaluator asks, and the focus groups participants respond to. A Community Conversation targets a specific set of topics but allows community members to drive the conversation which in turn prompts the evaluator to ask follow-up questions. The evaluation team has been intentional about ensuring participation from a diverse set of stakeholders from each community through various methods such as hosting a session during the workday and one in the evening. The language needs of community stakeholders were also considered by sharing the invitations in various languages and offering translation and interpretation services. Additionally, collaboratives differ widely between communities, as they are made up of a network of local providers and community resources who establish their own priorities and create their solutions. Depending on the geographic location, size, and maturity of the collaborative (length of their existence), the process was tweaked to meet the needs of each collaborative which helped achieve a greater buy-in from the collaboratives for this effort. Overall, through this presentation, we will share the lessons learned from conducting a statewide landscape assessment and suggest best practices to achieve greater buy-in from community stakeholders in the evaluation planning and process.