The Four Tools

Local Collaborative Assessment of Capacity
 

This instrument is intended to serve as a guide for a county collaborative which wishes to do a self-assessment of its progress in building its own capacity to improve outcomes for children and families. This self-assessment asks a series of questions about ten elements of collaborative capacity as a way of helping collaborative members determine how far they have progressed. 

A team may wish to add other items which it believes to be fuller reflections of the work undertaken by the collaborative. It may also want to set aside some of these as inappropriate or premature. These items are offered as suggestions, since they occur as elements of the work program of one or more county collaboratives in California.

Governance and Accountability
 

 
Agree
Disagree
 
1.  Our collaborative has agreed upon an annual, public review of the outcomes which we have set as the indicators of our success in meeting our goals.
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2.  Our collaborative has agreed upon a common agenda which commits the members to providing new and redirected funding to achieve our shared goals.
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3.  Our collaborative has set a clear, limited number of priorities in a way that enables us to devote concentrated resources to these priorities.
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4.  Our collaborative has translated our priorities and outcomes measures into budget commitments from members of the collaborative that will be carried out in the year ahead.
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5.  Our collaborative has designated specific target groups, programmatic approaches, geographic areas, or crosscutting areas of emphasis. These target groups, based on age, ethnicity, geography, or other need factors, have been selected for priority attention. 
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6.  Our collaborative has broadened its membership and its outreach to other groups to make us more representative of the whole community we serve and the clients we seek to help.
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7.  Our collaborative includes a significant number of agencies and members who are committed to substantial roles in its work; it is not dominated by one or two agencies, with other members seeing the collaborative as marginal to what they do. 
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8.  Our collaborative has actively engaged front-line workers and their representatives in the process of making changes in the way agencies serve children and families.
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9.  Our collaborative has been given a major role in decision-making about children and families by the policy leaders of our community.
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Outcomes
 

 
Agree
Disagree
10.  Our collaborative has successfully come to an agreement on the most important goals that we share and the outcomes measures by which we will assess whether we have achieved them.
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11.  Our collaborative has agreed upon a timetable and a process for moving toward results-based budgeting and has allocated resources needed to carry out this change.
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12.  Our collaborative has agreed upon a process for upgrading our interagency data collection and analysis over the next two years.
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13.  Our collaborative has agreed upon new and redirected resources to be used for upgrading our interagency data collection and analysis capacity over the next two years.
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14.  Our collaborative has developed an inventory of current funding sources for programs for children and families.
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15.  Our collaborative has developed data on overlapping populations in need, including data matching across programs and agencies
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16.  Our collaborative has begun assessing the impact of recent budget cuts on populations in need in our community.
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17.  Our collaborative annually tracks the referrals made to agencies in the community to determine the effectiveness of agencies in meeting those referred needs; we use referral patterns as part of our needs assessment.
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18.  Our collaborative has selected priorities among ongoing programs, which we intend to evaluate against standards of effectiveness over the next 1-3 years.
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Financing
 

 
Agree
Disagree
 
19.  Our collaborative has developed an inventory of total spending on children and families and a summary of the most important items in the governmental budgets that affect children and families, broken out by categorical area and federal, state, local, and private funding sources.
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20.  Our collaborative has done detailed budget analysis that has enabled us to review the projected, future-year of current trends in caseloads and spending.
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21.  Our collaborative has done detailed budget analysis that has enabled us to review the projected, future-year costs of current trends in caseloads and spending.
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22.  Our collaborative has developed a summary of the most important items in other governments' and agencies' budgets that affect children and families, including the United Way, cities, and school districts.
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23.  Our collaborative has set aside resources for improving the staffing of the collaborative from redirected sources within member's agencies’ budgets.
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24.  Our collaborative has been able to review new external funding opportunities in light of our own priorities and has not been driven by outside funders’ agendas in deciding to seek such funding.
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25.  Our collaborative has developed a multi-year revenue strategy that addresses the issues of the sources of funding for children and family programs and identifies areas where revenues and related spending may be disproportionate.
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26.  Our collaborative has selected and carried out re-allocation of current resources affecting children and family programs which have been adopted as formal policy priorities of the county.
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27.  Our collaborative has developed a strategy for responding to block grants as they affect children and families in our communities.
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Mobilizing non-financial resources
 

 
Agree
Disagree
 
28.  Our collaborative has developed a formal plan for identifying and mobilizing non-financial resources from throughout our community.
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29.  Our collaborative has developed an inventory of community assets, including mutual aid, self-help, and support groups.
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30.  Our collaborative has secured major commitments of non-financial resources from groups and individuals in our community as part of our program strategies.
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31.  Our collaborative is staffed so that we can conduct continuing outreach to community-based, self-help groups who provide supports to families.
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Community and parent ownership
 

 
Agree
Disagree
 
32.  Our collaborative has developed ways of gaining feedback and involvement of community residents and parents which are not dominated by service provider points of view.
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33.  Our collaborative has debated the difference between token and non-token roles for parents and community residents, and has provided specific opportunities for parents and residents to become providers, evaluators, and policymakers.
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34.  Our collaborative has designed programs to be open to parent and citizen participation, including ways in which participants can reimburse providers for the services they receive, with funding or in-kind services.
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35.  Our collaborative has revised programs or reallocated resources in response to comments from the consumers of services.
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36.  Our collaborative has worked to staff itself and involve a range of groups from within the community so that we are able to interact effectively with the ethnic and linguistic groups from throughout the community.
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37.  Our collaborative has addressed the problem of citizen representatives working across multiple initiatives in ways that increase the numbers of individuals providing representation and link the different forums in which representation is exercised.
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Staff and Leadership Development
 

 
Agree
Disagree
 
38.  Our collaborative has developed an interagency training program that is jointly funded and provides front-line staff with in-service training needed to perform as part of a collaborative team.
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39.  Our collaborative has provided support to policy leaders, which has enabled them to network with their counterparts who are working on similar issues around the state and the nation.
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40.  Our collaborative provides training to community residents for the leadership roles they provide in collaborative efforts.
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41.  Our collaborative has made clear to area universities and other training and educational institutions what kind of pre-service and in-service interprofessional expertise we need from these institutions, and have evaluated their capacity to provide such professionals.
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Program strategies
 

 
Agree
Disagree
 
42.  Our collaborative has designed the programs which we jointly sponsor in ways which reflect the decisions we have made on outcomes; we address the measures of success of our programs as we design them.
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43.  Our collaborative has linked programs for children and families with economic and community development strategies.
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44.  Our collaborative has addressed the problems of family stability and family income as part of our work with children and families and has designed programs that respond to these economic needs.
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45.  Our collaborative has designed the programs which we jointly sponsor in ways that balance public service providers with an equal concern for natural helping networks and supports provided by nongovernmental entities without public funding.
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Policy agenda development: changing the rules
 

 
Agree
Disagree
 
46.  Our collaborative has prepared anticipative policy options for the likely changes in federal programs, including block grants, decategorization, reduced entitlements, and funding cuts.
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47.  Our collaborative has informed our state legislative delegation of the state policy priorities which we support and the most important actions we need from the state government in support of our agenda at the local level.
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48.  Our collaborative has developed a policy agenda for changes in the barriers encountered in our pilot projects.
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50.  Our collaborative regularly discusses the best ways of reducing or eliminating the barriers encountered in our pilot projects and operates with a presumption that our task includes identifying and reducing these barriers, rather than accepting them as given.
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Interorganizational coherence: links among parallel reform
 

 
Agree
Disagree
 
51.  There are a number of other collaboratives and policy reforms that sometimes affect our collaborative by competing for time, membership, and resources.
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52.  Our collaborative has developed an inventory of the other collaboratives and policy initiatives in the community, and we keep this inventory current.
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53.  Our collaborative has developed methods of sharing information with other collaboratives and policy initiatives in the community.
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54. Our collaborative has developed a shared agenda with other collaboratives and policy initiatives and has begun sharing resources based on that common agenda.
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55.  Our collaborative has succeeded in merging or linking one or more collaboratives, rather than assuming that each new initiative requires a new collaborative or governing body.
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Addressing the equity issues: targeting and disproportionate outcomes
 

 
Agree
Disagree
 
56.  Our collaborative has discussed the coverage of new managed care and capitation initiatives as they affect the lowest income groups and individuals in the community.
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57.  Our collaborative has agreed upon the ways we will disaggregate data in order to assess disproportionate impact on ethnic and linguistic minorities.
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58.  Based on our analysis of disproportionate impact, our collaborative has developed policy items and program designs that attempt to improve these outcomes.
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59.  Our collaborative has allowed the real issues and underlying values that affect children and family programs to be debated and has learned to handle discussion of differences in our values and other forms of conflict effectively.
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