Challenges, Social Connections, and Early Childhood

We here in the Innovation Lab recently launched our second “Innovation Challenge” to CAP employees. These challenges are meant to leverage the creativity of all of our staff so that we can identify problems and solutions that would never have occurred to us in the safety of the group cube. Our last challenge sought ideas about building strong connections among the people we serve: What challenges do we face that could be solved by building better connections between the people we serve?

The motivation behind the latest challenge was T.J. Sexton’s research into social networks and “co-production.” “These relationships build connections among families and enlist them as partners to contribute their creativity and ambitions in achieving our shared goals.”

Upon my recommendation, T.J. ordered a book I’d heard about called Unanticipated Gains, which reviews the benefits of social connections at child care centers. Since I suspect he’s taking his time wading through it (T.J. being a very busy innovator), I thought I’d help out and link to a video interview with the book’s author, Mario Small.

Allow Early Ed Watch to provide you the summary:

In the video, Small says that he found that mothers with children in childcare centers were less depressed and exchanged more information about child rearing. They also found out about resources like health clinics and museums that catered to children. Instead of being thought of as simple drop-off spots for babysitting, Small argues, “the centers have quite a few benefits for the social networks and social well-being of the mothers.”

Small talks, too, about how certain characteristics of centers can encourage or discourage parents to get to know each other. For example, he says, child care centers that set specific drop-off and pick-up times are better at enabling parents to meet, talk and compare experiences.

Small mentions that parents with children at child care centers had more friends than other disadvantaged parents. I’m not sure of the extent to which this is really true within our own early childhood program, based on some surveys I’ve conducted, but that’s the point of the innovation challenge: we want to identify problem areas that would benefit from stronger connections between parents. If you work for CAP, read about the challenge on InsideCAP and submit an idea to us. (Soon! The deadline is tomorrow.) If you don’t, you are always welcome to contribute your ideas as comments right here.

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Innovation in Flyover Territory

Just last week the Stanford Graduate School of Business’s Center for Social Innovation hosted a roundtable for the newly-created White House Office on Social Innovation.  Headed by Sonal Shah, formerly of Google, the Office of Social Innovation seeks to develop new funding for social innovation, expand national service, increase civic participation through new media, and develop new partnerships both within the federal bureacracy and with private partners. 

Seeing this raises two thoughts for me – on the one hand, it’s easy to think “Maybe I should pack up and move to the coast, where there’s lots of innovation experience to learn from and energy to inspire.”  On the other hand, some of what the new White House office wants to do aligns with what Innovation Lab here at CAP is all about – especially the part about building partnerships and using “new” media (i.e. this blog).  And then I feel good that we’re on a good track, a track that may be more established elsewhere but is nonetheless just as critical to have outside the typical hotbeds of innovation. 

As Garth Saloner, incoming dean at Stanford’s Business School said at the roundtable, “The scarcity is not in the ideas, the scarcity is in the organizaitonal capacity to help grow these ideas.”  CAP and Innovation Lab believe this capacity is needed not just in Silicon Valley or Washington, D.C., but right here in Tulsa as well, and we’re proud to be a part of it.

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Getting It Right vs. Getting It Seen

A group out of New Haven, CT called Innovations for Poverty Action is evaluating anti-poverty programs around the globe to determine what works and what doesn’t. In their words:

Innovations for Poverty Action applies rigorous research techniques to test and develop solutions to real-world problems faced by the poor in developing countries.

Great. The anti-poverty world (whether we’re talking domestic or international poverty) needs as much information as it can get about what works and what doesn’t. And their roster of researchers is impressive enough that I trust their findings.

There are quite a few of these sorts of initiatives going on right now. I can name four off the top of my head, without even resorting to Google: MDRC (originally the Manpower Development Research Corporation), Mathematica Policy Research, the Center for What Works, and Edutopia.

It seems to me that the challenge before us has shifted. Access to skilled evaluators has been greatly expanded, as has awareness by funders that they have to start including evaluation costs in their grantmaking. It’s no longer about whether we should, how to, or who can evaluate promising programs. The problem is diffusing that information and enabling replication of successful models.

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Non-profits and the T-Shaped People

No, “T-shaped” people are not anatomically deformed nor extraterrestial beings. I came across the term in the excellent book The Ten Faces of Innovation by Tom Kelley:

At IDEO, we’ve found that some of our most valuable Cross-Pollinators are what we call “T-shaped” individuals. That is, they enjoy a breadth of knowledge in many fields, but they also have depth in at least one area of expertise.  (p. 75)

T-shaped people are excellent at “cross-pollinating” between disciplines and ways of thinking. Their breadth of knowledge allows them to apply insights and innovations from other fields to another (usually to their area of expertise). Kelley recommends making a point of hiring individuals with this trait, but I might add that organizations could also do a better job of identifying and supporting the ones that are already there.

I started thinking about the T-shaped people that I know and it occurred to me that non-profits are natural magnets for this trait.

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The More the Merrier

In an attempt to keep my head above water, I am simply going to post to this article without further comment:

“Unboxed: For Innovators, There is Brainpower in Numbers,” New York Times. December 7, 2008.

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Boston Comment

So, it’s true, it takes exactly the amount of time that you’ve been away to get caught up once you’re back and then some. This brings me to today and I can finally share some experience and reflection on the TI trip to Boston last week. It was probably one of the most memorable and incredible experiences I’ve ever had and it wasn’t even vacation. Warning: This is a long post but it serves many purposes. The main reason being that I want to avoid retelling my experience 100x and it was amazing. Feel free to skim or skip but I refuse to tell this in neat bullet points. I’ve written and rewritten this post in my head, but now I just need to start.

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Parent Involvement Innovation

I’ve heard of child-care and home school coops before, but not this. A letter to the editor in yesterday’s Washington Post praises D.C.’s cooperative play program:

The major reason the children are doing so well is that all of the parents at the program are active participants in the education of their children. Parents at each school go through the same criminal and health screenings that paid professionals undergo, and because parents volunteer every day, each site needs only one teacher to maintain a high adult-to-child ratio, a hallmark of successful preschool programs. The participation of parents, along with the sponsorship of the city, also makes the preschool co-op play program affordable. Many private preschools are out of reach for low-income and middle-class families. Combined with the significant benefits of parental engagement, the preschool co-op play program is a valuable resource for parents of all incomes.

The program is open to children aged 18 months to 5 years and runs from 9am to noon every school day. Every parent must volunteer one day per child weekly (though this requirement is usually softened) and commit to regularly attending Parent Board meetings. The cost is $7 per day or $1,176 per school year.

The difference here is that it combines some of the benefits of a coop (parent involvement, cost control) with the quality of center-based care (certified professionals, low adult-child ratios), while remaining accessible to working parents. I imagine even full-time workers could arrange a work schedule that allowed for the 3 hours per week of volunteering.

How could this apply to CAP, which runs a no-cost childcare program? One idea that comes to my mind is trying this program for before- or after-care.

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Be Your Own Innovator

I’m sure everyone here has a lot to say about our trip to Boston. I’ll be posting my reflections as soon as I get through the inbox.

We spend a good amount of time writing and thinking about innovation, but we don’t always get to act on quickly creative ideas. But you can help teachers act on their own classroom innovations at DonorsChoose.org. Teachers post their ideas and funding requests, and you choose which to donate to. There are lots available in Oklahoma, and several of our local foundations will match your contribution.

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Guest Post: Changing our Will Not to Change

The TI team is en route to Boston today, so our friend and non-resident strategist Jeff Schwartz has written a guest post for your enjoyment.

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I am reading a very interesting new book by Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey called, Seven Languages of Transformation: How The Way We Talk Can Change the Way We Work. Kegan and Lahey are two of the leaders of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

They are working on promoting change in educational leadership to produce better results from public schools. They quote a Harvard colleague as saying, “Whenever someone comes to me for help, . . . I listen very hard and ask myself, ‘What does this person really want — and what they do to keep from getting it?'”

A central theory of the book is that it is possible to identify “an unexpected source of boundless energy to bring [the changes we want] into being.” In the authors view, “the possibility of extraordinary change in individuals and organizations” lies becoming aware of and consciously addressing the unconscious or parallel commitments we change agents hold to beliefs, perspectives, and values that incline us “not to change.”

If, as cartoonist Walt Kelly told us years ago, “We has met the enemy . . . and it is us,” then there is good news in this. We ourselves hold the key to making change happen.

But we have to come to see that the key exists, realize that we hold it, be willing to place it in the lock, and turn the key. These can turn out to be mighty big challenges.

I will offer one example — not from the book, but from my own experience with a different nonprofit — that we might consider to understand this premise and how it might work. Organization A says it is committed to expanding its service to the unserved target population of a neighboring area to the place where it now provides the core of its services. That would bring about significant beneficial change in a variety of ways if the desired action were taken.

Organization A’s leader says to herself, “Sure I’d like to do that. I agree with the Board, we should do that.” At the same time, Organization A’s leader says to herself, “I already have a work-life balance issue. I am shortchanging my family. I am short-changing my self by not exercising enough. I am already short-changing my staff. I am already short-changing the people who we are supposed to serve in our existing area of core focus. So I don’t see how we can expand our service area to cover a new group of deserving folks.”

This is not so unconscious as some of the examples that Kegan and Lahey site, but it illustrates how commitments to change can be offset, hindered, etc. by other co-existing commitments — to family, to self, to staff, to current customers — that make honoring a new commitment seem difficult. Unless there is a commitment to work through the process that Kegan and Lahey offer in their book, this kind of inclination not to change frequently frustrates the simultaneously held commitment to bring about change. So how does this apply to CAP? How does it apply to each of us? What are we willing to do to confront these internal barriers to change?

Jeff Schwartz is President and founder of Kela Associates, a “community of practitioners working for social change.” We’re not at all jealous that Jeff now resides on the island of Maui in Hawaii.

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Philadelphia Field Project

Here’s something. The Philadelphia Field Project is an inter-disciplinary project out of Penn State University that looks for non-economic solutions to poverty. The theory is that there are lots of things that impede one’s ability to escape poverty, including the high costs of urban transportation, inadequate access to healthcare and nutritious food, poor schools, etc. The vision of the project is to “take an interdisciplinary substantive approach by asking why specific people in particular places spend what they do on meeting basic needs in the hope of finding less expensive, technically more benign, and ecologically less destructive ways of satisfying those needs.”

The gist seems to be that there are lots of costs associated with poverty, and that by alleviating these costs you raise one’s “effective income” – thus helping move someone out of poverty without focusing on income, savings, jobs, etc. Now I’m not entirely sure how this really differs from any approach that tackles barriers to employment or economic mobility – it seems really a matter of framing. But the way you frame a problem can have profound consequences for the solutions you come up with, so more power to them. Plus it gets lots of undergraduate students involved in applied research and community service. (My alma mater, TU, could stand to take some lessons from this for its TURC program.

Anyway the projects aren’t really overly constrained: one student taught yoga to residents of West Philadelphia. Read about the students’ projects here.

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