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Results Based Accountability Driving The Children's Trust's Strategic Planning Process
Over the past weeks, The Children’s Trust Board has formally begun to develop a strategic plan to guide our future investments in order to best serve Miami-Dade children and families over the next five years. Mark Friedman, the founder of Results Based Accountability (RBA) and author of Trying Hard Is Not Good Enough, and professional facilitator Deitre Epps, of the Results Leadership Group, have helped set the stage.

RBA
Mark Friedman facilitated a fast-paced seminar on the
RBA framework for Trust staff, providers and others.
Both embrace the RBA framework, which starts with establishing a clear vision of the conditions you seek – healthy children, strong families, a safe community – and then works backward step by step to decide who and what are needed to manifest the vision. RBA trainings have been offered in 40 states and seven countries around the world and appear to have tapped a vital nerve – a need, especially in dire economic times, to move from talk to action and create meaningful change.

"The RBA framework shifts the focus away from programs and services and puts it where it ought to be: on what we want to achieve, on what results we want to create in the community," said Modesto E. Abety, president and CEO of The Children’s Trust. "If we start with the vision that families were all that they could be, that children were all they could be, and backtrack from there, we can identify the measurements to know if we’re getting where we want to go. The science informs us."

RBA
Kathleen Dexter, of The Children's Trust, shares
results-based ideas generated by her small-group.
Children’s Trust senior research analyst Dr. Lisa Pittman said that the RBA concepts are nothing new.

“RBA offers a simple framework – a structure – to look at both the community and at providers and to be clear about what results each strives to achieve.” A number of other children’s services councils around the state and the Florida Children and Youth Cabinet are also training on the same approach. The long-term goal is to have more organizations locally embrace the RBA framework. 

At a workshop Jan. 11 titled “How Are Kids Doing in Miami-Dade County?”, the Board examined a host of factors – neighborhood crime, children with health insurance, graduation rates – to gauge how Miami-Dade County children fared vis-à-vis those across the state and nationally. Last spring, several new members joined the Board as part of the rotation process and Maria Alonso was selected as the new chair; the workshop served as an intensive debriefing, especially for these newer members.    

Shortly after, Friedman led the board through an RBA half-day workshop titled “How Do We Make Our Investments Count” and facilitated a full-day session for Trust staff, other funders, service providers and community members, including representatives from county government, the school system and other planning bodies.

Lana Smirnova, who runs a nonprofit that teaches martial arts to children with special needs, attended the RBA session of nearly 200 participants. 

“We’re only getting started with our center, and I need to go to trainings to improve what we’re trying to do,” said Smirnova, whose “staff” is comprised of her husband and children. “I really like the simplicity of the language in this training, and the framework will help us because we’re getting more children all the time in the program.”

Friedman said it was important for any group that hopes to work together to bring about meaningful change to agree on common language – be it English, Spanish or Swahili. The group must agree on what they mean when they use certain words, he said, and urged simple, concrete terms and to avoid jargon.  

“Some of these ideas I’ve heard before, but this approach reinforced my understanding and the structure helps keep the discussion focused,” said Shelley-Anne Glasgow-Wilson, a senior health specialist for the Health Council of South Florida.

“This process helps eliminate the bullying – when someone wants to try and push their own agenda through a group process,” she said. Glasgow-Wilson planned to use what she’d learned for an upcoming Consortium for a Healthier Miami-Dade, a process involving a wide number of civic and government groups.

RBA
RBA training participants used the framework to gen-
erate actionable ideas and indicators to measure them.
Friedman emphasized too the importance of data as a baseline for the complicated process of changing communities, but said that data doesn’t have to be generated by experts. Community surveys with a few questions, walking a neighborhood to count vacant houses, a show of hands at meetings of how many have been victimized by crime in the past month provides important information. Start with the best data you have, he said, and if that’s not enough, generate what you need.   

He urged participants to keep their expectations realistic and to celebrate whatever progress and improvements are made. Friedman cited the example of a mayor who sought to reduce crime in his city by 50 percent, but “only” managed to cut it by 47 percent – and was criticized in the local media. 

Friedman’s training and efforts are motivated by a single question: What would we do differently if outcomes really mattered?

“To get from talk to action, somebody must feel and say – the way it is, that’s not okay. You have to really ask yourself what if it really mattered if we succeeded or failed.”

The RBA framework is applicable for both what a community wants for all of its children and for what a provider wants for its client, and each is guided by one main question: Is anyone better off for the effort and the work involved?

“I like that in RBA not everything is about the numbers,” said Joy Clark, a field advisor for Barry University’s School of Social Work. “My passion as a social worker is with the clients. Sometimes the only question I get is: How many clients did you see? But what about the mom that I met with? The front line is how are we going to serve the client? With this framework, there’s a way to win-win.”

The Children’s Trust Board continued its strategic planning process on Feb. 8 with a session to review Trust strategies, other community funding and research or data that can best inform its process.

A full-day board retreat is set for March 6 where the 33-member Board will develop a draft of its strategic investment plan. Three community meetings set for April 8, 9 & 10 will be held at separate locations around the county – to gather input from the community and feedback on the draft.