35 Years - Older and Wiser

The first week of May, 1978 – where did you find yourself? The Monday of that week, I arrived at 355 Washington Street in Saint Paul (current site of The Ordway Theater), to begin working at Wilder Research, continuing a career dedicated to improving the lives of individuals, families, and communities, through social research. 

• In 1978, Jimmy Carter served as President, with Minnesota’s own Walter Mondale as Vice President.
• The United States had about 223 million residents – who could expect to live, on average, 73.5 years. 
• A first class stamp cost 13 cents; it rose to 15 cents mid-year. 
• Military rebels in Afghanistan murdered both the president and his brother during a coup. 
• The United States began to mint dollar coins with the image of women’s suffragist, Susan B. Anthony. The public largely disliked them, due to their resemblance to quarters. 
• Lesley Brown, who died just last year in 2012, gave birth to the world's first test tube baby. 
• The average cost of a home was $54,800. 
• The first, public, dial-up “computerized bulletin board system” went online in Chicago. 
• 400 of the world’s top climatologists met in Geneva to discuss climate change and if changes in climate were influenced by pollution. 

Clearly, the world has evolved in some ways, but has perhaps remained very much the same in others. The Internet has all but replaced computerized bulletin boards; Afghanistan remains turbulent; many people have not made up their minds about how to address climate change.

You can observe similarities and differences in the practice of social research over the past 35 years – the topics, the findings, and the methods.

In the 1970s, poverty among aging people consumed far more attention than did poverty among children. Social and health programs benefiting the elderly eventually alleviated much of that concern. Meanwhile, as the twentieth century ended, trends in childhood poverty and the condition of children in the United States began to trouble us. Awareness increased regarding the effects of social, environmental, and economic factors upon children – even effects upon early brain development, which occur prenatally.

Some words and issues common today did not appear on the radar screen, or just barely did so, in the seventies. The concept of “diversity”, for example, had limited circulation since at least the 1940s, but had not emerged in general use. Desegregation and affirmative action comprised policy approaches to eliminate discrimination. Racial issues stood as a major threat to the well-being of our communities. However, the notion of a diverse society, building on the collective strengths of multiple races and cultures, just approached the horizon.

The “achievement gap” did not receive the widespread attention it receives today. “Immigration issues” engendered less vitriol. Nobody even cared about the dependency ratio – the ratio of working age people to aging people who need support – given the large number of baby boomers in the beginning phase of their economically productive years. But that has certainly changed now, with the large number of aging and imminently retiring boomers, succeeded by a numerically smaller generation.

Researchers assessed public behaviors, attitudes, and opinions in the 1970s by means of mailed surveys and phone surveys.  With one (and usually only one) landline phone number in each household, researchers could use “random digit dialing” effectively, to produce representative samples of respondents. Today, with the proliferation of cell phones, a large proportion of households without even one landline, and the high mobility of some populations, researchers require new methods to locate survey respondents who will supply credible, representative information.

As I look back at Wilder Research over the past 35 years, what makes me the most proud, personally? It’s probably facilitating the growth and accomplishments of so many talented people – starting with about a dozen Wilder Research staff at the time I became Executive Director, to approximately 100 who serve here today. They carry out 200 or so projects each year, working directly with 150 to 200 organizations – evaluating effectiveness, assisting agencies to develop and improve their work, assessing changes in community trends and the implications of those trends. Wilder Research staff serve thousands more locally, nationally, and internationally by distributing information, sharing reports, training, and advising nonprofit, government, and neighborhood organizations who strive to make their parts of the world better places.

What has remained constant at Wilder Research, not just from the 1970s to now, but since our first study in 1917, is the commitment to provide objective, credible, culturally-responsive research to improve lives and communities.

We have seen that research can enable all people of all types to overcome challenges and live their lives better than if we never asked questions, never challenged conventional wisdom, never provided facts to inform judgment.

We should never and can never give up our searching for answers.

Trying Real Hard...

“You can’t always get what you want”

The number of homeless people does not reflect a situation that we want: More than 10,000 homeless people in Minnesota, including about 3,500 children with their parents, and about 1100 age 21 and under without parents, were counted in our 2012 study.

Our triennial statewide homeless study produces more than this simple tally. Over the next several months, we will report on the backgrounds and characteristics of homeless Minnesotans, for example: how many are mothers, fathers; how many find themselves on the streets because of abuse or neglect or because their family simply lacked the ability to care for them; how many have physical and mental impairments that create barriers to obtaining and keeping a job; how many earn incomes and maintain employment, but their resources don’t suffice in an expensive rental market. This information will be used by the state, service providers, and others to address homelessness.

To paraphrase the Rolling Stones:

“But if you try real hard, you’ll get what you need”

We can never completely eliminate homelessness, especially the short-term, acute variety. Beyond that, however, what about chronic homelessness? How close to zero can we bring the numbers? What should we consider as we “try real hard”?

“Trying real hard” involves a commitment to some short-term solutions - doing all we can feasibly accomplish to provide temporary shelter to house people with different needs. However, the short-term shelter response does not address larger social and economic issues which produce homelessness.

We need to do more; we need to think long-term. Homelessness constitutes a large issue. As concerned community members, we can perhaps feel overwhelmed. So, it helps to break our thinking about solutions into meaningful parts.

“Trying real hard” compels us to distinguish individual causes of homelessness from social-structural causes, and to address each as necessary.  Some of the reasons for homelessness relate to characteristics of homeless people themselves. Other reasons derive from society and the economy in general.

For example, for one portion of the homeless population, poverty explains their situation. With income sufficient to afford suitable housing, they could remain out of shelters. Their individual routes to homelessness include lack of education and job skills. So, if we want to create an effective community solution, we face the task of doing whatever we can to upgrade their abilities to match the needs of available jobs (not jobs in general, but available jobs in our labor market).

However, as skilled as people might be, they will not find jobs unless jobs exist for the finding. Economic development initiatives and job creation initiatives can reduce the rates of homelessness, if they offer employment at sufficient wages to secure permanent housing. We need to recognize that solutions to homelessness do not fall solely within the housing sector. Our business sector, finance sector, and anyone else who can promote the creation of economic opportunities – they all have a role in reducing homelessness.

The path to homelessness can include experiences of violence or abuse. Strategically, we need to sort out the implications. For the currently homeless, we need to ask whether those fleeing abuse or violence require just temporary safety and symptom relief while they recalibrate their life plans, or whether they need more significant help. If they need more significant help, we need to determine how to provide it most effectively and economically. Addressing homelessness long-term, though, means looking beyond the currently homeless, to prevention. Our actions as individuals, as well as our collective actions through policies and programs, to reduce violence and abuse will reduce homelessness in the future.

A portion of the homeless population will require more than just shelter for the rest of their lives. This includes some severely chronically mentally ill people and some people with functional impairments that preclude independent living. For these, we need to continue to enhance the most effective and economical assisted living environments.

Nevertheless, much of the solution does not lie in the strategic and the rational. It does not demand economic analysis and the formulation of strategic plans. A substantial portion of the solution lies in compassion. Merriam-Webster defines compassion as “sympathetic consciousness of others' distress together with a desire to alleviate it.”

A few hours before his death, Thomas Merton, a significant shaper of the conscience of the peace movement of the 1960s, told a conference: “The whole idea of compassion is based on a keen awareness of the interdependence of all these living beings, which are all part of one another, and all involved in one another.”

Interdependence characterizes our community – including the homeless and the non-homeless – whether the connections among us appear obvious or not – whether we have volunteered at a shelter, just driven past one, or don’t even know their locations.

Our homelessness study raises consciousness about others’ distress. To fulfill our obligations as community members, it is incumbent on us to alleviate this distress as much as we possibly can. We can’t always get what we want, but through a combination of rational planning and greathearted compassion we can try real hard to provide to the homeless much of what they need.

Information is Intervention

“Information is Intervention”: Those words describe how, in this Information Age of the 21st century, Minnesota Compass, the Wilder Research-led social indicators project, can produce tangible impacts on the quality of life in our communities, on the health and well-being of every one of us, and on the lives of future generations in our state.

About 130 community and foundation leaders, managers of nonprofit organizations, and others participated in the 2013 annual meeting of Minnesota Compass. The meeting built upon the premise that, in light of the social and economic opportunities and challenges for our state, we need to identify creative, innovative solutions – other than simply “more money” – in order to maintain strong communities and to protect vulnerable populations.

Craig Helmstetter, from Wilder Research, shined a light on our aging population, growing diversity, and large racial disparities in poverty, high school graduation, proportion of adults working, and homeownership.    

The number of people over age 65, many with significant health and social needs, will increase dramatically over the next 15 years. At the same time, there will be fewer working-age people to support older adults, lowering the dependency ratio from 5 working-age adults for every older adult, to 3 working-age adults for every older adult.  However, the older generation will include a lot of people interested in, and fit enough, to continue contributing productively to their communities, if suitable opportunities emerge. That prospect – an increase in needs on the one hand, but an increased potential for older paid and unpaid workers to meet those needs – should motivate us to think innovatively how we harness the constructive energy of the “silver tsunami”.

As for the young people in Minnesota, most of you working to improve the lives of youth already have developed great familiarity with the achievement gap. (Some of you even advised us on the measures we use to track that gap. We thanked our advisors at the meeting; and I thank you again!) The negative implications of the achievement gap lie just a generation away, unless we do something now. As Dr. Helmstetter showed, children of color constitute the fastest growing part of our population. They will become the workforce of Minnesota’s future, the community leaders of the future, and the parents of the future. If children of color cannot achieve in math and reading – if they cannot complete post-secondary education, or even complete high school, at a time when, as The New York Times reports, businesses increasingly demand college degrees for all positions, then we face a serious obstacle to sustaining this state’s economic productivity and its quality of life.

We cannot expect money to help us meet the challenges our communities face in the coming decades. With the federal debt in the teens of trillions of dollars, and with the state budget problem at about $1.1 billion, no new big bucks will begin to flow. Even if we do witness some increase in funding to address the demographic and social challenges which I just noted, it would not suffice to produce the impacts we require.

So, our annual meeting keynote speaker, Alex Cirillo, illustrated how people working to build strong communities can adapt the 3M model of innovation as an effective tool. He explained the importance of including people "not like us" in collaboration and defined key roles: specialists; scouts; architects; adapters. He also explained the potential payoff of looking for ideas that work in one realm, to apply them to another – success factors in agriculture that might work in human services, models in education that could apply in health care, principles of transportation logistics that could assist in channeling volunteers to productive opportunities for service. Some of these thoughts might seem bizarre, but idea links like these can stimulate worthwhile change (and, in the for-profit world, often garner a lot of money!).

Information is intervention. We plan to continue using Compass to change thinking, policies, systems, and behavior – with the ultimate result, a better Minnesota!

You can see more about all of the annual meeting presentations on our Event Spotlight page. Please take a look!

Language Assets, not Limited Proficiency

You have probably heard the joke:

What do you call someone who speaks three languages? Tri-lingual.

What do you call someone who speaks two languages? Bi-lingual.

What do you call someone who speaks one language? American.

Although a joke, it elicits serious questions about whether United States residents, on average, fall below par on multi-lingual ability. It also perhaps relates to the perception that we Americans less often carry a passport than do the people of most other developed countries.

At a meeting this morning with government, foundation, and business leaders, Mayor RT Rybak asked: “Shouldn’t we start to view multi-lingual competency as an asset, rather than a deficit?” A child who speaks a language other than English may need a few years to master the English language. However, the Mayor wondered out loud, once having learned English, doesn’t this child and similar others offer our region some competitive advantages within the globalized economy in which we live?

Greater language facility means greater capacity to understand foreign markets, more ability to communicate with customers in different countries. It means that we can work more efficiently, with fewer errors and greater productivity, in endeavors that require collaboration among people on different parts of the globe.

Speaking two languages, some research suggests, can enhance the “executive function” of children’s brains – that is, the higher level abilities that influence other critical processes such as attention, memory, and motor skills. Executive function enables human beings to initiate and stop actions, to plan for the future, to adapt behavior to changing circumstances, and to form concepts and think abstractly.

Research has shown that students who speak two languages can more accurately solve problems involving misleading cues. In addition, research has indicated that people who know how to use multiple languages, and therefore must manipulate their minds to bring one language to the fore, depending on the situation, develop skills that can support other mental processes and social interaction. Evidence suggests that they can better resolve conflicts; they can more perceptively monitor their environment. A recent study in the Journal of Neuroscience even suggests that speaking two languages might prevent Alzheimer’s and other age-related declines in “neural efficiency for cognitive control processes.”

So, the Mayor may have some good insight. Perhaps all of us should pick up another language, if we want to stay healthy and live longer. And, we should appreciate the collective potential of a multi-lingual Twin Cities, as we move forward in the twenty-first century.

I once printed as many words as I could find in a couple of hours one morning, for the word “peace.” I will print them again:

Paix (French)

Paz (Spanish)

Frieden (German)

ειρήνη (Greek)

和平 (Chinese)

Vrede (Dutch)

Vrede (Afrikaans)

Pace (Italian)

平和 (Japanese)

평화 (Korean)

Paz (Portuguese)

мир (Russian)

أمان (طمأنينة) (Arabic)

Mir (Croatian)

ukuthula (Zulu)

àlàáfíà (Yoruba)

kev sib haum xeeb (Hmong)

nabad (Somali)

Happy New Year, and Thanks, from Wilder Research!

Many of you gave us assistance, support, and advice during 2012. Together, we tried to answer challenging questions about the best ways to meet community needs. We addressed tough issues – racial and income gaps in education and health, increasing access to good child care, addressing homelessness, and other topics. We collaborated with you to improve the effectiveness of individual agencies and of the nonprofit and government sectors as a whole.

We did all of this in pursuit of our mission to improve the lives of individuals, families and communities through research.

One blog post can tell just part of the story. Wilder Research staff worked on 200+ projects last year, directly serving hundreds of organizations who share our desire to transform lives and improve everyone's quality of life. We produced about 3 reports per week, with many of them posted on our website and the websites of others. During our last complete fiscal year, more than 4,100 people attend our presentations; the media mentioned us 215 times; 24,000+ visits were recorded on our Wilder Research web pages; and YouTube tallied 7,650 views of our videos.

Some of our 2012 highlights appear here – which I share out of appreciation for you, our supporters, clients, funders, donors, collaborators, and friends who enabled us to accomplish all of this and much more. (To see the specific information produced by our 2012 research efforts, along with details on who requested, funded, and collaborated on this work, visit our website.)

Improve access to early learning opportunities. Regarding this critical issue for the future:

• A Wilder Research report identified trends and gaps in access to early learning opportunities for the 156,000 low-income children age 5 and younger in Minnesota and described the effectiveness of four approaches to expand access. In April 2012, we held a forum to highlight the policy implications of study findings.

• Wilder Research completed an economic analysis of the value of investing in healthy development and school readiness.
• Both of these studies have supported early childhood funders and advocates in their collective efforts to improve access to early learning opportunities for low-income children. The work of Wilder Research on this topic led to securing a national 3 year grant from the Kellogg Foundation.

Close the achievement gap. Our collaborative research efforts to improve education at the classroom, school, district, and state levels have included:

• A study of Response to Intervention (RtI), an evidence-based framework to identify children’s learning issues and intervene early
• Ongoing evaluation of Project Early Kindergarten, a program in the Saint Paul Schools to improve school readiness among English language learners and low-income children
• Ongoing evaluation of the Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports initiative which trains schools around the state on evidence-based approaches to improve school safety and climate
• An evaluation of a Saint Paul charter school that is one of the first case studies to document how a school with a predominantly low-income, East African student population addresses challenges posed by being a high-poverty school
• A longitudinal study of STARBASE Minnesota, aimed at increasing low-income students’ interest in science, technology, engineering and math. This study received national attention during 2012.

Identify health inequities and address health system improvements. Several new studies focused on this topic, including:

• Research showing that poorer health outcomes continue to result from both poverty and lower levels of education. The results of this study will help to address the underlying causes that contribute to racial and income health inequities.
• A study which identified health care needs of American Indians living in the Twin Cities area.
• An assessment which documented the role of community health workers to reach Native American, African-American and other underserved populations, and demonstrated the economic value of investing in community health workers.

Integrate mental health and substance abuse prevention systems

• Wilder Research staff serve as the lead assessment and evaluation experts for a federally-funded statewide strategic planning effort to align substance abuse prevention, mental health, and primary care.

Improve the mental health system of care

• Wilder Research manages MN Kids Database, a collaborative, web-based integrated data management system to improve school-based mental health services.
• We have begun a project to explore social indicators of children’s mental health.
• Wilder Research is also developing metrics related to adult mental health services/access in the east metro, and is working to help hospitals conduct mandated community health assessments.

Engage diverse voices to build corridors of opportunity around transportation lines

• Wilder Research undertook research on several projects related to Corridors of Opportunity, working to ensure strong, vibrant communities around seven-major transportation corridors under development in the Twin Cities Region.

Ensure a strong nonprofit sector

A new study on nonprofit mergers by Wilder Research and Map for Nonprofits received attention in July at a Greater Twin Cities United Way Leadership Forum, attended by nearly 600 organization leaders and board members, and philanthropists. This first-of-its-kind study identified concrete ingredients for success, if agencies feel that by merging they can increase their community impacts.

Minnesota Compass: Measuring progress, inspiring action

Supported by a collaboration of private Minnesota foundations, this quality-of-life initiative has become the go-to resource for organizations and concerned citizens throughout the state to inform them about community issues. During 2012, we witnessed the value of a new and comprehensive set of Saint Paul and Minneapolis Neighborhood Profiles, for grassroots and neighborhoods groups working to improve their communities. The profiles, which provide neighborhood-level measures including demographics, housing, education, and workforce, have been accessed more than 7000 times.

 

Also in 2012, Compass accepted a national award from the Community Indicators Consortium and received recognition as “the model others around the world look to” for developing user-friendly community indicators.

Improve early childhood development in the African-American community.

Wilder Research worked closely with the African-American Babies Project, finding a number of risk-factors, including inadequate prenatal care, low-birth weight, and teen pregnancy to be much higher for African-American babies than for other babies born in the metro area. The initiative intends to bring education and services to parents, child care providers, and community members in an accessible, applicable, and culturally relevant way.

Moving forward in 2013

Two events occurred near the end of 2012; you will hear much more about them in 2013: 

• With a statewide group of 1,000 + volunteers, we interviewed more than 5,000 homeless people. Findings will become available during the coming months.
• We initiated the “Speaking for Ourselves” project. About 80 representatives of immigrant and refugee ethnic communities and of the organizations serving those communities joined us to plan a study which will learn more about how immigrants and refugees fare in the Twin Cities. 

Never before has research had such importance – for increasing the effectiveness of organizations serving our communities, and for improving community quality of life. We look forward to continuing our work with you – understanding trends, measuring and improving effectiveness, and empowering all of us to meet our aspirations to do good for the community.