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.

New Prescription for Good Health

How much of good health results from our lifestyle? From our healthcare? From the environment in which we live? It might surprise you to learn the extent to which our health– good or bad –depends on our environment. In fact, experts assert that at least half of our health depends on our social, economic, and physical environment: the education we received; our income; our neighborhood; the quality of our housing; and other elements of our background and current circumstances.

In Minneapolis and St. Paul, people living in one neighborhood can expect to live as much as 13 years longer than people living just a few miles down the road. If you want to see how your zip code stacks up against others, take a look at the study which we at Wilder Research completed with the Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota Foundation. Where you live, how much education you received, your income –all are factors that can shorten or lengthen your life; they influence your blood pressure, your susceptibility to chronic diseases, and other physical conditions.

Traditionally, public health practitioners and community development finance professionals have focused on these social determinants of health using different lenses. Public health has focused primarily on increasing awareness of healthy behaviors (eating nutritious food, exercising, not smoking, etc.), on policies which protect the public from harm (food handling laws, fluoridated water, smoking bans, etc.), and on increasing access to health services. Community development finance professionals have focused on designing living environments best suited to good health and on financing major projects which can offer access to health care, child care, housing, and better food, for example. Despite similar missions, these two sectors have largely worked independently.

Clearly, a convergence (as Dr. Risa Lavizzo-Mourey of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation calls it) between these two disciplines makes a lot of sense. Individuals may seek to do all the right things – exercise, provide enriched child development experiences for their children, secure a good job with an income sufficient to provide stable housing to themselves and their families, and much more. However, the environment can inhibit them from accomplishing their goals. No matter what your skill level, for example, if no jobs exist, you won’t find a good job, you won’t have a good income, you won’t secure quality housing for yourself and your family.

Wilder Research collaborated with the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota Foundation, to foster just such a convergence here in Minnesota. We brought together public health and human service people and community development finance people – in the hope that they might join forces. Our daylong conference showed representatives from the two sectors the benefits of collaborating with each other and gave each the “basic 101 level” understanding of the other sector – so they can talk with each other, understand opportunities and constraints for action, and ultimately engage in more joint projects.

Fortunately, we have already made some good strides in Minnesota. Andriana Abariotes of LISC, one of our advisers and seminar presenters, identified in her article, Community Development, Health’s New Partner, some outstanding existing local efforts. For example, she notes an initiative which both promotes better health care and addresses longer-term social determinants of health: Northpoint Health and Wellness, “where the continued expansion of its clinic and campus can not only provide quality health services but also serve as an anchor in the redevelopment of Penn and Plymouth Avenues in North Minneapolis, improving community safety and providing access to jobs.”

Abariotes also points to the Backyard Initiative (an effort in which Wilder Research had the good fortune to play a role during the design phase): “a community partnership led by Allina Health and the Cultural Wellness Center to engage residents in a completely different conversation and approach to their health. It is innovation playing out in real time, where deep listening and learning are core to changing the nature of the relationship between a major health provider and its patients and neighbors. Also changing are residents’ sense of ownership and efficacy and their own relationship to each other and to institutions in the neighborhood.”

Through our work at Wilder Research, we have the capacity to build understanding, kindle imagination, promote collaboration, change systems, and improve the lives of individuals, families, and communities by working “upstream.” Our society cannot sustainably deal with problems one by one after they occur. “Healthy Communities” – our partnership with the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, the Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota Foundation, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation – offers the opportunity to build strengths (not just remedy weaknesses), lengthen and improve everyone’s quality of life, and prevent problems before they occur in this generation and in the future.

(A video of the keynote and resources from the Minnesota Healthy Communities conference are available here on our website.)

The Study We Wish Didn't Happen, and the Presentations We Love to Do: Both during the Same Busy Week for Wilder Research

Two major events occur this week at Wilder Research.

One event: Our statewide homelessness survey. As part of our triennial study of Homelessness in Minnesota, we undertake a comprehensive effort to talk with about 5,000 homeless people in Minnesota. We don’t merely count people and tally their social characteristics, such as their age, education, and race. We learn more deeply about homeless individuals and families through personal interviews which enable us to understand their past living conditions, their health, their employment experiences and their future employ-ability, along with characteristics of their families and social networks. More than 1,000 volunteers assist with this effort, conducting interviews at more than 300 sites.

We wish we didn't need to carry out this research, despite the great pride we take in the fact that we can effectively accomplish something of its size and complexity. The Wilder Research Homelessness Study has earned national recognition as an outstanding method for understanding homelessness and for influencing policies and programs related to the homeless. Nonetheless, the very need for the research indicates that homelessness remains a significant issue of concern in Minnesota. Solutions to that issue require collaborative efforts among different groups in the community, using sound information.

Many years ago, when we began this study, well-intentioned people from a variety of organizations – nonprofit, government, foundations, business, advocacy groups, faith-based, etc. – sought to help the homeless. However, they lacked an effective platform for building joint strategies and for assessing their progress. As often occurs in community initiatives, disagreements arose back in those days about the numbers and needs of homeless people. In contrast, now, through this study, and the related efforts of our colleagues in other organizations, we can respond not only compassionately, but also more knowledgeably, to the needs of homeless people. We can also build policies and programs with greater likelihood of effectiveness.

So, hopefully, the need for a statewide study of homelessness will diminish and eventually disappear, at some time in the future…..

(FYI: Craig Helmstetter of Wilder Research will host a live Twitter conference about the Homelessness Study at noon Central Time on Thursday, the 25^th. Tweet your questions to @FollowMHP; use hashtag #HinMN to follow the conversation.) 

The second event this week: The national meeting of the American Evaluation Association, which takes place at the Convention Center in Minneapolis. Many research staff from Wilder Research will participate. We plan to learn from our national colleagues as well as share what we know.

Seventeen of our Wilder Research staff appear on the program – focusing on topics such as improving the educational achievement of children, evaluating community initiatives, improving mental health services for children and adults (including different cultural communities), building evaluation capacity in an organization that educates the public and preserves understanding of our past (the Minnesota Historical Society), promoting child safety, collaborating as a community and/or as a network of organizations to use data effectively to improve people’s lives, using data to understand the impact of major development effort (the Twin Cities Central Corridor project), how foundations use research of the type that we provide at Wilder Research, and more!

Through research such as the Homelessness Study, and through presentations to local and national audiences, we join arms with others who seek to make the world a better place for all individuals, families, and communities. We hope to work with you on this!