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Thread STL Directory and Resources

The purpose of this directory is to support and facilitate connection among Thread STL members. This is not an exhaustive list of partnerships and coalition professionals in our region, nor is it a complete list of institutions and other entities involved in partnership work; rather, this is a snapshot of our members at a certain point in time. This directory will be updated regularly to reflect changes in membership and partnerships work in which our members participate.

Here is the 2020 Edition of the Thread STL Connection Directory

 

Thread Member Meetings

Click Tabs Below for Member Meeting Months

February 20, 2019

Featured Speaker Series

April 17, 2019

Building communities, connecting with peers and kicking off the learning cohorts

June 19, 2019

Regional Data Alliance

The June Thread STL Meeting featured presentation was by Paul Sorenson, Director of the Regional Data Alliance (RDA). He shared highlights and lessons from the formation of the partnership, as well as lead a discussion on ways the RDA can serve partnerships and coalitions in the St. Louis region. 

 

August 21, 2019
Thread STL August 21 Member Meeting 
Unpack Communication & Empowerment with the Community Impact Network
  • August 2019 Member Meeting Agenda – PDF of the agenda from our member meeting.
  • August 2019 Member Meeting PPT – PDF of the PowerPoint from our member meeting.
  •  5 by Age 5, Youth 1st, Work, Opportunity, & Wealth (WOW), and Back 2 Basics. The Community Impact Network coalitions flyer here.
  • Normandy School Collaborative boundary handout here.
  • The Community Impact Network Membership Benefits flyer here.
  • Fall 2019 Training Opportunities flyer here.
  • August 2019 Member Meeting Recap – a brief review of what we did, what we heard, and what we saw at this month’s member meeting.
October 16, 2019
Thread STL October 16 Member Meeting 
THREAD STL HEARS
The Ferguson Commission’s
CALL TO ACTION!
February 19, 2020
Thread STL February 19 Member Meeting 
Unearth Communication & Coordination
wtih The St. Louis Vacancy Collaborative
May 20, 2020
Thread STL May 20th Member Meeting 
Get Ready to Get Online
with Ready by 5!
August 19, 2020
Thread STL August 19th Member Meeting: 
Forward through Ferguson!
October 21, 2020
Thread STL October 21st Member Meeting: 
Generate Health STL
February 17th, 2021
Thread STL February 17th, 2021 Member Meeting: 
East Side Aligned
Learning Cohorts

Click Tabs Below for Cohorts

Learning Cohorts Background
  • Learning Cohorts Background– This document details the development and implementation of Thread STL’s 2018 Learning Cohorts
  • Hopes & Fears Activity – This activity is designed to help break the ice in the group and to familiarize members with each other’s motivations for joining. Moving forward, this activity will be used during the first meeting of a learning cohort to help elicit participants’ expectations and apprehensions for the cohort. This document provides specific facilitation instructions for the Hopes and Fears activity.
  • Connection Circles Activity – Use this tool to identify connections between a seemingly unconnected group of topics or to help the group prioritize and select their shared objectives. Moving forward, this activity will be used during the first meeting of a learning cohort to help elicit a list of potential shared learning topics for members to explore together. This document provides specific facilitation instructions for the Connection Circles activity.
  • Scriptapedia – This resource is curated and provided by the Social System Design Lab at the Brown School of Social Work at Washington University. The resources contained on this website are geared toward group model building workshops but can be easily adapted and used for nearly any facilitated group activity.
2018 Evaluation Cohort
  • Evaluation Knowledge Brief– This document tracks and curates the learning and resources of the 2018 Evaluation Learning Cohort.
  • Evaluation 101 class for ThreadSTL. Evaluation 101 from Paul Evensen. Learn about the basic building blocks of process, outcome, and impact evaluation.
  • Falmouth MA Case Study. This presentation by Paul Evensen provides an overview of his work with the Falmouth Prevention Partnership and their efforts to evaluate the impact of their coalition’s work in reducing teen alcohol consumption.
  • Adapted Module 12 – Evaluating the Initiative. This activity provides space for discussion to determine what “attributes” or qualities are most vital to a partnership’s evaluation, and how to ensure that these attributes are incorporated into the structure and philosophy of the evaluation.
  • Results-Based Accountability. This website provides an overview to Results-Based Accountability, an evaluation framework that can be employed in the evaluation of coalitions and partnerships.
  • Performance Accountability-Teaching. This is a website that can be used to guide stakeholders through the development of a Results-Based Accountability evaluation process by asking a series of questions including baseline information, key partners, and identifying measures of success.
  • Population Accountability- Teaching. Similar to the Performance Accountability form, this form walks stakeholders through a series of questions that will help frame what outcomes are desired and achievable at the population level. 
  • Living Cities’ Cross-Sector Partnership Assessment. This tool provides immediate, tailored feedback about your partnership’s progress and development based on your responses.
2018 Facilitation Cohort
  • Thread STL Detailed Meeting Agenda Template – This detailed agenda template will help you plan each meeting, step by step, to keep you on track and help anyone step into the facilitation role and be ready for success.
  • Developing Facilitation Skills – by Patricia Prendiville. A book with extensive detail on developing your facilitation skills, divided into chapters by major facilitation skill categories.
2019 Evaluation Cohort Meeting #1
2019 Leadership Cohort Meeting #1
2019 Sustainability Cohort Meeting #1
2019 Sustainability Cohort Meeting #2
2019 Evaluation Cohort Meeting #2
2019 Leadership Cohort Meeting #2
2019 Leadership Cohort Meeting #3
2019 Sustainability Cohort Meeting #3
2019 Evaluation Cohort Meeting #3

ELC members evaluation types/methodologies to research resources:

  1. Becky- Outcome Harvesting:

 

  1. Joe- Performance measurement/management:
  • David Hunter
  • Roca Boston
    • Performance Management in action to drive amazing results
  • Sarah Buek/IllumiLab
    • Awesome local expert who does PD/consulting. (she defines performance management slightly differently than most of the other sources I saw)
  • Aspen Institute

3. Amber- L2I2:

  • Amber’s L2I2 PowerPoint link here
  1. Amanda Sutter:

AEA365: LAWG Week: Evaluation Firms: Let’s Hire Youth! by Katie Fritz Fogel and Selam Tilahun

LAWG Week: Evaluation Firms: Let’s Hire Youth! by Katie Fritz Fogel and Selam Tilahun

Posted: 29 Jul 2019 12:18 AM PDT

Hello! We’re Katie Fritz Fogel and Selam Tilahun, Research Associates at Rainbow Research, a nonprofit evaluation and applied community research firm in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

In Flipping the Script: White Privilege and Community Building, Sally Leiderman challenges evaluators to imagine “What would anti-racist evaluation look like?”

We see evaluation as one tool for anti-racist community building through creating employment pathways in evaluation for BIPOC, queer and poor youth as well as youth with disabilities.

As meaningful as we find participatory evaluation processes—including training and paid compensation for youth to co-create, implement, and benefit from evaluation processes and products—when such projects end, youth evaluators typically revert to being ‘just’ youth. Meanwhile, we continue in our roles as the ‘expert’ evaluators. Evaluation firms have an opportunity and obligation to shift this power dynamic by creating employment pathways for youth that lead to permanent and sustainable employment in evaluation or related fields.

We’re not there yet, but working on it. We’ve been practicing multiple ways to promote youth in evaluation roles: engaging and supporting teams of young adults through participatory evaluation projects (YPAR-model); introducing high school summer interns to short-term, intensive evaluation work experiences; and hosting college student interns.

Lessons Learned: Facilitate youth participatory evaluation experiences intentionally, with a lens toward ongoing employment.

  • Encourage youth to see the experience as job training, and pay them. Create time to discuss how the skills they are practicing (e.g., customer service, community engagement) through evaluation apply to other fields. Help them update their resumes accordingly.
  • Share your social capital. Explicitly give youth permission to contact you afterwards to facilitate informational interviews or serve as a reference. We’ve been surprised by how many youth involved in short-term projects take us up on this!

Hot Tips and Cool Tricks: Host young adults as evaluation interns.

  • Assume that youth employees come with experiences that add value to the work. Assume they have ideas, knowledge, and expertise to share.
  • Prepare staff to reframe their roles to include mentor and role model.
  • Train staff in how to give productive feedback and create a work climate that supports growth among staff of all ages and experience levels.
  • When reviewing work with them, ask youth evaluators questions that promote critical thinking and reflection.
  • Support youth when they make mistakes. It’s important that interns, like all of us, have opportunities to try new things and potentially not have them pan out as expected.
  • Pay interns as professionals!

Rad Resources: Many organizations can help you connect with youth who want summer- or semester-long internships:

Hot Tip for visitors to Minnesota for Evaluation 2019:

Rainbow Research’s offices are located in a very hip part of town. We’re nearby the Minneapolis Chain of Lakes Regional Park, Walker Art Center and Sculpture Gardens, the American Swedish Institute (where the Turnblad Mansion is a sight to see!), and In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theater. Any of these places would be a great way to get a taste of the Twin Cities.

We’re looking forward to the fall and the Evaluation 2019 conference all this week with our colleagues in the Local Arrangements Working Group (LAWG). Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to contribute to aea365? Review the contribution guidelines and send your draft post to aea365@eval.org.
2019 Evaluation Cohort Meeting #4

ELC members evaluation types/methodologies to research resources below. 

Research Assignment Resources:

  1. Community Innovation and Action Center:

The Community Check Box Evaluation System is a web-based recording, measurement, and reporting tool for community work. It helps practitioners document their community change efforts and share success stories with funders and other stakeholders.

The Check Box helps communities better understand and improve their efforts, and helps answer questions such as:

  • What are we accomplishing?
  • Are we bringing about changes in communities and systems?
  • What factors or processes enhance our change efforts?
  • How are community/system changes contributing to improvement in population-level health outcomes?

The Community Check Box includes supports for: a) Documenting changes in communities and systems (e.g., new or modified programs and policies related to the effort); b) Analyzing the distribution of changes, for instance by goal addressed; c) Uncovering factors associated with increases/ decreases in the rate of change; d) Tracking changes in community-level indicators (e.g., rates of childhood obesity); and e) Online and print graphs about the initiative and its impact.

Some Check Box features:

  • Integrated resources for technical support
  • Customized measures
  • Participatory; allows communities direct access to their evaluation information
  • Real-time graphs for reflection and reporting
  • Information on accomplishments can be used to secure resources and assure accountability
  • Encourages participatory evaluation and co-learning among partners

 

  1. Amanda Sutter:

Mission Accomplished! How one coalition demonstrated a contribution to big outcomes

Paul Evensen, PhD           Raymond Tamasi

President, CSG LLC           President/CEO, Gosnold on Cape Cod

Cindy Pharis, MS               Patricia Mitrokostas

Community Evaluator, CSG LLC   Director of Prevention, Gosnold on Cape Cod

Amanda Sutter, MA, MSW

© 2014 CSG, LLC Helping you create healthier communities

Full Presentation Link: https://slideplayer.com/slide/16474883/

2019 Leadership Cohort Meeting #4
2019 Sustainability Cohort Meeting #4
2020 Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Meeting #1
2020 Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Meeting #2

The items that were adapted (in general, ‘organization’ was changed to ‘collaborative’) from Annie E. Casey’s assessment that is found here:

1. October 28, 2020- DEI Cohort Meeting PowerPoint – PDF of the PowerPoint from our cohort meeting.

  1. Illinois Action for Children also cites this self-assessment as a resource, which is a great one: https://www.coalitioncommunitiescolor.org/research-and-publications/cccorgassessment
  1. Finally, ABLE Change’s assessment can also be found here: http://systemexchange.org/application/files/2315/4327/2119/ABLe_EquityOrganizationalSelf-Assessment_F.pdf

          Additional Resources: 

  1. Kellogg Foundation Racial Inequity (Build Your Own!) Customized Toolkit: http://www.racialequityresourceguide.org/
  1. How to talk about structural racism: https://www.racialequityinstitute.com/groundwaterapproach
  1. Racial Equity Impact Assessment Tool – helps orgs understand how different racial and ethnic groups will likely be affected by a proposed policy or decision: https://www.raceforward.org/practice/tools/racial-equity-impact-assessment-toolkit
  1. Annie E. Casey ‘s data-driven, targeted strategies, programs and resources for those working with children and youth: https://www.aecf.org/work/equity-and-inclusion/‌
  1. Collaborating for Equity & Justice: Moving Beyond Collective Impact article:  https://nonprofitquarterly.org/collaborating-equity-justice-moving-beyond-collective-impact/
  1. Community Toolbox Justice Action Toolkit: https://ctb.ku.edu/en/justice-action-toolkit
  1. For Collaborations focused on children and youth, examples from the early childhood sector: https://www.buildinitiative.org/The-Issues/Diversity-Equity                                                                                                    8. ABLE Change Equity Impact Assessment (a deeper overview of systems change): http://ablechange.msu.edu/images/CHIRTools/Muskegon/ABLe-Equity-Impact-Assessment-Tool-4-6-18.pdf
2020 Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Meeting #3

Here are a number of tools that we discussed today that can help you bring a system change and equity lens to your strategies and actions:

1. December 2, 2020- DEI Cohort Meeting PowerPoint – PDF of the PowerPoint from our cohort meeting.

2. ABLE Change System Scan: This is a big tool! You may want to use it in pieces: http://systemexchange.org/application/files/2315/8626/0393/ABLe_SystemScanMenu_4.7.20.pdf

3. Equity Impact Assessment: This is a tool that helps you vet policies or action to better understand the intended and unintended consequences of potential actions, policy changes and strategies:

https://www.raceforward.org/sites/default/files/RacialJusticeImpactAssessment_v5.pdf

4. This resource provides a step by step road map to dig into Root Causes, focusing on the bottom of the iceberg – with prioritization for high impact/high feasibility strategies. Check it out!

http://systemexchange.org/application/files/8215/8634/9721/2020-04-08_08-42_710.pdf

5. Importance of Disaggregated data and flipping the script: https://weallcount.com/

6. Evaluation method aligned with a racial equity lens: https://www.publicprofit.net/Ripple-Effect-Mapping-REM 

7. Forward through Ferguson offers an equity assessment for any organization, coalition or partnership, as well as a 3 hour workshop that focuses on the iceberg called the Systems Change Primer. More info here https://forwardthroughferguson.org/racialequitycapacity/

8. Two local racial equity leaders, Nicole Hudson and Adelaide Lancaster, have created a Systems Change Training Series focused on Data, Power and Narrative called St. Louis Sandbox. Learn more here: https://www.stlsandbox.com/ 

2020 Diversity Equity and Inclusion Knowledge Brief

Purpose

This knowledge brief (link below) serves two core purposes:
1) To document the knowledge and resources generated and shared by participants in Thread STL’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI); and
2) To create a living document which other Thread STL members can learn from, contribute to, and build off as they continue to explore pertinent knowledge, skills, and resources for successful facilitation of community partnerships.

1. Thread STL 2020 Diversity Equity and Inclusion Knowledge Brief  

Trainings, Webinars, and Professional Development

Click Tabs Below for Trainings, Webinars, and Professional Development

Articles of Interest
  • The Tactics of Trust. Participants in a large, complex collaboration can build a capacity for finding common ground–and it doesn’t have to take years. From the Stanford Social Innovation Review Winter 2016 issue.
  • What Keeps Steering Committee Members Coming to Meetings? (Hint: F-words!) From the Collective Impact Forum’s Blog.
  • 10 Things You Need to Build Clever Coalitions This article from Stanford Social Innovation Review details, from the author’s perspective, the 10 components of successful and effective coalitions. We hope you find this article thought-provoking for your work in leading and managing coalitions.
  • The Context Experts In a recently released white paper, The Tamarack Institute in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada is defining and lifting-up the need for “context experts” (read: residents/constituents) as crucial stakeholders in the planning and decision-making processes for programs, organizations, and initiatives intended to serve their communities.
  • Ending White Supremacy in Ourselves This editorial from Nonprofit Quarterly reviews the violence that erupted in Charlottesville, Virginia on August 12, 2017; critiques the administration’s response to the violence; and calls upon nonprofit leaders to consider the role we are to play as leaders in dismantling racist and oppressive systems.
    • Charlottesville and a Time for Gracious Anger Vu Le helps subscribers begin to process the horrible acts committed in Charlottesville, Virginia – and proposes the nonprofit sector strike a new tone in reaction to the events.
    • What Does it Look Like for a Community to Own Its Future – This article from Nonprofit Quarterly dives deep into questions about radical shifts in ownership of community change. How do nonprofit organizations ensure their respective communities have ownership in the programs and services they participate in – and thereby, their own futures?
    • The Courage to be Unfair – This article from Vu Le at Nonprofit AF explores the challenges and fears many of us have of talking frankly about equity and equality.
    • Power Prism® Coalition Mapping Worksheet – link to handout for coalition mapping.
    Useful Links
    Relevant Webinars
    • Lessons from 500+ Cross Sector Partnerships. This webinar from Living Cities identifies the challenges most cross-sector partnerships face, and explores cross-sector case studies to help you improve your own work.
    Professional Development
    Blogs

    To view our latest Member Snapshot, click here.