After years of discussing how to improve deep-rooted issues in Grant County, community leaders have finally put a strategic plan in place to hopefully create a better thriving community.
Dozens of Grant County leaders congregated for several hours at Ivy Tech Community College in Marion Thursday afternoon to build a coalition and section themselves off into 12 work groups tackling 12 focus areas in Grant County related to quality of life, education and family/home environments.
These 12 work groups, open for anyone in the community to join, will start meeting regularly in February of next year and embark on 180-day action plans that will hopefully yield some positive results in the key areas as soon as July 2017, according to Dawn Brown, executive director of the Community Foundation of Grant County.
“We were tired of the negative narratives and we were tired of constant talking about what could be done,” Brown said. “We really felt it was time to put a plan of action together so that we could go forth and do this together.”
The 12 focus areas were developed by a guiding team of nine community leaders over the course of this year.
One of the end goals of this coalition, Brown said, is to make Grant County the best place to live and raise a family. After several months of discussion, the guiding team developed a shared vision that thriving families make for a thriving community.
The guiding team formed last December after community members met at Indiana Wesleyan University to discuss Grant County poverty statistics that broke earlier in the year.
Members have met for three hours each month since January. They invited several community leaders to an event Thursday explaining their findings and asking for their support and involvement in the coalition.
Attendees at Thursday’s meeting included Marion Mayor Jess Alumbaugh and city government workers; members of the Family Service Society; Grant County school officials; IWU, Taylor University, Ivy Tech representatives; local churches; and members of the United Way of Grant County, the Marion-Grant County Chamber of Commerce, Project Leadership, Main Street Marion and more.
Attendees joined the work groups they were passionate about and ended the event brainstorming other community members they could recruit.
“This is a systems-based approach, not a programs-based approach,” Brown said, “so it’s remarkably different from anything we’ve done in the past.”
The whole initiative has been described as a “collective impact” effort rather than a “collaboration” effort.
Collective impact is a form of collaborating that has two critical elements, said John Peirce, a Fort Wayne-based consultant who focuses on collective impact and early childhood initiatives. The Community Foundation also created a grant hiring him as a consultant to the guiding team this year.
One element of collective impact, he said, is using data for critical decision making, and the other thing is having a “backbone person” who solely devotes his or her time to supporting the success of the coalition itself.
“Collective impact in particular is designed to attack very complex community-level problems, like poverty, like educational outcomes (and) community development,” Peirce said.
During the meeting Thursday, the dozens of community leaders present voted on hiring a “backbone person” or coordinator to manage the work groups.
Brown said the Community Foundation will spend the next 60 to 90 days looking to hire a backbone coordinator and locating the funding to do so. Once hired, the person’s sole job every day will be to focus on the initiative and development of the work groups.
Since most of the work group members have full time jobs outside this initiative, it will be easy for them to lose sight of the goal or get distracted, Peirce said. The purpose of the coordinator is to keep everyone on task.
He said he is encouraged by the amount of support from community leaders for the collective impact initiative and that he enjoyed working with the Guiding Team as well this past year.
“It hasn’t been easy work, but if it was easy, we would have already solved these issues,” Peirce said.
Brown cited a motivating quote from Drew Klacik, senior policy analyst at the Indiana University Public Policy Institute, from earlier in the evening. When someone says, “You can’t afford it,” the response should be, “I can’t afford not to.”
“Be proud. Don’t rest, and be better,” Klacik told community members. “The status quo is not acceptable.”