HOW WE WORK
From early brain development, to literacy proficiency, to viable pathways to prosperity, and everything between, our backbone organization approaches systems change work in the following ways:
- WE WANT THE VERY BET FOR OUR COUNTY’S KIDS — We CONVENE stakeholders across sectors to uncover barriers and challenges that prevent students and families from achieving economic prosperity and identify evidence-based strategies that can successfully and sustainably remove said barriers.
- WE IDENTIFY AND FILL GAPS — Where systems or solutions do not already exist, we INCUBATE new initiatives. We lean on continuous improvement methodologies to implement innovative strategies, monitor their efficiency, and ultimately scale what works.
- WE LEAD AND DRIVE WITH DATA — Finally, we MONITOR a comprehensive, data-driven list of initiatives across the county to enable our partners to conduct root cause analyses, uncover performance improvement opportunities, and ensure shared measurement across organizations.
We work with dozens of cross-sector community partners to both inform the work we are leading and incubating, as well as collaborate on research and initiatives within our action teams and working groups.
What is collective impact?
Collective Impact is a multi-sector, collaborative approach to change systems and solve deep-rooted community challenges. By uniting organizations across Hamilton County to work together to address problems as their root cause, we can solve our greatest challenges permanently.
Collective Impact and system change initiatives like Chattanooga 2.0 move beyond programmatic or charitable responses to a community challenge and, rather, focus on addressing the structures within organizations and systems that hold a problem in place.
We work to fundamentally change the way systems behave because we believe that’s what it will take to change the outcomes of our children, students, and workforce.
A systems change approach ensures that we are not just treating the symptoms of systems that don’t serve our community. Instead, together we are building something better – a new approach and a new system in Chattanooga-Hamilton County that will change the future of our community and economy.
Strategic Framework
The opportunities for enhancement and collaboration from birth to career are vast and deep, so how does our small team decide what to work on? While many of our community partners are working on initiatives that will positively impact the 2030 goals we are tracking, our backbone team leads and participates in initiatives that can be found in this community-wide framework championed by Chattanooga 2.0. This is our team’s roadmap for where we’re going and how we’ll get there.