New Associates Orientation Meeting Day 2, Session 2: Problem-Solving with Pilot Sites Instructions and Exercise Prompts Purpose The purpose of this exercise is to provide associates with an opportunity to demonstrate the principles of peer to peer consulting and knowledge shared from the field of their work. Instructions * Divide associates into five, pre-assigned groups. Assign one person to be the facilitator and one person to be the scribe for the group. * Give each group a detailed case study/scenario. * Ask each group to discuss the following questions: 1. What challenges is this site experiencing? What are the underlying issues? 2. What additional information, if any, do you need to better understand these challenges? 3. How would you intervene with this site? 4. What strategies, alternatives, and approaches would you offer this community to overcome these challenges? 5. What follow-up, if any, is needed? 6. What are the indicators of a successful technical assistance engagement? In other words, how will you know if your efforts were successful? 7. What challenges, if any, do you anticipate experiencing during this engagement as an associate? How would you overcome these challenges? * Each group will summarize your scenario and report back on how you would intervene, what strategies you would offer this community to overcome their challenges, and what challenges you anticipate facing on this site visit and how you might overcome them. * The facilitator will debrief with the large group. 1. A Newly Formed Collaborative Struggles to Develop a Unified Purpose Your technical assistance team is responding to a request from the site’s project director. She reports that everything is going well. Since the grant award, the collaborative has reached consensus on the structure of the collaborative and a general work plan for the first year. But, there are two main issues that the newly formed collaboration can’t seem to get beyond. First, the group cannot reach consensus on the definition of violence that will guide their work. There are questions about whether the definition should include abuse by personal care attendants and violence that occurs within institutional settings. And, second, while the group has proposed a broad-based collaboration in their original application to OVW, there is significant resistance to including a focus on psychiatric disabilities and other mental health issues in their work. You attend the monthly meeting of the collaboration. For the most part, the meeting is congenial but you notice that the group is divided on these issues along disciplines and that the room is literally divided across disciplines - with disability-related service providers on one side of the room, violence-related service providers on the other, and the remaining providers in the middle. Tensions run high when these two contentious issues are discussed. But, it is clear from the groups’ interactions in the meeting that they are passionate about this work and committed to improving their community’s response to women with disabilities and Deaf women who have experienced violence. After the meeting, the Project Director asks the technical assistance team to stay behind. She doesn’t understand why these issues are sticking points for the group. She thinks that these issues “aren’t that big of a deal” and cannot believe that the group still hasn’t reached consensus on these issues. She is worried that these discussions are putting the site behind on their timeline. She wants to assert her “power” as the Project Director and make a unilateral decision for the group: stick with the traditional definition of domestic violence and sexual assault that only includes intimate partners and broaden the groups focus to include psychiatric disabilities. Discussion Questions * What challenges is this site experiencing? What are the underlying issues behind these challenges? * What additional information, if any, do you need to better understand these challenges? * How would you intervene with this site? * What strategies, alternatives, and approaches would you offer this community to overcome these challenges? * What follow-up, if any, is needed? * What are the indicators of a successful technical assistance engagement? In other words, how will you know if your efforts were successful? * What challenges, if any, do you anticipate experiencing during this engagement as an associate? How would you overcome these challenges? 2. A Site Experiences Significant Budget Cuts and Struggles with Shared Responsibility Your technical assistance team is responding to a request from one of our sites. This particular site has just completed a strategic planning session and identified several training needs in the community. One of the core initiatives they have proposed is to train 30 service provider agencies in the area over the next year to identify and respond to domestic violence among people with disabilities. According to the strategic plan, the shelter (who is the primary grantee) will work in collaboration with the independent living center to develop this training, but the shelter will take the lead for this activity (providing the leadership, oversight, and bulk of the staff time for conducting the trainings). Some of the curriculum has been developed, but the process has been disrupted. There have been massive city and county budget cuts. The independent living center has lost some money, but the shelter lost a huge portion of its funding - causing staff to be laid-off or reassigned to different projects. The initial request for technical assistance is to help this site figure out how to meet this objective of their strategic plan given the change in resources. Two weeks later, your team arrives in this community for your site visit. You sit in on one of their collaborative meetings before your session with the leadership team of this site. Much to your surprise, you learn that the Project Director has just resigned and taken a new position in the community that “offers more stable funding.” Between this staff change and the funding cuts, the collaboration is in a state of panic and confusion. Through the course of this meeting, you come to realize that the Project Director took responsibility for almost all aspects of the collaborative and, without her, the collaboration lacks direction. People aren’t clear about how to modify the strategic plan given these changes or how to keep things moving in the interim. As people are gathering their things to leave after the meeting is over, you hear several people say that the meeting was very unproductive. They fear that the entire process will be like this and, given the budget cuts, they might not come back - their time is too precious. Another person said that she wouldn’t mind coming “we (her organization) were getting our fair share of the grant money.” Discussion Questions * What challenges is this site experiencing? What are the underlying issues behind these challenges? * What additional information, if any, do you need to better understand these challenges? * How would you intervene with this site? * What strategies, alternatives, and approaches would you offer this community to overcome these challenges? * What follow-up, if any, is needed? * What are the indicators of a successful technical assistance engagement? In other words, how will you know if your efforts were successful? * What challenges, if any, do you anticipate experiencing during this engagement as an associate? How would you overcome these challenges? 3. A Long-standing Collaboration Struggles to Grow The members of this collaboration (located in a small southwest city) have a long history of working together. Before Michelle (the ILC representative) moved into the disability field, she spent twelve years working with Julie (the DV shelter representative) to establish and then manage the first battered women’s shelter in their community. Over the years they’ve worked together on various coalitions, and planned countless conferences, vigils, and rallies in their community on violence against women with disabilities and Deaf women. Through their work Julie and Michelle have come to be dear friends and they are often referred to as “the dynamic duo.” When Julie learned about this call for grant proposals she was thrilled to apply because it would provide an opportunity for the two of them to work together in this area in a more formal way. Julie and Michelle wrote the proposal together and they recruited their longtime colleagues and friends from the Rape Crisis Center and the Disability Legal to be project partners. In their six-months, the collaboration went through a strategic planning process. Part of this process was to further develop the collaborative and to define their scope of work. Through this process, they formed new relationships with two agencies: one that serves the Deaf community and one that serves people who are blind. When the grant program officer reviewed their latest progress report, she saw a lack of thinking outside the box and was troubled by the fact that the collaborative was not reaching out to more organizations, especially those that address elder abuse and substance abuse issues as well as those organizations that serve primarily people of color. Concerned that this group is not on the right track, the program officer calls Vera to ask that training and TA be provided to this collaborative. Vera deploys you to meet with the leadership of this community to facilitate a strategic planning session on collaboration. When you arrive you are met with some resistance. The members feel that they are “old hats” at this community work, and they are bewildered and offended by your presence. Discussion Questions * What challenges is this site experiencing? What are the underlying issues behind these challenges? * What additional information, if any, do you need to better understand these challenges? * How would you intervene with this site? * What strategies, alternatives, and approaches would you offer this community to overcome these challenges? * What follow-up, if any, is needed? * What are the indicators of a successful technical assistance engagement? In other words, how will you know if your efforts were successful? * What challenges, if any, do you anticipate experiencing during this engagement as an associate? How would you overcome these challenges? 4. Organizational Change Management A collaborative located in a large, urban community (that consists of representatives from disability service providing agencies, a domestic violence shelter and a rape crisis center) has been working over the last two years to develop a shared vision for their work. So far, the collaborative developed a strategic plan, conducted a community needs assessment, and recently completed a series of cross trainings for their agency staff. Now in their second year of funding, the agencies in the collaborative are committed to implementing changes in their own programs to better meet the needs of victims with disabilities so that they can serve as model programs for other community agencies. Each agency developed an action plan and a timeline for implementing these changes in their respective programs. To date, the disability and sexual assault agencies have both made formidable program innovations and already they are seeing results. Disability and Deaf organizations have increased their referrals to the sexual assault center and domestic violence shelter. As a result, the rape crisis center has seen an increased calls from women with disabilities and even been receiving positive evaluations of their services by these women. However, the battered women’s shelter is having a challenging time implementing their action plan, and now they are far behind the others in terms for meeting their goals. The shelter director, Karen (who represents the shelter on the collaborative), wholly supports these changes but she underestimated the strong resistance other staff would have to the action plan. Now Karen is coming to the meetings exacerbated, and she tells the others, “I’m sorry, but it seems that regardless of all the training we conducted and policy changes I’ve made, my staff is entrenched in the old way of doing things. I’ve tried to move them along in this process, but they resist.” Karen talked about how the staff in administration are “dragging their heals” around selecting a contractor to make the architectural changes that will bring the shelter into ADA compliance, and just last week another woman with a disability who had a personal care attendant was denied shelter at Karen’s agency. Similarly, a representative from the Deaf organization reported that no one at the shelter answered the TTY when one of her clients called for help. The collaborative agency representatives want to be supportive, but they’re wondering at what point they need to hold Karen accountable to the action plan in order to move their work ahead. Vera is called to assist this collaborative in two ways: Karen needs help managing the change process in her own agency, and the collaborative as a whole needs assistance developing a mechanism(s) to hold all the members accountable to the goals that they’ve set for themselves. Discussion Questions * What challenges is this site experiencing? What are the underlying issues behind these challenges? * What additional information, if any, do you need to better understand these challenges? * How would you intervene with this site? * What strategies, alternatives, and approaches would you offer this community to overcome these challenges? * What follow-up, if any, is needed? * What are the indicators of a successful technical assistance engagement? In other words, how will you know if your efforts were successful? * What challenges, if any, do you anticipate experiencing during this engagement as an associate? How would you overcome these challenges? 5. More Barriers to Collaboration A collaborative in a rural, southern community consists of a mid- and high level staff from the battered women’s shelter, Deaf Advocacy Services, the Rape Crisis Center, the ILC and the Disability Law Center. This community is substantially behind in terms of developing a shared vision and plan for their work, and is consistently contending with challenges that prevent them for forging ahead. Due to shifting priorities, the representatives from the DV shelter and rape crisis center (both agency directors) stopped attending meetings. This slowed the work of the collaboration significantly since this took place in the middle of the strategic planning process. Both agency directors then chose to send program coordinators to attend in their place. While these new representatives were engaged in the work of the collaborative, they had little power in their own agency to implement change or commit resources, and they themselves knew little about disability issues. This led to additional challenges, which was that the program coordinators often talked about disability in ways that deeply offended the representatives from the disability agencies and they have resisted having interpreters for collaborative meetings. The disability and Deaf advocates educated the violence against women advocates about these issues, but they are still occurring. Some of the collaborative members resent having to spend valuable time doing this type of training when they had hoped that, at this point, the collaborative would be at a place where they could focus on substantive work. Now, the collaborative is divided along various lines, and the representative for the lead agency (the ILC) is at her wits end. She asks Vera to help her motivate the collaborative to get back on track, although she feels it may be hopeless at this point. She tells Vera that the relations between the members are deteriorating, and they’re all loosing motivation and investment. Discussion Questions * What challenges is this site experiencing? What are the underlying issues behind these challenges? * What additional information, if any, do you need to better understand these challenges? * How would you intervene with this site? * What strategies, alternatives, and approaches would you offer this community to overcome these challenges? * What follow-up, if any, is needed? * What are the indicators of a successful technical assistance engagement? In other words, how will you know if your efforts were successful? * What challenges, if any, do you anticipate experiencing during this engagement as an associate? How would you overcome these challenges? Accessing Safety Initiative New Associates Orientation Meeting, Day 2 PM Session