[On-screen text: Place-based approaches and system level change
Insights from Mark Cabaj, international community change expert
President -Here to There Consulting (Canada)
Associate – Tamarak Institute]
[On-screen text: how can place-based approaches inform system level change?]
Mark Cabaj: The first one is the ability of place to a place based approaches to more easily zoom in and zoom out on wicked and complex issues.
So by zooming in meaning let's get a worm's-eye view of how this complex issue plays out in this place and the systemic factors related to it.
And then to zoom out and pay even more attention to those systemic reasons and saying at least we know where we might start.
The second thing that I think is important to note is government programs and services are a powerful intervention but that's not the only intervention to solve complex issues.
I've been in situations where community safety has been increased without any government intervention at all, just because residents organize themselves better and they create these community watches and they have these early warning systems when they see a drug deal going down.
So the idea that we could widen our gaze around the possible solutions that place has plenty to teach us and I think government needs that.
Because I've worked in government and we can get quite myopic at times.
The third thing that I think government that we can learn from place-based—and it's easy to watch it's hard to do—is accept that progress on complex issues actually doesn't begin with the plan.
Progress over time begins through a process of trial and error.
Strategy and responses emerge over time as people try things, and people try things and they develop responses and then they adapt them.
And we really work in a ‘plan the work, work the plan’ culture and have this the sense that that means discipline.
Discipline actually means paying attention to the complex situation on the ground, learning about it by trying to do things, and then adapting when you learn something.
So I there's no other way of working like that if you're in place, but I think governments can learn by simply watching that and then getting involved.
And the last thing, it touches on this earlier idea about resilience, to watch a place that has recovered and is in renewal and look at its history and realize that the only way it happened is because people were relentless.
This idea of relentless incrementalism.
And I think most people in their jobs are relentless, but most communities have reviewed renewed themselves over 10, 20 or 30 years.
And it's not because of any big bang solution—it was a million little solutions happening that accumulated eventually into a big one.
So the sort of this relentlessness an accumulation of small wins is something that we could all come.
[On-screen text: Why systems change is important]
Mark Cabaj: Karen Pittman is the CEO of the US Forum on Youth Investment and she came to Canada to one of our conferences and did a keynote.
And she came up with a Nobel prize-winning statement which is ‘programmatic interventions help people beat the odds but changing systems changes their odds’.
And so if we're in the game of moving the needle at scale on complex issues, programs are necessary but they're insufficient.
We have to shift systems that not only keep problems in place but often reproduce them.
[On-screen text: Are place-based approaches more successful at achieving system change than policy or program changes?]
Mark Cabaj: Is a return to place-based change some kind of magic bullet solution to all of our problems?
Is it something that we hope can turn the needle on things because all of our relentless efforts in non placed work haven't?
Maybe not, maybe what it is is a powerful complement to all the other things that we do that are non place-based over time and then when you look a little bit closer there's tons of outcomes.
They by themselves, however, place-based efforts are not enough to turn the needle on things.
Right before I came here I was at a session in Canada which was comparing early childhood development in New Hampshire and Quebec.
And I'm really editing this, but for the most part the New Hampshire early learning and care community had way more interesting programmatic interventions than we had.
Particularly at place, was very diverse, very thoughtful, well articulated, lots of scale—the Americans are good at scaling things—but their overall outcomes weren't as good as Quebec.
And one of the reasons was—and many people on the panel—pointed this out is Quebec may not be as terrific at some of the place-based programmatic stuff but in Quebec you have 12 (and the rest of Canada) 12 months parental leave.
You had 12 months with your kids and it might be 18 months soon and some if—depending on your employer—you can get topped up with your income up to 95%.
Daycare which is relatively world-class there in Quebec cost $5 a day and has since been increased to $7.50 a day.
There's free health care in Quebec, there isn't in New Hampshire.
So there this brings us back to the quote that you mentioned a couple years ago—programmatic interventions helped beat the odds systemsr interventions help change the odds.
There is systems change to be held at the place-based level and that is uncharted territory, we are not dealing with that enough, there is gold in those hills.
But it doesn't mean all systems changes is place-based.
What if you had better public policy?
That you had simple things like they did in Quebec that were quite transformational that made it were dramatically less important to have all those micro innovations at the place base level.
So it's not either place based alone, or it's not better or worse, it is a complementary package.
It doesn't absolve us of trying to go for good public policy overall.
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