United Way of the Greater Lehigh Valley and The Rider-Pool Foundation Welcome Mark Cabaj to Discuss Collective Impact and Systems Change

United Way of the Greater Lehigh Valley (UWGLV) and The Rider-Pool Foundation welcomed systems change expert, Mark Cabaj, to the Lehigh Valley on May 15th for three days devoted to evaluating systems change. More than 80 community members gained knowledge on the best practices to confront complex social issues.
 
Mark has worn various hats throughout his career - working with organizations for thirty years to develop innovative responoses to complex issues. Starting as an investment advisor in Poland's Foreign Investment Agency in 1990 where he then switched hats to Foreign Assistance Coordinator for Grants in Poland's Ministry of Privatization. From there he became the Mission Coordinator for the United Natoins Development Program's first regional economic development inititive and in 1995 moved into the role of Coordinator of the Waterloo Region's Opportunities 2000 project - a collective impact inititive that won provincial, national and international awards. Five years later he became the Executive Director of the Canadian Community Economic Development Network and most recently Vice President of the Tamarack Institute. In 2011, he developed Here to There Consulting Inc. which allowed him to work more directly with groups in Canada, the United States and beyond that were working on tough societal issues including poverty, homelessness, academic achievement and community safety.

One of the goals of the training was to “learn the shifts in our systems to serve people in pain,” as stated by Marci Ronald-Lesko, Executive Vice President, UWGLV.
 
Shared measurement is a key component of collective impact and uses a common set of indicators to oversee an initiative’s performance, all while, tracking the progress in reaching goals. Shared measurement aids in creating clarity of focus, continuous learning and enables coordination and collaboration in improving data quality through three steps: design, develop, deploy.
 
Five emerging principles of shared measurement include:
 

1. Be certain about the outcomes you want to achieve before you commit ‘heavy’ to developing share measurement systems
2. Distinguish between shared outcomes, shared measures and shared measurement
3. Embed shared measurement process into effective learning and decision-making processes
4. Employ an agile versus ‘big design up front’ approach to development
5. Balance the use of shared measurement for learning and accountability

According to Mark Cabaj, President of From Here to There and an Associate of Tamarack Institute, accountability is another essential component of collective impact.
                                                                      


This two-hour session was part of a larger three-day event aimed at expanding the understanding of current societal trends in solving community problems and capacity building. Leaders from across the Lehigh Valley’s education, health care, business and non-profit sectors attended and got a “taste of the kind of things we’re seeing in the evolution of systems change,” said Cabaj. Organizations including Allentown, Easton, Parkland and Wilson area school districts, Lehigh Valley Health Network, Crayola, New Bethany Ministries and Greater Valley YMCA were a few among the handful of institutes present.
                                   
Referenced by Mark, Karen Pittman, CEO, Forum on Youth Investment and keynote speaker at the Tamarack Community Change Institute states, “programmatic interventions help people beat the odds. While systemic interventions can help change their odds.”          
 


Discussions ended with next step planning in evaluating systems-change and accountability.