In early October, staff from the National Association of Counties Research Foundation interviewed Boone County, Mo.’s Commissioner Janet Thompson and Executive Director of Boone County’s Cradle to Career Alliance, Dr. Crystal Kroner. Last year, Boone County launched their Brilliant Beginnings Initiative, a community-driven effort to plan and implement an infrastructure improvement to their early childhood system, also known as a universal family connection and referral, which helps to ensure all families in the community have access to the high-quality resources available in their county. In the interview transcript below, the team from Boone County shares their story about how they’re strengthening their system to improve access to well-coordinated services and offers guidance to other counties interested in following a similar path so that all children and families can meet their full potential. For more information, please visit: http://www.cradletocareeralliance.org/2019/05/01/brilliant-beginnings-initiative/.
Tell me a little bit about Boone County and Brilliant Beginnings.
Our initiative, Brilliant Beginnings, is improving family support in Boone County by creating a seamless, universal connection and referral system for early childhood development. While this voluntary system will be available to all families, we have focused special attention on increasing the level and quality of participation from underrepresented families experiencing chronic disparities beginning prenatal through their educational experiences and beyond.
The Boone County early childhood effort is somewhat unique because we are doing it in partnership with the National Association of Counties Research Foundation (NACoRF) and StriveTogether’s Cradle to Career Alliance. The collective resources and support from national and local organizations have helped the county strengthen and coordinate services in our community. Along with the benefit of having services made available through our children’s mental health tax, the county’s strategic decision to centralize a service taxonomy for locally funded programs set up an incredible foundation for planning a local collective impact project. From there, Boone County’s Cradle to Career was established and able to come in and form a planning team of experts to collect local data—often from our own research and needs assessments—so we could better understand our local landscape of prenatal-to-three resources in the community. Now, we are really trying to create more integrated and streamlined processes that will help us to reach and build trust with more families, so they don’t slip through cracks which oftentimes happens in less coordinated referral systems.
How are you building Brilliant Beginnings? What types of strategies are you employing?
The planning for this universal system has been an inclusive and collective process involving a diverse set of stakeholders coming together in order design a comprehensive system and reduce barriers for families navigating programs and services in our community. Because we wanted to design a well-coordinated intake process, we invited planning team members representing community and health care agencies working with low-income, refugee, and underrepresented families to help us better understand program participation barriers so we can form better strategies to address them. Building trust with both providers and parents has been key. Currently, we are very excited to be initiating a partnership with a Kansas City collective impact initiative called Promise 1000. Together, we will be piloting their model locally – starting first by adopting a common set of performance metrics to be used across the system so we can monitor child and family outcomes and also implementing a training infrastructure similar to a hub/spoke model for potential scaling in the state of Missouri. There is never a dull moment!
Have you experienced any challenges along the way? How have you worked through them? What, if anything, do you wish you would’ve done differently?
Though it is certainly not unique to Boone County, one of the biggest challenges is getting our hands on current data. There is a tremendous need for getting organized around this issue, both for those who collect data and those sharing it. Although the focus seems often to be on the latter, it really is a relationship between the sender and receiver. In other words, as receivers we must ask ourselves, why are we asking for specific data? Are we still using it, or have we been asking for it for so long that we don’t remember the purpose? What questions or issues are we trying to understand, and are we actually capturing that information?
What has surprised you most about this work?
The most surprising part of our work has been that many of the stakeholders in community don’t see the link between early childhood and the potential financial gain in a community as a result of investing in young children early. It has been interesting to see light bulbs go off in people’s heads as they start to understand these linkages.
What advice would you give to another county official who wants to do something similar in their community?
In my opinion, counties should bring together members of the business community to meet with individuals for whom early childhood education has made a difference. It’s helpful for members of the business community to hear from those directly impacted by early childhood services so that they can begin to strategize ways to translate that into the economic health of their community.