Example - Establishing a Vision and Mission

A SCHOOL-COMMUNITY INITIATIVE TO PREVENT ADOLESCENT PREGNANCY

BACKGROUND AND CONTEXT

From 1999-2002, the Kansas Health Foundation funded three Kansas communities to implement Phase 2 of the School-Community Sexual Risk Reduction Initiative. The overall initiative aimed to mobilize communities and create environments to support behavior change and reduced rates of adolescent pregnancy. Community members, in collaboration with local agencies and organizations, aimed to bring about community changes - new or modified programs, policies, and practices in the environment to address the mission. Within two months of the first year, local project staff participated in retreats and other forms of technical assistance to discuss strategies for community involvement and to define priorities for action and intervention.

CORE TASKS

1. Convene a group of individuals and organizations from the community who are affected by the problem or goal:

Upon return to their communities, some projects hosted listening sessions, focus groups, sector-specific roundtables, and other forms of town meetings. They often contacted and interviewed particular community members "face-to-face" (e.g., meetings with school principals and teachers). They also recruited parents, youth, community organizations, and other members to attend project-sponsored events (e.g., roundtable discussion over lunch sponsored by local library; youth seminar sponsored by the local school; prayer breakfast with local church leaders). By contrast, other projects relied predominantly on staff feedback to determine a project vision and mission.

2. Ask and learn what is important to people in your community (vision) and what the group would do and why (mission) to address these issues:

  • At these gatherings, project staff asked a series of questions such as:

What kind of community (or school, neighborhood, etc.) do we want to create?
What do you see as the community's (or school's, neighborhood's, etc.) major issues or problems or goals?
What do you see as the community's major strengths and assets?

In addition to dialogue at these community events, some projects also connected with community members via written surveys and even door-to-door interviews. One project asked teens "What is YOUR point of view?" and got 116 responses regarding their recommended focus and direction for the project to prevent adolescent pregnancy.

3. Design and select vision and mission statements based on nominated ideas that are acceptable to all members:

One project relied on several meetings with school and health department personnel to develop vision and mission statements that reflected their ideas. The resulting vision statement was "caring communities for healthy youth decisions" --- the why. This was to be accomplished by a mission to "use preventive education to create partnerships between young people and communities to reduce teen pregnancies"--- the what.

Similarly, another project defined vision and mission statements according to staff's understanding of community suggestions: "a caring community that works together to promote healthy lifestyles by putting children first" [the why] by "providing teens with skills and knowledge to make healthy decision with regard to relationships" [the what].

By contrast, the third community effort aimed to "encourage healthy, lifelong decisions among youth" [the why] by "implementing a multi-component school and community initiative" [the what]. Their vision and mission statements were based on multiple town hall meetings with the community as well as hundreds of one-on-one encounters with youth and community leaders to discuss priorities for this community effort. Ultimately, choices for all the vision and mission statements were determined with community input.

4. Apply and use your vision and mission statements:

Projects incorporated vision and mission statements into logos or communications for stationary and other promotional materials, newsletters, and websites. These statements became catch phrases to initiate participant recruiting, conversations with the media, and even to problem solve conflict about the often controversial nature of teen pregnancy prevention. When a community member publicly criticized one project with distributing condoms to youth in schools, the project quickly reminded community members during face-to-face school district meetings and through local media coverage that their project focused on healthy decisions by youth.

REFLECTIONS AND CONDITIONS AFFECTING SUCCESS

In some communities, vision and mission statements focused on providing services. Here, project staff delivered a large number of sexuality education services to youth. Providing information and support, a relatively weak behavior change strategy, became the main focus of the intervention. When vision and mission statements were made in the absence of community buy-in, the project lacked direction and focus, and overall implementation (of services as well as community changes) occurred at low levels. Overall project impact on estimated pregnancy rates was limited in these situations.

By contrast, in another community effort, youth and adult community members developed a clear vision and mission. When they defined and endorsed shared goals and purpose, they shared responsibility for targeted action and intervention. Here, schools, youth, churches, local government, business, media, and other sectors brought about new programs, policies, and practices to address prevention priorities over time. After four years, estimated pregnancy rates were significantly lower than rates in similar communities without the focused intervention that concentrated many changes in one place. According to their group's community feedback:

"A mission-driven agenda for action can facilitate a systematic and strategic intervention for bringing about change in outcomes that matter. In the absence of such regular direction, less integrated and intensive strategies can result in the delivery of a haphazard and fragmented intervention."

A number of conditions may have affected the varied influence of Establishing a Vision and Mission on community change and improvements in different communities.

  • In some communities, staff may have lacked knowledge and skills (e.g., group facilitation or interpersonal skills) that are necessary to facilitate group processes for arriving at a shared vision and mission. Instead, they may have limited their interactions to those with whom they already worked, and excluded other populations actually experiencing the problem.
  • Second, the lead-agency sponsoring one initiative may have lacked organizational leadership since it did not always play an active role in project activities.
  • Third, newly hired staff in another community may have encountered difficulties recruiting community members to the effort since they lacked a history of collaboration with other organizations in the community.
  • Fourth, getting community members together to discuss, prioritize, and agree upon a shared direction for an initiative took time and effort. Some people were not willing to commit to the several meetings needed for this task.
  • And finally, language and physical barriers to participation, such as lack of child care and transportation, hindered some community members participation in the effort.

These and other Conditions May Affect Success.