Lessons Learned from Snohomish County Reclaiming Futures: Systems 101 Event

Reclaiming Futures Snohomish County, Washington, held a “Systems 101” event on October 4th, 2013. This event was the brainstorm of Kathy Haggerty (project director), Michele Rastovich (community fellow) and Janelle Sgrignoli (juvenile justice fellow/drug courts manager).
The idea was borrowed from a previous event, when the team worked in different capacities for Snohomish County. They wanted to convene all the child-serving systems to ensure that everyone knew what services existed, how to access them, provide time to meet the “faces” of the system and to reaffirm the community’s commitment to the Reclaiming Futures Vision for Our Kids which was developed at the start of 2013.

Cora Crary (CC): Tell me more about the Systems 101 event you held in Snohomish County.
Kathy Haggerty (KH): The purpose of the event was to increase awareness of the Reclaiming Futures initiative and our vision while forming new and strengthening existing relationships and partnerships, learn from each other, and realize the strengths that exist within our community. The outcomes I hoped for and shared with everyone at the start of the day were: that they left inspired, better informed, better connected, and activated. Based on the evaluations, we met these outcomes.

CC: How many people attended?
KH: We had approximately 100 registrants with representatives from education, Division of Child and Family Services, health care, mental health, chemical dependency professionals, justice staff, youth care and residential services staff, aspiring mentors, and, of course, our Change Team members.

CC: How did you advertise?
KH: We created an invitation in Constant Contact and distributed it to 200-300 people through a number of existing listservs in our community. We also posted the event on our local Reclaiming Futures website.

CC: What information was shared?
KH: Our keynote speaker, Diana Gale, from the University of Washington gave a presentation titled, “Passion, Complexity, Collaboration: Making System Change Work for our Kids,” which was a big hit – people found her message very helpful in terms of specific and concrete ways to do large scale systems change.
We also had a series of concurrent workshops about the juvenile justice system and juvenile justice reforms, juvenile drug court, child and family services, substance abuse treatment, the Seven Challenges evidence-based practice modality, foster care, children’s mental health, education, trauma, victims of minor sex trafficking, engaging homeless and at-risk youth, engaging families, and program evaluation.

CC: What advice would you give to other communities interested in trying this locally?
KH: First, develop a clear vision of what you want to achieve. Second, give yourself a few months of planning time and marketing time. Secure your keynote speakers first – then when you plan your workshops your presenters will know the locked-in date.

CC: Will you do this again?
KH: Yes, we absolutely plan to do this again! We received great feedback on the event from our participants and will use that for the design next year.

CC: What did you learn that will help you with your job?
KH: The big thing for me personally was letting go, trusting and delegating the design and logistics of this event to Michele Rastovich, one of our Community Fellows – as this is an area of expertise for her: convening people, designing events to have specific outcomes, drawing people in. I think for Project Directors we all have “control” issues and often we feel we need to be the ones doing it all – but we can’t – and this was yet another great example of capitalizing on the strengths of our Fellowship Team to share in, and help realize the vision and success of Reclaiming Futures in our community.

Cora Crary manages the creation, development and implementation of tools and resources for the Reclaiming Futures learning collaborative. In this role, Cora assists sites with their use of the website, online resources, webinars and related tools. Prior to working with Reclaiming Futures, Cora spent six years managing and developing website projects. Cora received her bachelor's degree at The Evergreen State College.