"Infrequent, random acts of intervention will not achieve the results we seek," one participant said at the first Mental Mapping Meeting on school readiness. With those words, she summed up much of what has driven the Pathways Mapping Initiative (PMI): a commitment to putting together what is known from theory and from high-quality, results-oriented programs, alliances, and systems and to share that knowledge in ways that will strengthen efforts to improve community outcomes for children and their families.
PMI has constructed three Pathways. With the support of the Annie E. Casey Foundation, we developed Pathways to the outcomes of “Children Ready for School and Succeeding at Third Grade,” and “Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect.” W.K. Kellogg funds supported the Pathways to “Successful Young Adulthood.”
For access to the three Pathways click here.
The Background
In an astonishing number of communities around the country, concerned citizens, community coalitions, philanthropists, legislators, service providers, and other stakeholders are working to give children from disadvantaged environments a reasonable chance at a good start in life. Among the many difficult challenges faced by the individuals and organizations engaged in social change efforts, however, is a lack of readily usable information about what works.
Although the nation has learned so much in the last decade about how families, communities, social policies, and institutions can improve the life chances of children growing up in America’s tough neighborhoods, most information that is readily available has several weaknesses:
· It comes in small, isolated, and disjointed pieces.
· It arrives too late.
· It is derived from a severely limited range of interventions that are sufficiently circumscribed and standardized to allow for elegant evaluation and be pronounced “evidence-based,” using narrow definitions of evidence.
· It rarely specifies what, exactly, made the intervention work—although chances are good that if it worked under the hothouse conditions that produced strong evaluation results it won’t work under real-world conditions, especially if scale-up involves public money.
The Pathways Mapping Initiative has been engaged in connecting the dots to construct a knowledge base that is more useful to communities. We have been trying to bring coherence to a world of social policies and programs that has grown increasingly fragmented as it has become more complicated.
Purpose of the Pathways Mapping Initiative
The primary purposes of the PMI have been to:
· Provide community collaboratives, service providers, and local officials with reliable guidance about what has worked elsewhere—information these users can combine with their understanding of local conditions and opportunities to improve outcomes for children and families, especially those living in tough neighborhoods.
· Provide state and federal policy makers and philanthropic funders with new ways of understanding what works, so they can think and act more broadly and deeply in their efforts to improve outcomes for children and families.
· Create a forum through which community experience can continuously inform and modify the knowledge base.
· Make it easier for an array of stakeholders to agree on plausible strategies—across disciplines and jurisdictions—for achieving the child and family outcomes that the majority of citizens consider important.
PMI Methods
PMI takes a unique approach to assembling knowledge by not limiting its explorations to what has been proven and by placing a wider lens on "what works." We began our explorations with a literature review. We then convened groups of experienced researchers and practitioners who work in diverse fields and have a variety of perspectives. We asked them to make explicit their "mental maps" of what it takes to reach the outcome under consideration. For example, the mental mapping groups addressing school readiness were asked, "Considering the research, theories, and experience you have been exposed to over the years, what could a community most effectively do if it were determined to raise rates of school readiness?"
Posing the question that way helps to reveal the big picture, including the fact that school readiness cannot be achieved by a single system. Thus the mental mapping conversations crossed disciplinary, political, and systems boundaries. They reflected the growing understanding that it takes more than child welfare services to keep children safe, it takes more than the police to keep neighborhoods free of violence, it takes more than family support services to strengthen families, it takes more than good preschool programs to get children ready for school, and it takes more than job placement programs to make families economically successful.
Our discussions recognized that many potentially effective actions do not achieve their intended outcome because they are implemented poorly or in isolation, without an understanding of potentially synergistic impacts. Interventions also may not be getting results because they are paying insufficient attention to the community, policy and system contexts that can support or undermine effectiveness. By being inclusive about what we considered credible knowledge, we were able to get beyond identifying successful programs to find the essential attributes of services and supports, of community activities, and of policies and systems that seem crucial for success. These include not only funding and regulatory decisions, but also a community’s capacity to monitor the availability of services and supports, assure a continuum of services and supports over time, strengthen social bonds, influence neighborhood norms, and implementation of core attributes of effectiveness.
After organizing the information that emerged from the mental mapping meetings, we subjected our findings to review, critique, and modification by diverse groups of experts, including practitioners, researchers, and potential users, to construct the Pathways. We then organized our findings for presentation in an interactive and navigable form on the web.
Components of Each Pathway
The centerpiece of a Pathway consists of Actions that, in various combinations, will contribute to achieving the Goals that lead to the Outcome. Also included are Examples of existing programs or strategies that are known to be effective or to have characteristics likely to make them effective in producing the outcome. The Examples include links to sources of additional information. The Pathways identify Indicators that can be used by communities to assess progress.
Key Ingredients of Effectiveness describe the underlying elements that make actions effective in contributing to the achievement of outcomes. The Rationale describes the reasons for believing that the actions will indeed contribute to achievement of the outcome. The Pathways also include the Evidence from formal research, wherever it is applicable, that demonstrates that identified actions will contribute to achieving the outcome.
Current Status of the Pathways
In 2007, it was becoming apparent that our hopes for Pathways -- that “we would build them and they would come” -- were not well founded, although we do believe we were able to draw on our work in constructing the Pathway to encourage key stakeholders (including funders, community coalitions, and policymakers) to think differently. We believe that as a result of our work and the similar work of others, more individuals and groups are using an outcomes framework to bring greater coherence into their planning and decision-making; and that there is a greater respect for using multiple ways of knowing, including practice-based evidence.
With the support of funds from the W.K.Kellogg Foundation, we were able to systematically explore the reasons for the underutilization of our website-based Pathways. PMI staff engaged in a series of interviews and consultations on the utilization and dissemination of our knowledge bases, to determine why the information we were offering was not more widely utilized. We held meetings with users and potential users to better understand their information needs and their patterns for obtaining information.
We learned that the ability to assemble information about “what works” in an outcomes framework, and to organize this information in the ways that we developed can be extremely valuable, but not when it stands alone, not unless it is coupled with an activist delivery mechanism. Our explorations led us to conclude that the Pathways Mapping Initiative would have to change quite fundamentally in order to achieve our objective of seeing our information widely and effectively used. It became clear that doing what would have to be done to optimize the use of the information contained in the Pathways was beyond the current capacity of the PMI. It was also a larger challenge than we were prepared to take on under the Project’s current leadership and under the auspices of the Project on Effective Interventions.
We therefore initiated discussions with several organizations that would have the capacity to put this information to better use than we have been able to do. Our hopes were that our successors would be able to: