Starting a Community Partnership: The Bay Point Experience

This article was first published in WestEd's R&D Alert^®, 2003.

In Bay Point, California, hope is sometimes hard to find. Located at the far reaches of the San Francisco Bay Area, this community of 27,000 suffers from depleted housing, entrenched poverty, gang activity, violence, and poor schools. Serving as a terminus for a commuter rail line, Bay Point is perceived by many youth to be a personal dead-end.

But a partnership between Bay Point and WestEd is mobilizing resources — both internal and external — to strengthen the community’s future and, in the process, gain a better understanding of how to help other communities turn around as well.

The Community Laboratory initiative draws on WestEd’s broad-based expertise, resources, and networks. In addition, the Bay Point work is guided by a WestEd advisory group and national advisors. The work so far has included professional development for improving secondary student literacy and resiliency-support training for after-school program staff. WestEd has also helped with creation of a new teen center, tutoring center, and summer job corps. More work is planned. All of it directly or indirectly builds capacity for local youth because, says project director BethAnn Berliner: “They are a big part of the solution for improving the quality of community life.”

The Bay Point initiative is still young itself, so the lessons that Berliner shares focus mainly on the early steps of setting up a collaborative, multidisciplinary approach to rejuvenating an impoverished community. These strategies are informed by an extensive literature review and interviews with more than 40 experts and practitioners in such realms as education, social work, family support, and community mobilization.

Learn the lay of the land. Chatting over coffee, perusing postings at the local Laundromat, participating in endless meetings, studying official reports, hanging out at the local park talking with youth and others passing by — all such activities are part of the ongoing investigative work needed to understand a community and how it operates: Who are its informal leaders and where does their power come from? Who are the chronic naysayers? What are some important community successes and failures, and what contributed to them? What good things are already happening and what gaps exist? “This kind of information is important,” says Berliner, “because you need to be able to mobilize community assets and, at the same time, avoid getting caught in any sticky local politics.” This fact-finding is like “courting,” she adds, because the community also gets to know the outsider, and the seeds of important relationships that will influence future collaboration are sown.

Don’t overpromise. Accustomed to receiving empty promises, high-need communities may be very suspicious of outsiders offering help. Follow-through is essential in earning trust. Berliner made a point of being clear herself and to the community about WestEd’s capacity and commitment: what it could bring to the effort and what it could not bring. She let people know that WestEd should not be seen as a primary funding source, but could offer important services and skills, including expertise in grant-writing. WestEd then helped the community win a few grants: $1.8 million for the high school, $50,000 to staff the new teen center, and $10,000 to start the summer job corps.

Help connect the dots. An outsider can bring important perspective. People inside a system or community under great stress are often so overwhelmed by their own work that they’re not fully aware of what others in the same system or community are doing. As an “inside-outsider,” says Berliner, “you can more easily get the big picture, spotting duplicative work or holes and identifying leverage points.”

Find your niche. Choose a few activities that can quickly yield successes and thereby set the stage for longer-term work. This approach requires understanding the community’s highest priorities and knowing which institutional strengths can be readily mobilized to help meet them. Berliner knew that while opening a teen center and a tutoring center were considered important, the community lacked capacity to collect and use data to guide programming decisions for the centers. So, she marshaled WestEd expertise to develop and conduct a series of surveys for and about Bay Point youth, and to put together teen focus groups. Opinions were elicited from some 200 young adults. Results informed the kinds of activities and support that the new centers would need to offer in order to attract and serve local youth effectively.

Cautiously push for more. Small, quick wins can help build commitment and momentum for reform. Equally important is maintaining and promoting a more far-reaching vision. One of Berliner’s long-term hopes, for example, is the development of a teacher-preparation “pipeline” through which local youth would be encouraged and supported to become teachers in their own community. “Every time we experience success with local youth,” she says, “I find myself saying, ‘Remember the pipeline.’”