|
|
|
Strategies for Community Change How to effect desired change in a community of interest? A community can be a group of people who form an organization, stakeholders who comprise and form a school district, a neighborhood, or an organization comprised of physically disparate functional units or divisions. Strategies for change in each of these types of communities share basic elements of technique and decision making information. The community leadership must establish a decision making functional environment. Establishing a program for community change requires setting goals and objectives. Setting realistic goals and objectives requires first knowing "where we are" and "where we want to be" in a manner that can be specified in measurable terms and time frames. For example, the community might seek to elevate the level of educational attainment. We might measure "where we are now" as the median number of years of education. The objective community change might be to increase this by 2.0 years in 10 years. By having/stating these numbers, we have implicitly constrained how a time series model of the community population educational attainment must change. How did we arrive at the number of 2.0 years? A lofty goal? The way this should be done to make use of a stochastic model that specifies the behavior of educational attainment as a function of certain endogenous and exogenous variables. Some factors affecting educational attainment are within our control while others are not. Assumptions need to be made about factors that are not within our control. It is unlikely that one set of assumptions will actually manifest themselves. The initial challenge facing the leadership is the formulation of a model. In this example, the model needs to capture what variables will affect the outcome of educational attainment. In this example there is an implicit business and educational infrastructure. Elevating educational attainment requires having secondary and post-secondary institutions playing a role that is reflected in the model. We help organizations develop improved data-driven tools and strategies for community change. Please contact me to discuss your situation. Warren Glimpse Proximity |
|
|