Working under contract with the city of Oakland’s Human Services Department in 2004-2005, Gibson & Associates (G&A) led a planning process for the City’s major fund for children and youth services. This process resulted in the development of OFCY’s funding priorities and strategies to serve over 20,000 children and youth with their $10 million annual budget for the four years from 2006 to 2010.
G&A engaged the fund’s policy group in redefining the organization’s mission, vision and values to guide the planning process and then conducted community research on a variety of indicators of the health and well being of Oakland’s youth over the past five years, identifying important trends in youth development.
G&A performed GIS mapping to depict the population characteristics in relation to Oakland’s districts and neighborhoods and thereby identified gaps in services to children.
G&A interviewed and held focus groups with parents, youth and community stakeholders to discover what they define as the needs and priorities for services to Oakland’s youth.
In order to get meaningful input from children, we worked with Oakland’s Youth Commission to conduct a day-long youth summit where participants, ages eight to 18 from select neighborhoods in the City, built models of their neighborhoods, identifying features that would make them feel more safe, able to learn and recreate. Through these methods we were able to combine community input with research into an analysis of the needs and priorities of Oakland’s children and youth.
Having generated a sense of community investment in the fund’s planning priorities G&A researchers then engaged seventy-five representatives of the City’s major youth serving agencies in two-day-long Task Force meetings to identify the outcomes and strategies for the fund. Their work became the basis of our further research on the effectiveness of model practices to advance the strategies they identified. Using this research we facilitated the policy group’s decision-making and development of ownership of these strategies by having each committee member steep themselves in the research that had been conducted and present those strategies to the larger group.
The impact of this process was the development of a plan strongly rooted in evidence-based funding strategies and enthusiastically endorsed by OFCY and its constituents. Oakland’s City Council unanimously approved the plan and discussed the planning process as a major policy accomplishment having value to the City Council in their ensuing deliberations about youth issues in Oakland. Throughout the process at public meetings, representatives from community groups and agencies praised the process for its openness and inclusiveness.
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