PROJECT BY AREA OF FOCUS
Social & Human Services
Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Loca 1021 Bylaws Planning Process: SEIU Local 1021 contracted with Gibson & Associates to conduct a comprehensive bylaws planning process in August 2008. SEIU 1021 was created through a merger of 10 different autonomous organizations representing different areas of Northern California. Gibson & Associates was brought in as an external facilitator to help move the process forward. Using a consensus building facilitative approach, G&A developed a planning process, facilitated community input, and moved the committee charged with drafting bylaws towards agreement on complex legal, governance, and structural questions. The bylaws were passed overwhelmingly by the 54,000 member union in November 2009. For more information, contact Brightstar Ohlson .
City of Irvine Strategic Plan for Children, Youth and Families: The City of Irvine turned to G&A to facilitate a comprehensive planning process that resulted in a 5 year plan for Children, Youth and Families. We facilitated five task forces, community and youth input processes, and the creation of a plan that reflected community needs and resources, as well as best practices in each priority area. In support of this effort G&A completed extensive best practice research in relation to health & fitness, child care, underage drinking, mental health and assistance to families in need. In addition, we convened a number of national and regional experts who will advise Irvine stakeholders in relation to early childhood development and child health. The plan received unanimous approval from the City Council.
Oakland Fund for Children and Youth (OFCY) Strategic Plan 2006-2010: 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. We engaged the fund’s policy group in redefining the organization’s mission, vision and values to guide the planning process. We also 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. We 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 gain input on the needs and priorities for services to Oakland’s youth. We also 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 improve the quality of life in their community. An outgrowth of this process was the development of two key strategic partnerships, one between the City and the school district to expand the scope and vastly improve the quality of after school programs. The second was to develop a partnership between the city and the county’s First 5 program to develop a series of innovative early childhood programs designed to increase school readiness.
San Francisco Drug Court: G&A facilitated a two-year research and planning process involving multiple public and private agencies across public health, criminal justice and housing fields to develop one of the largest and most successful drug courts in the country. As part of this work, G&A conducted extensive research on the few communities in which drug courts existed to help San Francisco ‘envision’ what such a drug court could look like. Ongoing meetings were conducted with leaders from systems that were historically adversarial in nature (district attorney and public defender) or who had rarely worked together (public health and criminal justice). The outgrowth of these meetings was a shared understanding of the benefits both to their systems and to their clients of working in a treatment focused system instead of one driven by evidence and incarceration.
Stanislaus County Department of Health, Maternal & Child Health Services: G&A facilitated the planning and development of an innovative and multidisciplinary, community-based teen pregnancy prevention project that required extensive research, numerous community planning meetings, organization of focus groups with teens and the church community, and the development of a complex proposal to the State of California.
