Most local communities, and many state governments, are seeking ways to improve results for children and families.

The reasons are not hard to find. By most measures, the conditions of many children and families are deteriorating. The National KIDS COUNT report highlights these trends: over the past decade, six of the ten indices measuring the well-being of children and youth have been getting worse, not better. Recent data indicating a rise in child poverty (to almost 23% of all children) suggest that these downward trends will continue.

As states and communities try to reverse this decline, many are deciding that this effort requires a thorough redesign of the ways in which they assist children and families. Changes are being made in the way that health, education, and social services are being organized, financed, and delivered. In order to achieve better results for families and children, states and localities are seeking to achieve four basic changes:

• Provide services and supports that are more responsive to individual need, more preventive, and more supportive of families;

• Finance human services and education in a way that supports a more flexible, individualized approach, and that provides greater control over resource allocation at the local level;

• Organize and govern human services and schools so that they are more effective and more coherent in carrying out a community's agenda on behalf of children, and more rooted within local communities; and

• Place the development of good schools and effective services within a broader "community building" agenda that recognizes necessary linkages to the safety and economic viability of communities, and to the natural networks of family support.

These changes are of course intertwined. Typically, changes in one only trigger new or different activities in the others. This paper focuses on the third of these changes: new forms of governance. The paper first examines new governance roles that are being assumed by entities at the local level, and then focuses on governance changes that are being negotiated jointly by state agencies and local communities. Although some cities and towns are working on their own to implement new forms of governance, the emerging "partnerships" between state government and localities are of particular interest.

These efforts must address issues of scale, equity, resource allocation, legitimacy, and representation that surface to a lesser degree when a community creates a new governance body without state level involvement.

The paper concludes with brief observations about some of the larger purposes behind the movement toward improved governance.

The case for new forms of governance begins with the fact that, in many communities, our current education, health, and social service systems are not achieving good results for children and families, despite effective individual programs and many committed professionals. Part of the reason for this is chronic under investment in these systems. Many school systems and health and human service programs lack the funds they need to fully do their jobs. Before that situation improves, however, it is likely that we must address another problem: the fundamental mismatch between what are known to be the ingredients of successful community strategies for children and families, and the way that our health, education, and social service systems currently operate.

In the ideal world, a community seeking to improve the lives of its families and children would be able to move forward on a coherent agenda designed around a clear set of results. Strategies would build on the assets of each community, involving and strengthening the natural helping networks on which all families rely. The community's agenda for families and children would be broadly understood and embraced, and a wide variety of resources would be mobilized to do "whatever it takes" to accomplish these results. Strategies would be built on the assets of each community, underlining and strengthening the natural helping networks on which all families rely. Strategies would be tailored for different neighborhoods, and ultimately, for individual families. Actions would be based on an understanding of problems that was grounded in facts as well as residents' perceptions, and community members could track progress toward the results they seek.

Community leaders and residents would view their actions on behalf of children and families as part of a broader commitment to create and maintain safe and economically viable places to live. Social supports for children and families would be linked with actions to ensure safe streets, adequate housing, and secure and accessible jobs. Underlying all of these activities would be a strong commitment to "leave no child behind," and to assure equitable and culturally sensitive responses to all children and families.

In reality, communities trying to improve results for families and children in this way confront existing public systems whose very structures often block this approach, rather than support it.

A fundamental problem is the fragmented and categorical nature of most forms of assistance and support for families and children. Federal, state, and local programs are the result of specific mandates to address particular problems (whether directed toward health, child welfare, education, mental health, criminal justice, substance abuse, employment and training, or other needs).

Programs have proliferated with little relationship to one another, and with no design for creating a coherent system of supports at the local level. Any family seeking help is faced with a complicated web of eligibility and service restrictions. Any community -- whether a neighborhood, town, or city -- trying to organize an effective network of supports for families and children has no focal point for doing so. Nowhere is there responsibility for coordinating or managing the human service and education system as a whole. No entity is envisioned in current federal, state, or local policy as the place where diverse programs fit within a unified community strategy that could accomplish clearly defined results.

The problems posed by the current categorical system of services cannot simply be fixed by block granting all human services programs to the states. In fact, poorly designed block grants will weaken rather than strengthen our ability to promote self-sufficiency and enhance parenting skills among disadvantaged families. Instead, we need to carefully select which programs and funding sources should be made flexible at the state and local levels for particular purposes and which are the proper province of the federal government. For example, we would argue that income assistance should be a federal responsibility while block grants to the states would be most appropriate to fund comprehensive human services programs focused on prevention, family preservation and early intervention strategies. This kind of careful sorting out, while much more complicated than simple block grants, cannot be avoided if we are to responsibly address the problems created by our current fragmented system of services.

Equally difficult for local communities is the fact that current public agencies' mandates mostly aim to redress problems, rather than promote healthy development. With the exception of general education mandates, there is no base of federal, state, and local policy that charges state agencies or local communities to promote the healthy development of children or the stability and strength of families. Instead, help is triggered after problems become severe. Recent emphasis on "preventive" strategies in social service, mental health, and health care systems is token, at best. Barely a tiny fraction of total investment is being devoted to earlier interventions, yet significant (and in many instances, growing) expenditures are made once families are close to collapse. Any community seeking to mobilize resources in the manner described above, and aiming to put together a range of family supports so that all families have access to resources that help them to raise their children well, will find few dollars available for this purpose.

A third problem confounding communities' efforts is the intergovernmental complexity of current financing and governance structures. The key policy and budget decisions for education, health, and social service systems are made at different governmental levels and by different governing structures. Governance for education is primarily local (by elected or appointed school boards). Education policy as well as management decisions are being moved into schools themselves. Governance for social services is much more centralized. Decision-making for child welfare and juvenile justice services, for example, is more likely to be made at the state level (except in states which retain strong county administration of these systems). Mental health systems reflect still a third division of state/local responsibilities: freestanding (often non-profit) local boards govern much of their operations.

This hodgepodge of governance structures means that basic decision-making is cumbersome, and better suited for "maintenance" rather than change. The systems are rule-bound, using much of their energies to assure compliance with standardized procedures. With decision-making spread diffusely "across" categorical agencies and "up and down" levels of government, there is a constant need for checking and rechecking decisions. Implementing new courses of action requires approval from several governmental layers, and from multiple categorical systems. By the time significant efforts are mobilized, the compelling problem may have changed or worsened.

Because decision-making that could be directed at genuinely improving the situation of children and families is so difficult, current human service agencies as well as schools tend to focus more on managing resources rather than on achieving results. No single system can control or influence the "cross system" dollars and staff that are required to improve the most important outcomes for families and children. Thus, each system -- whether schools, social services, or health -- can claim (with some justification) that it cannot be held accountable for achieving better results.

As an example, many school personnel today argue that they cannot succeed because so many children have problems at home that prevent their learning. Schools do not control the community resources that could address problems of family dysfunction, substance abuse, or child neglect, for example. Simultaneously, human service agencies have little ability or opportunity to utilize their resources in combination with one another or with the schools. Thus, each system continues to be criticized for failures, while all lack authority to achieve many of the necessary changes.

The severity of these problems with formal education and human service systems masks another deeper problem: the undervaluing and underutilization of the natural helping networks and primary services that contribute most to producing good results for families and children. Ask any group of people where they turn for help, and the answer is the same: to their families, friends, churches, clubs, and even to their workplace. Only when these cannot provide the necessary help do most people turn to public agencies. Similarly, research literature and common sense both indicate that the healthy development of children is often best promoted (outside of their family's influence) by the social and recreational opportunities that connect children with their peers and with their communities in productive ways.

Despite this growing recognition, however, many schools and (particularly) public human service agencies have neither the skills nor the motivation to activate, build on, link to, or support these natural networks and primary services. By moving many of the key decisions in the public sector away from communities, these formal institutions have, over time, become disconnected from the so-called "informal" systems. One of the goals of local governance is to bring decision-making to a level that allows natural helping networks and more formal support systems to interact in more productive ways.

For all of the reasons cited above, the tendency is to perpetuate what exists rather than replace ineffective activities with better strategies. Because there is no one vantage point from which the impact of multiple systems -- public and private, formal and informal -- can be assessed, there is little opportunity to respond to local need by increasing investments in one area while reducing them in another. Change occurs by adding new programs or new funds to existing programs, but rarely by fundamentally restructuring the way all services are organized or financed, or by redesigning approaches that link formal and informal resources in new ways.

The development of new forms of governance aims at addressing these structural problems and at improving the way that decisions are made, resources are deployed, and strategies are implemented at the local level. By establishing or designating entities at the local level that will assume a new, broad-based responsibility for improving results for families and children, local communities (and, increasingly, states) are trying to create:

Although new forms of governance make sense solely as a matter of structural coherence, ultimately they address more profound goals. They represent a new and intense community commitment on behalf of families and children. Many today are fueled by a passion to make things better for all of a community's children, making it less likely they will run out of steam. Ultimately, the "governance job" is about more than better decision-making or systems change. It is about delivering on the hopes that all parents and all communities have for their children: that children will grow up in families that help them become healthy, happy, productive adults.

When talking about local governance, it is helpful to reach a common understanding of what is meant by the term. In the context of this paper, local governance is the decision-making process by which a community takes responsibility for advancing broadly supported strategies that achieve desired results for families and children.

To accomplish this goal, communities are establishing or designating entities that are willing to begin assuming responsibilities for the well-being of children and families. These entities may be known as community collaboratives, community partnerships, local planning entities, and so forth. This paper refers generically to local governance entities, and means by that term groups made up of public and private sector constituencies and community residents that take on the governance role described above.

Experience suggests that there are several characteristics that are crucial to these entities' ability to exercise a role that can be described as "governance." To the extent these entities develop into credible accountable local governance entities, they take on five characteristics:

Each of these represents a change from current patterns of decision-making on behalf of children and families and warrants further explanation.

First, local governing entities take sustained responsibility for designing and implementing strategies to achieve clearly defined results for families and children. Several issues are key here.

Local governance entities are oriented to producing results (or outcomes), rather than merely promoting a certain type of service or vaguely "making things better" for children. A number of states and localities have identified and gained consensus on a set of core results desired for families and children. These results then become the targets they aim for as they develop innovative strategies at the operational level. This focus on results requires a major shift in thinking as traditional service providers tend to measure their success in terms of how many services they deliver instead of how families and children are faring.

Some of the early local governance efforts focused on a limited range of results for a defined target population of children. After Savannah's Youth Futures Authority decided its initial focus on at-risk middle and high school students was too late, it broadened its efforts to include preschool children. More recently established entities often focus on a broader set of results. For example, Rochester, NY's CHANGE strategy targets the list of desired results shown in Figure I.

Defining a broad scope of desired results does not preclude setting priorities. Communities usually find that they cannot work equally intensely on all desired results at once. By establishing a comprehensive set of desired results for children and families at the start, the governance entity clarifies two points: (1) its intent eventually to improve a broad range of conditions for the community's families and children, and (2) the fact that narrow categorical approaches rarely succeed, since progress in achieving one set of results (e.g., those for early childhood) is linked to others (e.g., positive results for older youth).

Whether a governance entity's desired results are more narrowly or broadly conceived, they need to represent an agenda that engages and motivates their community. A primary characteristic of local groups that view their role as governance rather than just planning, is that they frame their agendas in terms that community residents and citizens can understand and support.

This is a further reason for the focus on results, rather than more abstract notions of "improved services" or "systems change." Increasingly, governance entities strive to define their goals in simple, declarative, understandable terms, so that they can marshall maximum degrees of community support.

The second distinguishing feature of local governance entities is that their actions are driven by a set of principles concerning service delivery and the community's commitment to its families and children. The specific principles vary, but generally they emphasize that a community's response to children's and families' needs should be respectful of families' autonomy and diversity, should be comprehensive and individualized, should build on natural networks, should be directed toward increasing independence, and so forth. Although these values are by now commonplace in the national rhetoric of reform, local governance entities have the not-at-all-commonplace task of translating them into the operations of public and private supports for families.

Regardless of which specific principles are adopted by a governance entity, the key point is that how services, supports, and educational opportunities are made available is often as important to local governing entities as what is provided.

A third characteristic is that local governance entities have legitimacy and credibility to adequately represent residents, communities, and state and local government. Two concepts are important here.

"Legitimacy" connotes that local governance entities have been formally recognized by key constituencies as playing a role on their behalf. These constituencies can include state agencies, local government, and other governing units (such as a school board), as well as private sector interests, parents, business, and other sectors of the community. To achieve legitimacy, some local governing entities negotiate written agreements with key constituencies, spelling out roles and responsibilities. In other instances, legitimacy is formally conveyed by means of statute or executive order (e.g., Prince George's County, MD, Commission on Families). In some cases, a governing entity's legitimacy is negotiated with several of the key constituencies at once, so that mutual expectations are clear. In all cases, the intent is to formally recognize the local governing entity's role in the planning and implementation of human services or education.

"Credibility" addresses the less formal trust and recognition that a local governing entity has in a community. Credibility has to be earned, rather than assigned. All of the local entities that have been playing some form of governance role emphasize the importance of "earning their stripes" and gaining their community's confidence. Without it, much of the formal authority and recognition referred to above means little. Once they gain credibility, local entities often make significant accomplishments even without formally delegated powers.

Key to earning credibility is the ability to win the trust of the families who live in targeted neighborhoods. This means that in addition to professionals, community residents must be involved in the governance entity's decision-making in meaningful ways. Finding interested parents and neighborhood representatives, training them, and bringing them into participatory processes are tasks that have plagued community development efforts for decades. Yet governance entities are finding that they need to reach out to churches, service and fraternal organizations, neighborhood associations, and other informal groups in order to be perceived as credible by the lay community. Moreover, once the right people are identified, the governance body needs to devise new ways of engaging community residents and sustaining their involvement over time.

Whether the focus is legitimacy or credibility, local entities involved in governance have to achieve both with all of their major constituencies. Building legitimacy and credibility requires different steps depending on whether the constituency is local or state government, parents, the local business community, or another important stakeholder. Given the complicated nature of this task, legitimacy and credibility are achieved over an extended period of time, not suddenly bestowed. Key to both legitimacy and credibility is a governance entity's leadership. Having the right leadership "around the table" can establish credibility early-on. Ongoing demonstration of leadership by a governance group earns community trust and usually translates directly into greater influence in all aspects of the community's educational and human service systems.

Closely related to the concept of legitimacy is the notion that local entities involved in governance influence the allocation of resources across systems as necessary to accomplish the desired results. Over the long haul, unless local governing entities can affect how dollars are spent and how staff are deployed, they are unlikely to make much of a difference in the provision of education and human services. More importantly, they will have little effect in improving results for families and children.

Influence over dollars and staff of the major systems in a community (i.e., schools, human service agencies, the private sector) can come in different forms. Some jurisdictions are considering giving local governing entities direct control over funds that are now controlled by public sector agencies. In these models, dollars would flow through local governing entities in order to assure that all relevant agencies direct their actions to a common community agenda. The aim is to give local communities direct decision-making authority over how funds are spent.

In other instances, local entities involved in governance do not have direct financial control, but instead influence allocation of resources through the priorities they set and the plans they develop. The idea behind this approach is that, once all the parties involved in a local entity agree to a course of action, each of the parties will deploy all possible resources in a way which supports this direction. In some communities, the group's work on assessing needs, developing plans and setting priorities is seen as a necessary first step toward actual control of resources.

Whichever approach is taken, a common principle underlies this aspect of local governance: without gaining influence over funding, a local entity cannot achieve its aims in the long run. Ability to focus dollars and staff in support of a community's agenda is one thing that distinguishes local governance from many other interagency efforts whose impact is uncertain.

It is important to note that devolving decision-making power over the resource allocation to local governance entities will not automatically prevent turf battles and promote consensus, especially in these times when most budgets are being cut. In fact, it may actually provoke greater divisiveness as organizations jealously guard their own resources. Budget debates can be most intense -- even vicious -- at the local level where people know each other and have strong opinions about who deserves support. Local governance entities need to recognize this inevitability and take steps to minimize its disruption to their overall agenda.

The final critical aspect of local governance is that these entities are envisioned as maintaining standards of accountability for individual systems and their agencies and constituencies, as well as for the community as a whole. In keeping with governance entities' focus on results, they need to be able to measure baselines, document progress, and ensure that all the parties who commit themselves to take action on an agenda actually do so. Two levels of accountability are sought: (1) holding individual systems participating with the governance entity accountable for specific results, and (2) holding the governance entity itself accountable for how it operates, uses its dollars, and accomplishes its desired results.

Governance entities can maintain accountability in a number of ways. One sequence involves four steps, each of which builds upon the prior steps:

As all of these characteristics operate together, local governance entities speak for, and to, a broadly-based constituency to: (1) determine what results are most important to the community; (2) determine the patterns of education, health, and human service delivery, and other community supports that can contribute toward those results; (3) decide how state and local funds along with private sector (and non-monetary) resources will be used in the community to support children and families; (4) track progress against the desired results; and (5) remain accountable to the community for those results.

While communities on their own can make progress in establishing new forms of local governance, it is clear from this definition that real "local governance" requires the participation, cooperation, and support of a number of current governmental entities. A number of state governments are considering how they can promote and contribute to these changes. In the next section of this paper, we examine how concepts of local governance, as described above, are being considered as part of broader state-local partnerships to improve results for families and children.

A basic framework for envisioning new forms of community governance and their relationship to state agencies and other key stakeholders is shown in Figure II. It involves new entities at both the state and local level. More importantly, it involves new relationships among a variety of partners: between the levels of state government and local government; between the entities within each level (state and local), including other governance entities such as school boards; and perhaps most importantly between agents of government (state and local) and the residents of neighborhoods and communities.

This section provides an overview of this framework, sketching its basic components and the new roles and relationship that are envisioned among them.

The core element is a governance entity at the local level with responsibility for mobilizing community resources on behalf of specific results for families and children. The key characteristics of this entity have been described in the previous section.

The makeup of this entity can vary widely, but in most instances it combines parents and citizens with representatives of schools, health and human service agencies, local government, and business and civic leadership. Its priorities will also vary, depending on the needs of the local community.

As Figure II indicates, in many jurisdictions this local entity may actually be a network of more localized bodies that ensure that planning and service delivery are individualized to smaller geographic areas (neighborhoods or other sub-city or sub-county areas). Unless a local governance entity can assure that its strategies are individualized to neighborhoods, or other smaller geographic areas, it is unlikely to be perceived as a force that meets people's real needs.

In order for these local entities to thrive, state agencies need to establish a policy, fiscal, legal, and operating environment that supports these new entities. This involves creating opportunities for these entities to develop; supporting their evolution; giving them access to resources as they assume progressively greater responsibilities; and establishing a reasonable system of accountability. This requires change in the ways in which state agencies structure their decision-making, as well as in what roles they play in relation to local communities.

Structurally, states are forming new interagency mechanisms to coordinate budget and policy decisions. Interagency cabinets have been established for this purpose ( as in Maryland). Other states have used less formal Interagency Committees (as in New Mexico). A third approach involves the creation of a board with public and private membership that expands ownership of change beyond the public sector (as in Missouri's Family Investment Trust). Whichever approach is used, the aim is a decision point where policy and budget decisions that affect children and families can be made by state agencies in a unified fashion.

Beyond new structures, states are trying to create policy climates that support local governance entities by establishing new relationships between state agencies and local communities. This involves shifting roles and responsibilities so that state agencies are responsible for:

Functions that state agencies have traditionally performed are being shared with local jurisdictions. Thus, the following functions are increasingly being moved to local levels:

A summary of the types of changes envisioned for state agencies is shown in Figure III which is part of Missouri's Family Investment Trust's communication to local communities about what state agencies will do differently.

This chart is actually two charts in one. For each change in state agency roles, there is an equal, and opposite shift in local roles and responsibilities. As states move away from detailed local program design and strict categorical structures, communities are newly empowered to configure resources and programs to meet local needs and produce locally defined results.

As new local governance entities are forming, they are finding that operationalizing their agenda is much more difficult than they first imagined. While most of the state and local stakeholders agree on the need for such an entity and their general duties, carrying out their mandate is much more problematic. Put simply, designing and implementing changes in the financing and delivery of services requires years of difficult work. Simply joining various people in new forms of collaboration will not automatically lead to better results for families. At the very least, governance entities have to sort out what interventions they want to try in order to accomplish their goals. Since there are many promising examples of programs and supports but few models with proven track records, local governance entities must engage in a substantial strategic planning process up front, and then watch carefully the results so they can adjust and readjust their interventions as necessary.

The challenges for new local governance entities are many and should be recognized from the outset. Participants at both the state and local levels need to acquire new skills and knowledge; resources need to be made more flexible and less categorical as well as redirected to preventive services and reallocated among existing organizations rather than merely channeled to the most influential constituencies; new, more effective ways of supporting families using both natural helping networks and formal service providers need to be created; new ways of getting families from specific neighborhoods to participate in the governance entity need to be invented; turf battles among independent agencies and organizations need to be overcome; whole new languages need to be developed so people from different disciplines can talk to each other; new information systems need to be created to track progress on specific outcomes at both the state and local levels, and so on. In short, a host of barriers need to be overcome and new methods developed before the governance entity can be expected to produce better results for families and children.

This characterization of the difficulties new governance entities typically face is not meant to dissuade interested parties from trying; rather it is offered as a realistic portrayal of the tasks at hand so that new groups are not surprised and dismayed when they run into inevitable challenges.

Undaunted, a number of states and localities have made progress implementing new governance arrangements. These have produced several lessons about how governance entities work and how new governance structures can be developed. In this section, five key implementation issues are discussed and some general conclusions are provided about "what works" and "what doesn't."

The five issues are: