Together for Change Podcast: When Communities Focus on Kids Instead of Institutions

Josh  0:00

Hello, my name is Josh Davis, Vice President of Policy and Partnerships at StriveTogether, and I’m your host for today’s episode of Together for Change. This season, we’re focusing on our North Star of economic mobility by diving deep into how children and families are better off as a result of social impact work that treats the root causes of issues rather than only focusing on the symptoms. At StriveTogether we do this by changing systems and building up civic infrastructure.

Today, we’re going to focus on a different perspective on transforming systems by reframing the conversation and the approach of who systems are out to serve. So if I put this another way, what happens when communities focus on kids rather than institutions? I believe that to achieve economic mobility for every child, we must organize systems around youth, not institutions. And now let’s say that isn’t a talking point. It’s really taking a very different approach to the work of policy and developing relationships within a community to get there.

At StriveTogether, we believe that this is the fundamental shift network communities make as they change the way they work together. And I am so excited to be joined here today by my friend and colleague Richard Raya. Richard is the Chief Strategy Officer of Mission Economic Development Agency, the anchor entity of Mission Promise Neighborhood. Richard is the newest member serving on the board of directors that StriveTogether.

Richard, great to have you here with our listeners, and I’m excited to introduce you and your work. So I have to always think about person, role, system. It’s just what I naturally gravitate to, is we’re all people doing this work. And so before we get into your role in your system, why you are at MEDA, Richard, tell us about your person? And what is it about your person that draws you into this work?

Richard  1:49

Josh, it’s a pleasure to be with you. It’s a pleasure to have you as a colleague and a friend. We’ve been in this work for a few years now. You’ve been here locally with us, we’ve been working statewide, and we’ve been working federally together nationally on this movement for systems change, and systems collaboration. So how I got into this work is that I’m basically trying to address the problems that I saw when I was growing up as a child and the problems that that I faced, but also the problems that that my parents faced and that my community faced when it came to equity. And when I say equity, I mean economic equity, academic equity, health equity.

So I grew up my parents were farm workers. When I was growing up, we moved around a lot. And I ended up dropping out of high school just because I wasn’t in any one school long enough to get some traction. And I just saw that there was a lot of unfairness in the way the system was set up. And eventually, I did go to the university, along with my mom, at the same time- actually, she was also a high school dropout for probably the same reasons that I was, but we both had the capacity to succeed, but the system was unable to, to tap into that.

But we used the community college system as a second chance to actually make it to the university. And so ever since then, I’ve been on a mission to make sure that we’re tapping into the potential of all of our communities in this country. And I believe that to do that, we need to see the people in these communities. And we need to build our systems around these people. I think that’s a little bit of what Josh was getting to in his opening statement. And what I, the way I interpret that is the school district and community-based organizations and the city, we all need to be collaborating around those in our community who are falling through the cracks, and seeing them seeing what their needs are and seeing what they can contribute to our society. So that’s how I got into this work. I see Cradle to Career work is a big part of achieving that goal.

Josh  3:58

Richard, when I listened to your account of your youth and adolescence, I’d like you to think back to when you were 15 or 16 years old. And I want to ask you, if system leaders in your community wherever you were at 15 and 16 years old, had thought about re-engineering the way that they approach their mission in service of young people. What do you think you would have told or asked those systems leaders that may have been in healthcare that may have been in safety and security that may have been in education as a 15- or 16-year-old describing the path that you’ve taken? What do you think you would have shared with them about your desires for yourself for your future, and how they could help to build out that pathway for you all to walk along towards the goals that you were holding for yourself?

Richard  5:04

I think at 15, I know I was definitely feeling unseen. I felt like the systems around me. So, the school classroom that I sat in or the clinic that I was going to, I didn’t believe that they saw, maybe the food insecurity that I was experiencing the behavioral health needs that I needed, the behavioral health needs that I had. And I don’t think that those systems also were letting me know that I was expected to succeed and contribute to our community, I would have loved to have seen those things at that time. Instead, I think I felt either invisible, or I felt a little bit like an outsider or a pariah. And so I, you know, I started to kind of give up hope at that point. And that’s why I ultimately dropped out of high school. So that’s what I would have liked to have seen.

Josh  6:10

Yeah, I’d say that resonates. I truly believe that so many of us have come to these positions later on in life that we might describe as a successful plane. And it’s totally in spite of, we were the ones that got away from the ensnare myths and the traps that were put in place to ensure that folks like you, and folks like myself, never exceeded a certain position in this country. And so when I often get the question about, you know, what is focusing on systems? What is thinking about structural barriers, I have this conversation that I was able to say to one gentleman, it’s simply the marriage of policy and racism. That’s what structural racism is, to me, it is that marriage of policy that is married with racism. And before we move into MEDA, right? And before we move into your work, and collective impact, like these things are so foundational, because people do the work. Before we enact, enroll in assistance, people do the work. And so I just want to share that with you see if anything resonates about that, before we move into your capacity as Chief Strategy Officer.

Richard  7:26

Josh, absolutely, I mean, you’re getting to the root of things. And that’s something that I feel professionally and personally that we need to address if we’re really going to make a difference. And I have always seen this, this situation, this these inequities that we’re fighting against, I have always seen them as a result of being a result of structural racism.

We know that black and brown communities have been historically redlined. Even before that, we know that there was segregation, Jim Crow, slavery, colonialism. And we can go back to the very, very root of many of these systems. But as we move towards modern times, we see the redlining in the last century, where there was just state sanctioned under investment in our communities, that will continue to be segregation and communities at schools, and disparities and funding.

So there’s just a laundry list of state sanctioned policies and conditions that helped to put us in the position that our communities and that our country is in right now. So certainly, at a very fundamental level, these are the things that we are addressing in our work. And these are the things that drive me. And I also want to say, I’m talking to you from the Mission District in San Francisco, which is a very vibrant and lively community. So I don’t know if you all can hear the noise, the sounds of the neighborhood in the background. But if you do that, just know you’re being transported to the Mission District in San Francisco right now, which is where Carlos Santana is from. And we have a tremendous cultural legacy of artists and musicians. And so you might be hearing some sounds in the background.

Josh  9:09

I love it. We’re literally taking it to the streets. So Richard, I want to now shift to how this work takes place with respect to your cradle to career approach and continuum and the methodology of collective impact. And so let me pose this to you. Because when we are talking about putting kids on a path to economic mobility is our North Star. I think it’s really important that we consider all of those other objects in the constellation, right.

And so, even in your experience, we named multiple systems and multiple potential contributors to building this path in a stronger fashion with you and your family. You know, so this work is involved with solving for poverty that touches on the edge is in tend to serve racial equity and housing and education. For a lot of people that can seem really overwhelming, right? So how does MEDA and Mission Promise Neighborhood approach cradle to career work in a way that is accessible for other stakeholders to get involved? For children and families to be centered in this work, how do you all sort of break this word down so that it is accessible?

Richard  10:29

That’s a great question, Josh. And I have not had this question before. But it’s for me, it’s illuminating. Because the way that we prevent it from being overwhelming is that we start with addressing the basic needs of the children and their families. And so in a way, that’s just kind of like putting one foot in front of the other. So let me introduce just kind of who I am and my organization.

I’m Richard Raya, as you know, and I’m the Chief Strategy Officer at the Mission Economic Development Agency, about 10 years ago, we got a federal Promise Neighborhood grant, which launched us into this cradle to career work. Before that we were a smaller organization than we are now focused on helping families develop their financial capabilities. And so helping them reduce their debt, increase their savings, do their taxes, helping small businesses, write business plans for small entrepreneurs, when we got this Promise Neighborhood grant, the goal was to improve academic outcomes in our neighborhood. And we started off by hosting some town halls with the families in the neighborhood and asking them, okay, how are we going to improve graduation rates and kinder readiness rates and so on?

And we were a little surprised to hear the top answer, because the top answer would didn’t seem at first to be education related. The top answer was, we actually need an affordable place to live in order for our kids to do well in school. And so for us, that kind of really helped us focus in this kind of overwhelming environment that we were in have academic disparities, health disparities, tremendous income inequality, it really reduced all of that to like, oh, the first step here is we need to help people have stable, secure, dignified housing as a first step. So let’s start on that. And so that from day one has been a critical part of our work.

And from there, you know, the next step was, well, families, then in order to be able to have secure housing, they need to make sure they have a steady source of income, that there’s quote, unquote, rental ready, they can submit it submit an application, showing that they have a steady source of income, that they have the savings to put the first month’s rent down. So all these kind of just basic elemental steps. And so everything else that we do kind of built out from that.

And it just really speaks to the importance of meeting the families where they’re at. And then building off from there. Now from there, I just want to say, Josh, that we did expand out, we did make sure we were doing this work at schools and in learning centers, and in collaboration with the school district and the city. So that we were attempting to match the scale of the problem. We knew that our loan agency was not going to be able to solve these problems, or even begin to address these problems if we were working alone. And so I just want to make it clear that we had to work we went into formal contract with 15 different community based organizations, because we knew that mental health was a big part of what our families were also expressing they needed help for and what our schools, our school staff, and our principals were telling us, we need to get mental health on campus for the students, not only the students, but the families. And in some cases, the very staff needed mental health services. So we made sure that we had a mental health component to our work. So we contracted with a mental health partner. And of course, we did have an academic enrichment component to this and just getting back to the educational nature of this. We knew that that needed to be there as well.

But it needed to be there in combination with, as I said, the mental health supports that financial capability supports the access to housing support. So it was kind of this, you hear this nowadays, the whole child, whole family approach. And this community ecosystem approach. We learned right away that we needed to have that broad approach that, as you said, could be overwhelming, but it’s not overwhelming when we just speak to the families and are what are their priorities right now? Where can we help them? Where do we need to help them right now. And that simplifies everything. And it actually helps systems focus.

Josh  15:09

That’s a really, really good example, Richard, of holding education is maybe an entry point, and then being brought back to our humanity by people saying, first of all, we need shelter, and we need food.

Richard  15:24

Absolutely.

Josh  15:25

We got to have those. So let me ask you, because I know how much was invested in this from a financial standpoint. And along with investments that are philanthropic as well as from the public, you know, there comes accountability. So what were you all measuring? How did you all know that you were having success along the way over the last decade?

Richard  15:51

So we were measuring quite a bit as part of our federal grant that kind of launched us into this work, let me just be clear, it was, it’s what we call a catalytic grant, was $30 million over five years. And so that really helped us build out our internal capacity. And then also the community capacity. As I said earlier, we contracted with 15 different agencies to provide wraparound supports. And that was because of this very large investment, which allowed us to do that. So, when we use this money to build our internal capacity, we built an evaluation team, to be able to collect data to help our collaborative share data, and then to help us use data for strategic planning. So as part of what we were measuring, we were measuring 15 different, we were required to measure 15 different outcomes or indicators. And they were things like graduation rates, early learning rates, the rate at which students are transferring from one school to another, it’s called the student mobility rate, which is often a reflection of housing instability. So we measured these 15 different indicators in a very rigorous way.

And so, we’ve seen over time, we’ve seen these things improve. So the graduation rate, for example, went up by 31%, up to close to 90%. Now, for our target high school in our community. Over the 10 years that we’ve been doing this work, we saw the kinder readiness rate getting to a point of 71% for the families that used our wraparound supports, and that 71% is much higher than the neighborhood average of 47%. So those are the sorts of things that we measured.

Josh  17:44

Richard, I know that you all have had enough success over the last decade that you’re actually going to scale with some of your approaches. And I’m curious about have you had some unlikely partnerships began to emerge, or folks that maybe weren’t so bought in about this approach, or maybe met his ability to lead this years ago, that have turned around a little bit because of the recent announcement of your approach, moving to the city level, you know, it’s really, really an accomplishment to think about a catalytic grant for a neighborhood in such a dense city of San Francisco, and then having the efficacy as well as the buying in to move from the bottom up geographically, one neighborhood move out, you know, what are you what are you all seeing now, in terms of maybe some of those unlikely partners and folks that are beginning to accept at least some appetite for scaling this work across your city? We know the governor is now invested, for the first time the state of California is investing in this work. And so there has to be some mental model change some evidence, some tide that has come along along with yours work, but what do you sort of attribute that to? What do you think about that?

Richard  19:12

Yeah, let me take the first part of that question. First, when we started this work, we couldn’t have started without the city and the school district and the community by hand. So we, we jointly applied, but of course, our agency MEDA was the lead on this application. So we had some, you know, we had some form of, you know, community buy in or cross sector buy in, as we progressed, and we realized that housing was one of the top issues. We used some of our federal grant to, to actually build out our affordable housing development capacity because we saw that there was no one really developing affordable housing or preserving affordable housing in our neighborhoods. So a little quick little bit of background on the Mission District. It’s a formerly redlined community, historically Latino immigrant gateway community, which, over the past two decades has become increasingly gentrified, for lack of a better word because of the tech boom, and higher income tech sector workers wanting to live in a vibrant, transit friendly, dynamic neighborhood. And so these workers moving into our neighborhood caused the rents to rise and then displacement of our residents, because they could not compete with these, the new residents, and also displacement of many of our cultural institutions and small businesses that served our community. So we were facing that that landscape. And so we weren’t seeing enough movement from the city on addressing these displacement issues. So we decided to become an affordable housing developer. And we use some of our grant to kind of build out our capacity to do that. And so now we have about 2000 units of affordable homes either built or in the pipeline. And so we’ve become quite an affordable housing developer in our neighborhood.

And so I will say, Josh, that you’re right. There were folks who said, that’s not right. This is an education grant, you should not be using it to get into housing. But this is what are the parents and guardians and the families in our neighborhood were telling us they needed and we saw no one else meeting the need. So we did it. And yes, even the city, one of our main partners was opposed to this. And so we had to go through some obstacles and some hurdles and some tough conversations. But here we are now. And you know, now the city is a partner in is cutting ribbons with us on these new apartment buildings that we’ve built together, because the city came around, and we couldn’t have built these apartment buildings, or preserved some of the existing affordable housing without the city changing some of its policies or creating new policies to help make this happen.

So yes, things did turn and we had to take risks for that to happen. So now where we are, Josh is that we don’t want this to be a boutique project just in the Mission District. There are other formerly redlined communities of color in San Francisco such as Chinatown, and the Bayview which is historically one of the Black working-class neighborhoods in San Francisco, in other neighborhoods, and we’re working with the city now and philanthropy to help plan Promise Neighborhoods for these other neighborhoods. And we’re calling it the Promise City Initiative.

How do we go from having just one promise neighbor, to actually taking this approach city-wide, and where the city takes a neighborhood-based approach to addressing the historical inequities and the current inequities in the city. And the state is investing in this work now in the mission Promise Neighborhood work. And we’re working with a coalition of a statewide partners in the cradle to career space to expand the state’s investment. And we’re calling this the “It Takes a Village Act” because at the root of this work, and I think you hinted at this Josh at the at the root of this work is about us, kind of remembering who we are as humans and seeing each other as neighbors who help each other out when we are in need. And we’re coming together as a village to take care of our own. That’s what this work is about. And so that’s what we’re calling the Statewide Act, which would help fund multiple Promise Neighborhoods or similar cradle to career initiatives across the state.

Josh  23:52

Richard, that is definitely an illustration of how StriveTogether and others viewed a concept of nested infrastructure. And so with this funnel approach representing scale, it is truly remarkable at the impact this one neighborhood in San Francisco is able to have on children that are as far north as the Siskiyou County and Oregon border and as far south as Chula Vista and the Mexican border by the efficacy of yours work the way that you center human beings and children and families and working with and alongside them to address what they need to be people first and then working with systems to create carve outs and pathways for children and families to choose their destiny and have what they need in equable fashion to get there and the way that you are evidenced in moving that approach to multiple neighborhoods go into city and see the state and the federal government invested is just, it’s remarkable. There’s not a better way to end this segment other than that illustration. So I’ll close with this, Richard, you’ve been doing this for a long time. And when I say this, I mean that you have been leaning into a way of being compensated through employment for the work of equity, but you’ve been doing the work of equity by being who you are, your entire life. So whether or not you’re paid to advance the science around this, you are doing this work and had been your entire life. And so I want to ask you, what is it that you do for restoration?

Richard  25:41

That’s a great question, Josh, I didn’t know you were going there. But you’re right, I will just say you’re right, that this work is my passion, I thought of it or in my teenage years is revolutionary work. But I call it now transformational work, the system’s transformation that we’re working on. And what I do to sustain myself, number one, the work, the nature of the work gives me joy. But I still have to be careful to not overwhelm myself, because there is so much happening on so many fronts, especially when you’re working at the community level, where you see the immediate, dire needs of folks who are facing eviction and homelessness and hunger. And so, you know, things can add up. And certainly I could burn out like many of us in this field. So what I do is, I definitely make sure to breathe deeply, to drink a lot of water, and to keep learning about something totally different from this work. So I I study Kung Fu, and I’m, I know, I’m the oldest guy in the class. But I’m not worried about that, because I just love learning something brand new. I’m years into it now. But there’s still always something new to learn in it, which is just a for me, keeps me refreshed, and keeps my body and my mind activated. And so that’s what I do, honestly, is I do martial arts, it’s a good way of stretching and stretching the body, stretching the mind.

Josh  27:16

Wonderful, my friend. It’s been a pleasure.

Richard  27:19

Josh, always a pleasure. And I just want to say thank you for leading with your authentic self. And we could not be doing this work without you and your passion and your vision. And I love working with you.

Josh  27:31

Thank you, brother. So to our guest, thank you for joining us today. Stay connected with us by visiting strivetogether.org where you can get the latest information through our monthly newsletter. You’ll also find transcripts of academic change podcast series, case studies and more.