Collaborating Across Community Safety Collaboratives
CCSJ helped form the “Sister Peace Initiatives,” a consortium of four collaboratives in San Francisco, which were funded through the City’s budget to run community-based programs that respond to violence, with a focus on youth and their families. Each collaborative is made of several non-profit organizations addressing different aspects of community safety, including health and wellness, violence prevention, and economic thriving. We started to meet regularly to get to know each other’s work, share learnings, and support one another.
By engaging in dialogue with members of other communities and getting a glimpse of their daily lives, participants leave with a better understanding of and more empathy for other racial and ethnic communities. For example, after visiting single residency occupancy units in Chinatown, members of Coleman Advocates, a Black and Brown-led organization, felt injustice on behalf of low-income Chinese immigrants living in such cramped conditions. And after visiting with Black community members in Bayview, a neighborhood in San Francisco with a large Black community, CPA members felt empathy for Black communities who are missing elders due to structural racism and health inequities.
Key Strategies
Regular meetings
Every collaborative is extremely busy, but we have committed to having quarterly in-person meetings. We have rotated hosting at each of our offices to spread out the responsibilities, encourage each other to visit neighborhoods outside of our routines, and introduce each other to our staff.
Co-create agendas with flexibility
We have an open call for agenda items and encourage each collaborative to add items, with the hosting collaborative responsible for curating the agenda. At the same time, we allow for organic items to come up at the moment. For example, a discussion of our theories of change led to us realizing that many of us use the same case management system. This sparked separate communications on sharing tips for using the case management system to its fullest potential.
Bring in people with prior working relationships
CYC and other people involved in CCSJ have been in the violence prevention space for decades. They have already worked with many of the members of the other collaboratives. Inviting staff who have pre-existing working relationships with others in the room allows for a warmer introduction for other collaborative members.
Technical assistance
We share knowledge of working with City departments, navigating client referrals, grant reporting, developing coalitional infrastructure like theories of change, and other information that is helpful to develop our collaboratives. Our ability to crowdsource experience and learnings from one another deepens our relationships and helps us grow together given many of our collaboratives are new — all of our collaboratives only began programming within the past six years.
Sharing information about new developments
Because of the trust that we have built, we have been able to share information about funding, policy, and political developments in a sensitive environment. For example, in facing government budget cuts, we were able to share information about our levels of funding and cuts we have observed elsewhere in our networks. Having the fuller picture of the budget allowed us to decide how we would respond as a group and as individual collaboratives.
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