Increasing community engagement in collective impact approaches to advance social change

ABSTRACT

The Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) is a large urban school district in Oakland, California where hunger and poor nutrition are prevalent. Given the critical link between nutrition and academic achievement, OUSD pursued a collective impact approach to school food reform called Rethinking School Lunch Oakland (RSLO) as part of OUSD’s community development model of school reform, with the Center for Ecoliteracy and philanthropy. RSLO required repurposing land among other major system shifts. This case study describes RSLO’s implementation, the engagement through expanded public processes, and how OUSD’s legal identity prevented shared decision-making over land use – one of the most important issues for community given past land use and current neighborhood change. This case study illustrates how past application of law and a government collaborator’s legal identity, structure, and relationship to other government entities and community will shape engagement and the Collective Impact (CI) approach.

KEYWORDS:

• Collective impact
• community engagement
• local governance

Acknowledgments

Thank you to a team of students and research staff including Jaime Lopez, Christine Ngo, Raine Robichaud, Beth Spitler, Amanda Fukutome, and Shannon Rieger, for critical research support and anonymous reviewers for helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

The author worked as consultant in 2014 and 2015 for the Oakland Unified School District, providing research and analysis in support of the development of a district-wide Equity Policy, and research and analysis to support the implementation of a major facilities Community Engagement Policy. All consulting activities concluded prior to the beginning of research interviews and data collection described in this article, and two years prior to final analysis and submission of the initial manuscript. However, the author incorporated data from her work as a consultant into this study, including (1) direct observation of 104 hours of public community meetings and board hearings; (2) notes from the design and implementation of a door to door survey of 284 households within the census tract surrounding the project site in June and July 2015; (3) notes from the town hall forum with community and OUSD leadership in August 2015; and (4) notes from 33 separate site visits to 2850 West Street (the location of the new Central Kitchen, Instruction Farm, and Education Center). The author also continues to maintain ongoing relationships withboth OUSD and the Center for Ecoliteracy, providing all analysis from all ongoing research activities to each entity.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Berkeley Food Institute at University of California at Berkeley; The Stupski Foundation; and The TomKat Foundation.