Looking for ways to leverage resources in this environment with shrinking funding?  Interested in taking collaboration with your partners to the next level?

Collective impact is a community development framework by which multiple agencies collaborate to create a common vision, align strategies and activities and use a common set of indicators to measure progress.  This framework is used successfully by the Strive Partnership in Cincinnati in making progress toward their collective goal of improving student achievement.  Collaborations in Colorado, including One Community Pueblo and the Colorado Coalition for Healthy Schools, are in the early stages of using this framework to create a shared vision and common measurement system to improve the health and well being of children and to create healthy school environments respectively.

John Kania and Mark Kramer have identified five conditions of collective success for collective impact initiatives. The conditions that successful collective impact initiatives have include: (1) common agenda and vision for change, (2) shared measurement systems to track progress, (3) mutually reinforcing activities/interventions, (4) continuous communication among agencies, and (5) backbone support organizations to dedicate staff to coordinate and support the initiative logistics and activities.

Initiatives using a collective impact framework require funding to support their work over a multi-year process.  The work of the Strive Partnership has been in progress over four years, compared to the Colorado based initiatives that are in the early stages of their work.  Communities and organizations that have a long term commitment to making change within their community, should consider using a collective impact framework to leverage resources to maximize program impact.

The Criminal Justice Clinical Specialist (CJCS) Grant Program was awarded to the Department of Human Services, Division of Behavioral Health (DBH) through Justice Assistance Grant (Federal American Reinvestment and Recovery Act (ARRA)) funds.  The project strategically places 10 Criminal Justice Clinical Specialists and other ancillary services in the behavioral health system to coordinate with criminal justice authorities (e.g. law enforcement, district attorney’s offices, public defenders, county jails, probation, parole, community corrections, and state prisons) and to case manage referrals of offenders to community behavioral health agencies and to other needed service providers.

In collaboration with the Center for Research Strategies, DBH is conducting a comprehensive evaluation of the CJCS program.  CRS recently completed the Client Satisfaction portion of the evaluation.  Starting in June 2011 and continuing through October 2011, Clinical Specialists at all 10 program sites were instructed to distribute a client satisfaction survey to any client they had seen more than one time. The client satisfaction survey distributed was a modification of the Mental Health Statistics Improvement Program (MHSIP) Consumer Survey.  This instrument was chosen because it is distributed annually to consumers receiving public mental health services state wide by the Division of Behavioral Health (DBH).  Using the same survey allows for comparison between the CJCS clients and the overall community mental health population.

A total of 158 surveys were returned by clients in the CJCS program.  In contrast with system wide MHSIP respondents, the majority of the CJCS respondents were male (63.3%), whereas in the entire community mental health center sample the majority of respondents were female (62.8%).  Twenty-two percent of the CJCS respondents described their ethnicity as Hispanic/Latino.  Race distribution was quite similar to that of the community mental health center sample with the majority being White/Causation (61.2%).  Over 95% of the CJCS clients who responded to the survey expressed positive attitudes on all five domains of the MHSIP survey.  The percent agreement ranged from 95.1% in the outcomes domain to 98.7% in both the access and general satisfaction domains.  The overall satisfaction with the program is substantially higher than the satisfaction ratings found in the overall community mental health sample.  The high degree of client satisfaction coupled with the findings from the Community Stakeholder Satisfaction survey conducted earlier in 2011 suggest that the CJCS program is perceived as beneficial to its clients and valuable to the communities it serves.

Since April is Sexually Transmitted Disease (STD) Awareness Month, the Center for Research Strategies supports efforts to educate Coloradans on their individual risk factors in order to prevent the spread of STDs. According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, “Every year sexually transmitted diseases, or STDs, cost the U.S. health care system $17 billion and cost individuals even more in immediate and long-term health consequences.”  Regardless of race or gender, sexually active teens and young adults are at an increased risk for STDs with an average of 19 million new infections every year.

Statistics for Colorado show that the rates of reportable STDs among young people ages 15-24 are high.   In 2010, Colorado reported 13,413 cases of chlamydia and 1,708 cases of gonorrhea per 100,000 youth.

Unfortunately STDs such as gonorrhea are becoming harder to treat as the disease is becoming resistant to available antibiotics. The National Coalition of STD Directors (NCSD) reports that those infected with gonorrhea and chlamydia are also at greater risk for contracting HIV at a rate that is five times more likely than those uninfected.

Other STDs are also widespread and of concern.  The Denver Post reports that one in four people are living with herpes worldwide and an estimated 80% of those that are infected are not aware that they carry the virus.

For a list of resources in Colorado and testing options, please visit JustGetTested.com or visit CDC.gov for additional information.