Boston Promise Initiative

Project OverviewThe Boston Promise Initiative (BPI) is a strategic approach to revitalize Boston’s neighborhoods. It is designed to catalyze significant change in the short term (3-5 years) and result in transformation over the longer term (10-20 years). The BPI approach will soon guide work in all of our neighborhoods, impacting over 615,000 residents; especially our children. The first neighborhood to launch the BPI approach will be the Dudley area of Roxbury and North Dorchester.This is about changing business as usual. We are working harder now to place our lowest performing schools on a path to success, so all students will get the education and the opportunities they deserve. Governor Deval PatrickIn Dudley, the BPI partnership described in this proposal will build the Dudley Village Campus (DVC), a union of all components of the community—residents, organizations, schools, governmental and institutional partners,businesses and service providers. This emerging learning community will share a common mission: to guarantee all children sustained success in school. Following the launch of the DVC (which is home to 18,345 residents, nearly 7,000 under 24) the BPI partners will work with other emerging and existing place-based initiatives to develop new Campuses. The initial area for expansion will be neighborhoods within the Circle of Promise (CoP), an area surrounding Dudley in the heart of the city - home to 160,000 residents, and most of Boston’s underperforming schools.The BPI approach recognizes that in addition to excellent schools, enhanced and enriched learning, and opportunities for growth, every child has needs for other essentials. Our campus approach organizes and manages resources so that all children also have the following:

• Basic needs met for food, shelter, safety, and health;
• Caring consistent adults in their lives;
• A positive peer group; and
• Access to the wider world

We know that children thrive in healthy, strong families and communities. We also know that transformation requires a community-led, multi-generational, and cross-sectoral approach. Three strategies differentiate our approach to comprehensive community change from preceding ones (in Boston as well as across the country):

1. Our Management Strategy: The DVC lead agency will not be the provider of the broad range of services necessary for our comprehensive approach to community change. Rather, the lead agency will provide the structure, coordination, and strategic direction to keep the DVC on track and accountable for results. This model takes advantage of the strong, diverse, and successful programs and organizations extant today on the Campus and throughout the city, and will expand our already strong partnerships. By separating the role of organizer and assessor of services and programs from the role of provider, we will have flexibility, objectivity, and accountability to residents in the selection and evaluation of service providers.
2. The Child-centered Achieving, Connecting and Thriving (ACT) Results Framework: We will use the ACT framework1 to evaluate the progress and success of all components of the initiative in terms of children’s outcomes. Every child will have an ACT Plan2 outlining his or her pathway to success. This tool will help all DVC organizations to ensure that each child is getting the educational, social, emotional, and other supports he or she needs to succeed.
3. Our Commitment to Resident Leadership:Real transformation must build on the strengths and capacity of residents, including youth, and must reflect the neighborhood’s cultures and concerns. DSNI has a 27 year history of catalyzing successful resident leadership. This competency is one of our distinguishing characteristics; moreover, the efficiency of our broad engagement process is one reason for our continued success and growth. DSNI is governed by an elected resident-majority board3, and in turn, residents lead the governance structure for the DVC. By giving all residents the information and tools to evaluate progress, engagement will be pervasive.

DVC organizations will use the ACT Plan to track progress and participation for 1,858 children including those living in our Choice Neighborhood's HUD-assisted scattered site development4, Woodledge/Morrant Bay. By looking at the results of our work child-by-child, partners will know when and how to provide more or less intensive services to children and families. By looking at the results of our work in the aggregate, partners will determine if our strategies for engaging families and working with youth through our anchor schools and our community-based partners are successful. Resident demand will ensure that investments follow success.The DSNI Board of Directors will be accountable for implementing the mission of the DVC and ensuring that scale-up proceeds on-time and efficiently; the DSNI Senior Management Team and Project Director (a seasoned organizer and manager with 17 years’ experience at DSNI) will operationalize the mission each day. Four bodies advise DSNI and will help us monitor the execution of the plan and its expansion throughout the city:

1. The Data Team (DT)has identified the information architecture to ensure that partnershave accurate, complete information on solutions and their impact;
2. The Strategy Group (SG) has overseen the development of, and will monitor progress on the implementation of the plan;
3. The Accountability Team (AT) will analyze the results of the work, and will help to make difficult but necessary determinations about future allocations of resources, including the DVC members’ time, attention and funding; and
4. The Funders Group5 (FG) will invest in and help the DVC to leverage new resources to support our complete continuum of solutions.

DVC partners have created shared sets of metrics (and the tools for using them) to track our results and to help us to examine when we’re falling short. We will examine these data regularly to determine where our strategies need to change in order to get the results we seek. We will measure our work on three important dimensions:

1. Results for children Are children achieving, connecting and thriving? How well are we doing at improving the numbers and percentages who meet the targeted indicators of well-being in each domain? To achieve the results we want, we will optimize our use of shared and limited resources.
2. Process for Doing Work. Resident leadership and collaboration are essential elements of the DVC approach. Partners will be accountable for creating opportunities for resident leadership and working in a fully collaborative way with others on the Campus and beyond. We value effectiveness and efficiency. We will support the use of sustainable strategies, including those that are cost-effective, resourceful, and green.
3. Relationships to Sustain Partnerships The work described in this proposal relies upon a group of partners developing and sustaining trusting relationships built upon shared values and goals. Partners’ treatment of the partnership itself is an important indicator of our success as well as a tool for our long-term success.

All of these tools and structures are designed for maximum accountability, for transparency,and to ensure the success of each stage of the BPI, from launch to scaling up to citywide roll-out. The power of the model is that it keeps all of us—partners, parents, youth, teachers, and others—learning and growing together.1 ACT stands for Achieving, Connecting and Thriving and refers to Boston’s first-in-the-nation results framework for assessing the well-being of children and the impact of community based programming on helping children achieve specific results in these three domains.2 The ACT Plan may include Individual Educational Plans (IEPs) when necessary and will also take into account the relationships children need with caring consistent adults, whether family or mentors, teachers or coaches.3 DSNI holds open Board elections every two years. Any resident over 14 can vote. There are 34 seats, with equal representation assured for each of the four major population groups living in Dudley: 4 seats each for African-American, Cape Verdean, Latino and White residents. Other seats are reserved for youth (ages 15-18), nonprofits,faith-based organizations, small businesses, and community development corporations.4 Woodledge/Morrant Bay consists of 11 severely distressed buildings clustered around Quincy Street in the DVC, an area with nearly 33% of households living in poverty and Part I violent crime rates that are double the rate of the city as a whole. Woodledge/Morrant Bay is also the target of Boston’s Choice Neighborhoods plan, a $20.5 million revitalization investment which is aligned with the BPI.5 The Funders Group comes together under the leadership of the Opportunity Agenda, a funding collaborative dedicated to supporting the education pipeline from 0-5, through K-12, and on to graduation and increasing college completion rates across the City.