This innovative system will ensure that more middle school students have access to quality learning opportunities after school, however, this project is still in great need of community support.  We need community leaders to own this project, funds to support development and growth and volunteers to use their expertise and time to keep this wonderful community effort off the ground and flourishing.

LTOTN would not have formed without the eagerness of our community to support out of school time learning and the healthy development of Asheville teens.  It is amazing that our community pulled together to support and build this project, but this is only the beginning and success will depend on collaboration from all levels of our unique and vibrant city.

Check out the awesome Fall programs!

ABYSA (Soccer)

UNCA Craft Campus

The Health Adventure

Asheville Art Museum

FEAST (teacher club) (organic gardening and healthy cooking classes)

Our Voice-Climbing Towards Confidence

YWCA

NC Outward Bound

Torch Club – Boys & Girls Club

NC Stage Company

Cougar Mountain Club (teacher club)

Directing Ourselves Movie Making

POETIX

French Club (teacher club)

Roots + Wings School of Art

Cougar Creativity Club (teacher club)

Delta House (academic support)

LEAF in Schools and Streets (music from around the world)

WNC AIDS Project

Building Bridges (relationships across divides)

LTOTN will offer three 8-week sessions

Fall:  September 20th - November 19th

Winter:  January 10th – March 12th

Spring:  March 21st - May 27th

Being mindful is absolutely essential to our success in achieving strategic goals and overall mission, and it is central to leading and facilitating collaboration in communities and organizations. It is important enough that the concept of the ‘mindful organization’ has emerged.  Tom Heuerman and Diana Olsen define mindfulness as paying attention to what is (inside and outside of ourselves) and then reflecting non-judgmentally on what is and why it is so. They define organizational mindfulness as the connecting and sharing of the mindfulness of people, in a forum such as dialogue, to create new meaning and knowledge that will help people and organizations achieve greater congruence between their intentions and outcomes.

Organizations committed to learning have improved their capacity for reflection-on-action, but mindfulness is calling for reflection-in-action. It calls us to collectively focus on a number of things even as we act:

• our collective intentions–our strategic outcomes and vision
• the ways we are working together
• the way work is being done

The result of mindfulness is greater alignment of actions with outcomes. It’s like polishing the stone, creating a smooth, frictionless surface, making it easier for us to be successful.

In their research into mindful organizations, Weick and Sutcliffe found that organizations where error and disaster can lead to catastrophe have a unique structure which leads them to think and act differently from other organizations. They use mindful organizing for the unexpected as well as the expected.

Not all organizations have the potential for catastrophe in the event of failure, however, the substance of the elements that Weick and Sutcliffe identified may be broadened in ways that offer key elements for intentionally designing the mindful organization:

1. Anticipation

• Attention and sensitivity to early warning signs and key measures relevant to strategic outcomes
• Commitment to inquire instead of simplify interpretations
• Sensitivity to and awareness about operations, taking into consideration the dynamic and nonlinear nature of Sociotechnical Systems and their relationship to strategic outcomes.

2. Commitment to resilience:

• The capacity to function even in the face of adversity
• The capacity to return to service and excellence following adverse events
• The capacity to learn and grow from whatever happens

3. Deference to Expertise:

• Include “lower ranking” members of the organization
• Place greater emphasis on collaboration, focus on an assembly of knowledge, experience, learning, and intuition.

The good news is organizations can intentionally design for mindfulness. In mindful organizations the stress of having to be the all-knowing leader or manager, of having to make all the decisions and have the answers, is alleviated as organizational members realize that mindfulness and collaboration moves them more rapidly towards their vision and delivers more effectively and efficiently on strategic objectives.

Middle school students have aged out of most of the after school and special summer programs and, under current laws, they are too young to work. This leaves them potentially vulnerable and bored. The number of hours they may be without constructive activity over the course of their middle school life (from 3:30 – 6 PM five days a week and 2 ½ months in the summer for three years), is 10,000 hours! (It is ironic that this is the total number of hours that Malcolm Gladwell found were necessary to create mastery in any given area.) Left on their own, without affordable, healthy options, these curious and independent kids are often drawn into drugs, violence, and other risky behavior (not exactly what we want them mastering!).

What Asheville discovered in it’s 85 interviews with a cross section of the school’s student population is that young teens, age 12 – 14, are full of a sense of maturity, independence, and competence. They have great ideas about how they can serve their community and support younger children and 60% of them would like meaningful opportunities for service after school and in the summer. This is the age when children pass into young adulthood and their sense of who they are and how they can contribute to their families and community changes significantly. They hold great promise for most communities—if we can find meaningful ways to engage them.

In Asheville, a team of volunteers interviewed a cross-section of 85 youth in the middle school, facilitated focus groups with 5^th and 9^th graders, interviewed parents and facilitated parent focus groups.  This was followed by a 1½ day Appreciative Inquiry summit. Cheri Torres of Collaborative by Design worked with the Asheville City Schools to design a process that would ensured the following:

• voices of youth were heard
• best practices and strengths found their way into the conversations
• participants collaborated
• shared outcomes and a vision were generated
• collaborative future action was taken

More than 80 community members, including parents, students, service providers, government and school officials, police officers, and business members attended the summit. In just a day and a half, they generated a vision, a commitment to a community collaboration, and formed four Action Teams for moving forward in creating out-of-school programming for middle school youth.  Here is the Listening to Our Teens Network (LTOT Network) vision:

The Listening to Our Teens Network delivers a coordinated menu

of highly experiential and relevant after-school and summer programs

designed and evaluated with student/young teen input.  These

programs are made possible by a collaboration of individuals,

community organizations, businesses, and government pooling

their resources so all middle school youth are empowered by

opportunities to find their voice and realize their potential.

The hallmarks of every LTOT Network program are:

• Fun
• Creativity
• Enrichment
• Service
• Access

The actions team spent the last part of the morning on the second day developing a plan of action for the upcoming month and a follow up meeting was scheduled.  The action teams hard at work this summer are:

• Network Communication and Coordination
• Engaged Community Leadership
• Research for Development
• Mapping Our Current Resources

For those of you interested in the LTOT Network progress, updates on this community collaboration will be posted as they emerge.  As we learn more from our research, we will share it with others.

For further information about the LTOT Network, contact Kate Pett or Hanna Woody at the Asheville City Schools Foundation or Cheri Torres.

For information about how Providence RI has responded to the same need in their community, you can find out about the Providence After School Alliance. You can also view a number of videos about their program at Edutopia.

Another exceptional program that surfaced in our research was Citizen Schools, an apprenticeship program for middle school students.

Collaborative by Design is hoping to surface public/private partnerships from around the world as well as service provider collaborations that offer new and more sustainable practices for serving young people. Please add to this conversation if you are aware of other collaborative community efforts to create meaningful opportunities and programming for middle school youth.

The Utah Health Department, in seeking to address the increasing and alarming rate of STDs in Youth, developed a community coalition on May 13, 2009 joining a diverse set of organizations in a partnership to prevent STDs in Youth.  These groups represented the full spectrum of a value stream: from the conservative Eagle Foundation to the more liberal Planned Parenthood, from church groups to teachers and social service workers.  A united and cooperative coalition emerged in a gathering that was carefully designed to foster collaboration across differences through inquiry and a broad-based focus on a shared and common outcome and value.

The Department of Health contracted with Colette Herrick of Insight Shift, Inc to deliver this program. Cheri Torres of Collaborative by Design worked with Colette to intentionally design a 1-day event that would generate collaborative action. In order to ground the day’s conversations and planning, the 60 attendees first learned of important data and demographics that would open the possibilities for directed action. They were briefed on a variety of statistics and local data which revealed the incidence of STDs among different populations (e.g. homeless, prisons, street address, schools, age groups, and gender).

Following this, participants engaged in one-on-one interviews to surface current successful efforts in the community, best practices, and visions for working together to have a positive impact on the whole community. These interviews were followed by small group discussions and large group interaction that allowed the group to develop (1) a framework for their Collaborative Coalition:

• Design structures for the collaborative action
• Ideas for the vision, mission and principles for collaborating
• Ideas for communication strategies
• Commitments to behaviors to foster positive relational dynamics

(2) A set of principles and ideas that formed the foundation for their projects and programs working with youth and STDS:

• Core factors for successful prevention
• Trends and opportunities
• Ideas for future action

Before the day was over, this motivated group of people had developed action areas, prioritized them, and outlined future actions along timelines. These are their areas for immediate focus:

• Screening and Testing
• Policy Issues
• Our Utah Collaborative Coalition
• Integrating STD and Unintended Pregnancy
• Increased Testing Among Young Men
• Community-based Education

Participants aligned around their own interests and passions for action.  You can learn about the progress this group is making at their website.

If you have collaborative efforts to decrease the incidence of STDs in youth going on in your community, please post what you are learning about collaboration that is supporting your success.

What is it about the relationships in a collaboration that sets them apart? What is the “glue” that holds the whole together in this way? What are the connective structures that support this sense of wholeness? If we can identify this glue, perhaps we can more intentionally shift from high performance teams to generative collaborations.

What is your experience of collaboration such as described above? What were the connective structures that allowed a sense of safety and wholeness to emerge? How would you describe the relationships and what contributed to the dynamics among those collaborating?