Our community partners know that data capacity building is not a “one size fits all” journey.
While our partners share a collective vision for our children, young adults, and families to be happy, healthy, safe, and thriving, each partner’s programs and services are uniquely adapted to reflect the families they serve and their community’s needs. Best Starts partners with The Capacity Collective to provide critical data capacity-building support for our partners in the Home-Based Services and Community-Based Parenting Supports strategies, whose programs and supports are tailored to provide trusted, culturally relevant support that families can rely on.
Today, we hear from four partners who have worked alongside The Capacity Collective to share their community’s stories in their own voices and co-develop stronger data systems that help them identify, respond, and adapt to emerging needs.
Watch our Q&A conversations below.
To learn more about Best Starts’ capacity building efforts, check out our Capacity Building blog series which provides an in-depth overview of Best Starts’ investment in a number of capacity building efforts, how we define “capacity building,” and why we think it’s important.
Divine Alternatives for Dads Services (DADS)
DADS has been helping fathers walk together in supportive community and navigate relational and legal barriers that separate them from their children and families for over 20 years. To support their work in building stronger fathers and healthier communities, The Capacity Collective helped DADS migrate over 20 years of critical data and stories to one data system for easier access and continued organizational transformation.
Listen to our conversation with Jeanett Charles and Gregory Adams from DADS and Janae Teal from The Capacity Collective.
The pandemic shifted our understanding of how do we continue to relationally connect with our clientele, which is the most important part of what DADS does – reaching out to the heart of the man and being physically, emotionally, and spiritually present with them. The Apricot database alongside our website, where we had online opportunities for our clients to ask us about our services and to connect to us, [has been] amazing during this pandemic. Moving forward, my husband and I are thinking about how to maintain the great work of The Capacity Collective to continue to help the growth of DADs as we expand to Yakima and reach broader communities.
Jeanett Charles, Co-Founder
Divine Alternatives for Dads Services (DADS)
Coalition for Refugees from Burma
In their initial project, Coalition for Refugees from Burma (CRB) partnered with The Capacity Collective to redesign their wide breath of data collection tools – from intake to home visit and referral forms – to continually learn more about their families’ strength and needs and find better ways to support their families. Now, their current focus is implementing Apricot, an online database. This transition from paper to web-based forms has created a smoother data collection process that captures and analyzes their team’s work in real-time and allows them to focus their energy on supporting families.
Listen to our conversation between CRB’s Early Learning team and Janae Teal from The Capacity Collective.
It’s important to our team and the communities that we meet families where they are by providing materials and resources in their own language and from their own people. With the Apricot implementation and The Capacity Collective’s support, we’ve been able to develop our surveys into 6 different languages to reflect the communities we serve and hear from our community leaders – our home-based visitors who work directly with our families – and learn how we should collect data about our programs.
Emani Donaldson, Program Coordinator
Coalition for Refugees from Burma
Childhaven
The Photovoice Project creates space for parents in Childhaven’s Healthy Starts program, mainly young Latina mothers, to share their stories as way of honoring their strengths while simultaneously acknowledging the challenges they’ve faced. Participating mothers took pictures to capture their experiences based off prompts like, “what do you wish people knew about your family?” and attended focus groups to reflect upon their images and share their thoughts with other participants.
Watch our Q&A session with Erin Hood, Childhaven’s Data Coordinator, who speaks to her relationship with The Capacity Collective and how they’ve supported the long-term sustainability of her team’s data system.
The Capacity Collective is first, last, and always mission centered. They deeply care about the person – the kiddo – at the center, and that’s unique within the data sphere. There’s no need with The Capacity Collective to translate what this data means and how important and heart-centered it has to be to really tend to the needs of the kiddo and family, and our organizational needs – all while being mindful of honoring our partnership with BSK.
Erin Hood, Data Coordinator
Childhaven
Denise Louie Education Center
The Capacity Collective and the Home Visiting team at Denise Louie Education Center are in the process of co-creating data dashboards to illuminate areas of strength and challenges that their staff and families face, in an effort to continually improve their programs and services.
Hear directly from Megan Jimenez, a Denise Louie Home Visitor Supervisor, who speaks to her team’s partnership with The Capacity Collective and how building data capacity is a continual process of reflection and adaptation that helps their programs quickly address and respond to community and staff needs.
We appreciate that Best Starts has facilitated this partnership with The Capacity Collective as it brings us to that next step of inquiry and makes us ask “why?” As we get better at asking those questions, we can identify how to respond and adapt to community needs. The hope is that this translates to us being able to provide the services to the community that best support them.
Megan Jimenez, Home Visitor Supervisor
Denise Louie Education Center
