Lisbeth (Lee) Schorr's
work has focused over the last three decades on "what
works" in social policies and programs to improve outcomes
for disadvantaged children and families. Most recently she
and her colleagues at the Pathways Mapping Initiative have
been exploring novel approaches to assembling and organizing
actionable information to help communities solve urgent social
problems.
Lee is Lecturer in Social Medicine at Harvard University,
and Director of the Project on Effective Interventions at
Harvard University. She directs the Pathways Mapping Initiative,
and co-chairs the Aspen Institute's Roundtable on Community
Change.
Lee addressed the first AD symposium in January
2003 on the "Attributes of effective dissemination efforts
and the impact of contextual challenges" and we were
thrilled to welcome her to our learning community once again
for a conversation on "Scaling Up".
 Lisbeth
B. (Lee) Schorr is Lecturer in Social Medicine at Harvard
University, and Director of the Project on Effective Interventions
at Harvard University. She directs the Pathways Mapping Initiative,
and co-chairs the Aspen Institute's Roundtable on Community
Change.
Ms. Schorr has woven many strands of experience
with social policy, community building, education, and human
service programs together to become a national authority on
“what works” to improve the future of disadvantaged
children and their families and neighborhoods.
Ms. Schorr's 1988 book, WITHIN OUR REACH:
Breaking the Cycle of Disadvantage, analyzed social programs
that succeeded in effectively combating serious social problems
(such as high rates of single parenting, youth violence, and
school failure). With its documentation of efforts to improve
the life prospects of disadvantaged children, WITHIN OUR
REACH is in wide use in colleges and universities, and
by policy makers, practitioners, and advocates for more effective
interventions. In COMMON PURPOSE: Strengthening Families
and Neighborhoods to Rebuild America, published by Doubleday
in September 1997, she laid out the evidence that by acting
strategically, focusing on results, and putting together what
works, it is possible to strengthen children and families,
and to rebuild communities.
on
Lisbeth Schorr. Download her full biography here!
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"Nothing
Works"
 Born
in Germany, Lee's family came to the US when she was just
9 years old. She remembers not only the thrill of seeing the
Statue of Liberty, but also being a fourth grader with a strange
accent. Having learned early what it was like to be an outsider,
to feel marginalized, may have sparked some of Lee's interest
in others who are marginalized – because of color, class
or their convictions. Improving the lives of disadvantaged
has been a fairly constant thread running through her work.
In the early 1980’s, Lee began to
hear the refrain that “nothing works.” Refuting
that notion was the purpose of her first book, Within
Our Reach (WOR) wherein she described 25 successful programs
that prevented or reduced “rotten outcomes” and
identified the elements that made them successful.
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Common Purpose
 Lee's
book, Common Purpose, is considered by some to be
the dissemination bible. In many ways, Common Purpose
dispelled the myth that a successful model will carry the
seeds of its replication.
People did believe that once you had a successful
program it would replicate itself. Five years after WOR was
published, Lee found that half the programs she had profiled
were no longer in existence; many had become diluted in effectiveness,
and few were being built upon. She wanted to understand why
and embarked on her second book, Common Purpose.
Common Purpose was no longer about
programs, but about the administrative, policy, and funding
context -- about the changes required to allow successful
programs to thrive when they move beyond the hothouse of pilot
programs and demonstration funding.
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Challenges
of Successful Replication
Spreading what works requires new approaches
to:
- Taming bureaucracies - Bureaucracies
served us well in the past, but today, they are too brittle
and hierarchical to be the dominating organizing device
given that societal needs have changed so radically since
bureaucracy had its heyday. The focus now is on solving
social problems, and they aren't going to be solved by
the bureaucratic behaviour of people operating out of
bureaucratic settings. Bureaucratic behaviour (i.e. wherein
everyone is treated the same) can't transform individuals
and human systems, because it's dehumanized. It's the
exact opposite of what helps individuals and institutions
to change. Transformation requires trust.
- Focusing on results - A conversation
about results and outcomes can inject a real ethical core
into human service systems that have often dwelt more
on the state of agencies and programs than the people
they're meant to help. Focusing on the outcomes we want
for children and families at the forefront of our thinking,
planning and actions is key. Collaboration among agencies
and community leaders is the means, not the ends.
- Assessing “what works” - As
people try to identify the elements of what works, information
about what works often comes in disjointed pieces - arriving
too late or having been derived from a limited range of
interventions that allow for elegant evaluation. We need
to shift our focus from passing yes/no judgments on programs
and look at different sources of evidence which can be
analyzed in the context of theory. We need to strike a
balance between rigorous, narrow attempts of defining
what works with anecdotal evidence. There are many different
ways of knowing what works. The emphasis should be on
making good judgments, not evaluative methods relying
strictly on quantitative data.
- Reforming systems and rebuilding communities
- It's essential to focus not just on individual
programs but also on connecting families to supports,
on connecting services to one another, on filling gaps,
and sometimes, on creating new institutions. We know that
short term programs do not lead to fundamental change
because fundamental change happens in fits and starts
and needs to be supported over the long term. Programs
and projects operating in isolation are not likely to
improve outcomes for a significant proportion of those
at serious risk. We need community wide efforts and accountability
and the willingness of policy makers and funders to create
a coherent and supportive infrastructure by connecting
programs and funding structures across domains. Whole
communities can work together to improve lives.
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Attributes
of successful replication
- Identify and replicate the essence of a successful
intervention while adapting many of its components
to a new setting or new population.
Figure out what the essentials are of the thing that works
and what it is that needs to be adapted to new situations.
So much of what makes a program successful is often tacit
understanding.
- Use an outcomes orientation.
- Obtain the continuous backing of an intermediary
organization that offers expertise, outside support,
legitimation, and clout to help sustain the scaled-up
intervention. Successful programs that have been
able to replicate have found someone outside the organization
that provides technical assistance, and who is also able
to go to policy makers and funders and have a discussion
about the changes required to ensure successful replication.
- Recognize the importance of the systems and
institutional context in sustaining or undermining
the critical attributes of effective interventions.
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Some additional
thinking on “scaling up”
In our efforts to identify “what works”
and what is worth scaling up and replicating, we must move
beyond reliance on isolated pieces of evidence and a narrow
range of interventions that have proven their effectiveness
and are therefore considered “evidence-based.”
Instead, we must apply reasonable judgments and plausible
interpretations to a preponderance of evidence culled from
accumulated experience, from multiple ways of knowing and
from theory as well as from research.
We must also refrain from being sold on ease
of replication for it's own sake. We must learn to live with
the tension between what is easy to replicate and sustain
because it doesn't challenge existing arrangements and those
things we are trying to scale up that challenge the status
quo.
What is easiest to replicate and scale up
often operates at the margin because they don't require changes
in belief and values. There is a tension between innovations
that are welcome so long as they are easy and peripheral,
but are threatening when they begin to expand and threaten
jobs or a shared understanding of how work should be done.
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- Building a Deeper
Knowledge Base - A description of the Pathways
Mapping Initiative by Lisbeth Schorr and Patricia Auspos,
from the Fall 2003 issue of the Journal of Policy Analysis
and Management.
- The
Pathways Approach - The
Pathways Mapping Initiative seeks to expand, enrich, and
organize information about what has worked-and what can
be expected to work-in community efforts to achieve agreed-upon
results. Pathways are designed to guide choices about
investments, programs, and policies made by a range of
stakeholders, including developers of community initiatives,
service providers, funders, and policymakers.
- Time to Start Connecting the Dots - In
this address to The Pew Partnership, Lisbeth Schorr urges
organizations involved in building stronger communities
to “connect the dots in ways that would allow us
to tell our story more convincingly to the wider world.”
A thoughtful examination of how to "spread
and sustain what works" in programs that promote social
change. Though the context is the U.S., the lessons are
universal and the numerous in-depth examples effectively
illustrate her conclusions and recommendations.
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- Nurse
Family Partnership - Soon after the first
research results of the demonstration project were published,
Nurse-Family Partnership received numerous national and
international requests to implement the program. Although
the results of the first clinical trials were very promising,
the founder and his colleagues were reluctant to rush
the program into non-research settings for two reasons.
They wanted to test the model in other populations to
see if the same results would be achieved, and they wanted
to be well-prepared to help new, local sites implement
the program.
- The
Beacon School - Funders saw that community-based
organizations did not have the expertise to provide quality
after-school programming and put together a consortium
that included the City of New York and a foundation group
to funnel funding and provide technical assistance. This
group became such a strong intermediary organization that
the programs continued despite changes in administration.
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