August 2005

According to Philadelphia City Councilwoman Blondell Reynolds Brown, proponents of large-scale public policy initiatives must engage key champions – or “possibility thinkers” – in diverse arenas who can help spearhead reform. As a fellow of the Urban Health Initiative (UHI) – The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s 10-year effort to spur measurable improvements in children’s health and safety in five U.S. cities – Brown is just such a thinker. Speaking in May at the most recent event in the UHI-linked Urban Seminar Series, held twice yearly at Harvard University, Brown outlined several core lessons for proponents of “systems change.”

A community activist with a master’s degree in education, Brown vowed to make children and youth a centerpiece of her work as a councilwoman. Leaders of Philadelphia Safe and Sound, the local UHI initiative created to secure greater investment in kids, approached her about becoming a UHI Fellow after she had held office for just 12 months. According to Brown, her affiliation with “a think tank that provides the glue” gave her “strategies and tools to honor my pledge.” As a Fellow, Brown attended UHI-sponsored conferences that highlighted successful examples of fundamental reform in cities such as San Diego and Chicago, and applied the resulting insights as both a councilwoman and a strategic ally of initiatives championed by Philadelphia Safe and Sound.         

“Safe and Sound had clearly defined and distinguished itself as a laser-beam, big-picture entity,” Brown asserts. But the second step was to “build a network of believers” who would help redirect public policy and funding to improve the lives of children. Fortunately, Mayor John Street – another “possibility thinker” – was successfully courted and convinced to use his political clout to support the Coalition for Kids, a group initiated by Safe and Sound, which was composed of leaders from government and the business and philanthropic communities.  It was this collaborative that designed and launched the City’s first annual report card, measuring 27 indicators related to child health and well-being.  Shortly after Mayor Street took office, Safe and Sound also solicited his buy-in for the Children’s Investment Strategy, the primary vehicle to move designated strategies, such as after-school and parenting support, to scale.  (The Coalition for Kids was later dissolved, and was replaced by a full board of directors for Safe and Sound, as well as a City Children’s Commission, each of which is composed of a blend of activists, CEOs from business, and government officials.)

Larry Brown, a professor at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University who also spoke at the Harvard seminar, concurs that “a natural constituency for systems change” does not exist. People who vow to pursue large-scale policy reform often “smile for the group picture” and “then at the end of the day go off and do what’s really important to them, which is something completely different.”  To form “constructed constituencies – the ones you build,” reformers need to canvass “lots of political space” including the state, city hall, the mayor’s office, the bureaucracy, citywide organizations such as the Chamber of Commerce, and grassroots groups. Indeed, the job of finding a constituency for systems-change initiatives is never done, he says.

To help cement such a constituency, Safe and Sound helped launch the annual Children’s Report Card and Children’s Budget, which portray the health and safety of the city’s kids. “People want tangible documents that tell the story,” Councilwoman Brown observes. “When Mayor Street showed up at monthly meetings of social service departments, his commissioners got the message” that despite initial resistance, they should supply explicit information for the report card and budget. Such tools provide both “leverage and ammunition,” as they put Brown’s “fellow councilmembers on notice while making decisions.”

Those documents revealed that 100,000 young people in Philadelphia had no place to go after school, and that the city was spending more on punitive sanctions than on preventive services for children and youth. The City Council responded by approving funding for 35,000 new slots in after-school programs. Those services are “making a huge difference” in keeping kids out of principals’ offices and family court, Brown maintains. Those slots also institutionalized demand for such services. “We are already hearing whispers that it would be politically stupid to even think about eliminating them,” she says. 

To win converts to their cause, Councilwoman Brown advises change agents to “enlist, educate, and enlighten political stakeholders at the door, as they don’t like surprises.” Some of her colleagues on the City Council heard about Safe and Sound only “after the train was down the track”—after it had begun collaborating with Mayor Street—and found that “offensive.”

Brown also counsels that repetition breeds learning. That is, public officials “need to hear repeatedly from many different voices” about why they should redirect funding streams and revamp public policies in support of kids. She recommends that change agents identify grassroots champions in each council district. When she introduced a proposal to expand family childcare in Philadelphia, for example, she “formed a coalition to find people who would take the message” to each district’s council representative, as “my colleagues are more inclined to listen and respond to their own district constituencies.”

One stunning success stemming from the Children’s Investment Strategy is the Youth Violence Reduction Partnership, which cut homicides 40–60 percent in three police districts. When Philadelphia Safe and Sound asked the state to fund an expansion of that program, state officials needed “to hear repeatedly from a number of different worlds . . . that that would be the right thing to do.” Safe and Sound also had to be “smart in identifying folks who understood the state political landscape and who used their intellect and their contacts to craft the support we needed.”

Because term limits prevent Mayor Street from running for a third tenure, Safe and Sound is already devising a message for the next mayoral campaign. The agency will need “to work with all the candidates in a nonpartisan way” and collaborate with people “in each candidate’s world,” because reformers cannot predict who will win public office.

Having witnessed firsthand how the Children’s Report Card and Budget have “mobilized professionals across departments,” Councilwoman Brown now puts a premium on data.  Her standard question to department heads about their budgets: “Where are the data that support your department’s decision?” Professor Brown agrees, “Data-driven change and politics-driven change are complementary.” Meshing work on both fronts, Safe and Sound plans to introduce a Children’s Report Card in each district or neighborhood and identify local leaders who can urge greater investment in youth.

Have such initiatives added up to systems change in Philadelphia? “Absolutely,” says Councilwoman Brown. The city now devotes as many dollars to preventive services for kids as to punitive measures. Still, she asserts, progress in the political world “is always incremental,” even when advocates are aiming for fundamental reform.

Professor Brown agrees. “Moving the needle—in some big, comprehensive, citywide sense—may be unrealistic, but plenty of little needles add up. That may be the kind of progress advocates should focus on.”

For more information on this website about Philadelphia Safe and Sound, click here.