Join us for lessons from the Opportunity Youth Forum (OYF), a national network of over 40 diverse local collaboratives, about how to assess and learn from local collaboratives' impacts on local systems and communities, in areas such as cross-system program coordination, policy change, narrative change, cross-system data sharing, and more. We’ll share the rich OYF data about the relationship of collaborative capacity to attaining systems changes, and at the typical growth patterns for collaboratives over time. We’ll look not just at what was measured, and how it was measured, but how local collaboratives in the network used that assessment information for various purposes, such as driving improvement in the collaborative, or for case making for funding, or policy change. These approaches to assessing change are not specific to youth initiatives, so if you are struggling to understand how to track systems-level change, please join us for this session!

Learning Objectives:
•    What is meant by “systems change,” and how to assess it across 7 main categories
•    Understand the relationship between collaborative capacity and attaining systems changes and examples of growth patterns for collaboratives
•    Learn a ‘light lift’ approach to assessing systems change annually, and tracking year to year impacts of a collaborative
•    Ways to use local systems change data for advocacy and improvement