Heliotrope enhances national initiatives

Heliotrope works on a local level while influencing national change.  With groundbreaking projects in Western Washington, Heliotrope has modeled innovative strategies and created new tools for a number of national initiatives.

Nancy guided the creation of the Seattle It’s About Time for Kids initiative, which was recognized as one of the strongest urban participants in Search Institute’s national Healthy Communities. Healthy Youth initiative. It’s About Time for Kids aims to increase developmental assets in all Seattle children and youth. Nancy helped shape the focus of this collaborative effort of The Seattle Foundation, youth development organizations, corporate funders, and others to create changes in the policy in the community as well as organizational change within youth-serving agencies. She also led the research effort to develop a social marketing campaign designed to engage all adults in forming positive relationships with kids.

During the initial years of the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s Making Connections initiative, Heliotrope used its analytic and organizational skills to help develop a clearly articulated initial strategy for the Seattle/King County site.  Making Connections is based on the premise that children will do better if their families are strong and they live in supportive neighborhoods that offer economic opportunities, social ties, and responsive services. Nancy worked to effectively communicate how the initial steps of this multi-faceted, long-term effort would begin in the White Center area.

Heliotrope goes a step beyond the original model 

When the Seattle SafeFutures juvenile crime reduction initiative developed its systems change component, Nancy led efforts to go beyond tinkering to search for more fundamental shifts in the way juvenile justice and youth services are delivered in Seattle and King County. (Seattle was one of six communities in the country selected for this five-year grant from the US Department of Justice.) The result was a ground-breaking effort named Reinvesting in Youth, with a goal of placing greater emphasis on “front-end” prevention measures that build strengths in children and families before they get in serious trouble. While that goal is not new, Reinvesting in Youth is distinguished by spelling out a financing system and policy changes capable of bringing about that result.

Heliotrope contributed experience with systems theory, community decision-making, collaboration and evaluation to Seattle’s MOST (Making the Most of Out-of-School Time) Initiative. Seattle’s MOST was one of three projects chosen for a multi-year national initiative of the DeWitt Wallace Reader’s Digest Fund to improve the quality and availability of out-of-school time activities.

Heliotrope tackles new issues

As part of a national movement to develop Domestic Violence Coordinated Response Systems, Nancy crafted the first template for a state-of-the-art domestic violence response system.  She also designed an innovative process for the first local community domestic violence summit in Washington, facilitated that summit and several others, and wrote a guidebook to help communities plan these summits. Her other domestic violence work ranges from guiding the first collaborative project in the country to address the emerging problem of youth who assault their parents to shaping and implementing one of the few long-term, local domestic violence prevention campaigns.

As strong neighborhoods emerge as an important strategy to helping families and children become strong and capable, Nancy has helped explore how traditional social service approaches could be transformed by working with and through neighborhoods. She led the planning effort to include a Human Services element in the Capitol Hill/First Hill/Pike-Pine Neighborhood Plan during Seattle’s Neighborhood Planning Process. She has also provided inventive ideas for addressing domestic violence on a neighborhood level to Seattle’s Domestic and Sexual Violence Prevention Office.

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