Wellbeing Blueprint
  • Start here.
  • A message for those of us within systems
  • Principle 1
    • 1. Start with what matters to people: wellbeing
      • 1.1 Be public about our historical roots and commitment to equity and wellbeing.
        • 1.1.1 Make history and commitments available on the web; co-create a report card with the community.
        • 1.1.2 Engage staff to shift this history.
        • 1.1.3 Collect and use disaggregated data.
        • 1.1.4 Eliminate biased decision-making data sets.
          • 1.1.4 A Toolkit for Centering Racial Equity Throughout Data Integration
      • 1.2 Use restorative and transformative practices.
        • 1.2.1 Fund ongoing restorative and transformational work.
        • 1.2.2 Default to restorative and transformational practices.
        • 1.2.3 Recognize why people may avoid telling the truth to the system.
        • 1.2.4 Use person-centered language in policy and practice.
      • 1.3 Center power for community decisions in the community.
        • 1.3.1 Recognize and support people's right and ability to vote.
        • 1.3.2 Make informal community assets visible.
        • 1.3.3 Relentlessly seek diverse and inclusive engagement in planning processes.
        • 1.3.4 Change structures before adding programs.
        • 1.3.5 Contract with local experts for community services.
      • 1.4 Change structures that force unsustainable tradeoffs.
        • 1.4.1 Adjust existing and potential policies to address tradeoffs.
          • 1.4.1 Playbook and Tools: Policy-level Tradeoffs Analysis
        • 1.4.2 Pay for performance that optimizes wellbeing.
        • 1.4.3 Create policies with clear mechanisms for alternative responses.
          • 1.4.3 Example - St. Louis County Family Court
        • 1.4.4 Align staff policies to address tradeoffs.
      • 1.5 Structure procurements for wellbeing.
        • 1.5.1 Develop core procurement elements that use equity and wellbeing as a framework.
      • 1.6 Adjust benefits and expectations in recognition of the trauma we are all experiencing.
        • 1.6.1 Respond with the context of people's decisions and choices in mind.
        • 1.6.2 Encourage staff to use the information and resources they share with constituents.
        • 1.6.3 Examine emergency policies to ensure they don't replicate the harms they are meant to address.
  • Principle 2
    • 2. Push against harms being concentrated in communities already facing the greatest adversity.
      • 2.1 When deciding where to bring resources, start with the least capitalized communities.
        • 2.1.1 Start with what communities need to thrive, not just what individuals need.
        • 2.1.2 Leverages and supplement what's working in communities.
      • 2.2 Address bias in expectations.
        • 2.2.1 Remove criminal history as an automatically disqualifying event.
        • 2.2.2 Set aside funds to offer higher security deposits to landlords.
      • 2.3 Support and create space for the nascent businesses that come out of this crisis.
        • 2.3.1 Create inclusive innovation incubators.
        • 2.3.2 Adjust regulations that limit new business creation.
        • 2.3.3 Examine licensing requirements.
      • 2.4 Track workarounds and adjust policy to reduce the need for workarounds.
        • 2.4.1 Collect data on barriers and workarounds in Management Information Systems.
        • 2.4.2 Use data on barriers and workarounds to inform ongoing systemic transformation.
      • 2.5. Use the different access to people’s homes to help, not to surveil.
        • 2.5.1 Provide guidance to guard against implicit bias when "entering" people's homes remotely.
      • 2.6 Separate out sanctions from treatment and help, and adjust both.
        • 2.6 Example: St. Louis County Family Court
        • 2.6.1 Vacate or reduce sanctions.
        • 2.6.2 Allow people to make community restitution by supporting their families and neighbors.
        • 2.6.3 Adjust treatment expectations in consultation with the individual.
          • 2.6.3 Tool: Adjusting Case Plans In Response to the Pandemic
      • 2.7 Make access meaningful.
        • 2.7.1 Improve access to and use of tech to reduce barriers.
        • 2.7.2 Ensure that professional, credentialed translation and interpretation services are available.
          • Example: Found in Translation
          • 2.7.2 Example - Found in Translation
  • Principle 3
    • 3. Build on, instead of undermining, social connections and social capital in communities.
      • 3.1 Remove obstacles to family members helping family members.
        • 3.1.1 Allow family members in public housing to take in family members in times of crisis.
        • 3.1.2 Keep families close.
        • 3.1.3 Expand models and approaches that reimburse family members for caregiving.
      • 3.2 Enable social networks.
        • 3.2.1 Make it possible for people to gather.
        • 3.2.2 Apply intergenerational and social-network oriented approaches in policy.
        • 3.2.3 Encourage multi-family economic strengthening and resiliency efforts.
      • 3.3 Enable expansion and leverage of community networks.
        • 3.3.1 Partner with community to support change driven by community.
        • 3.3.2 Reduce false divides between community-strengthening activities and services.
      • 3.4 Leverage community expertise in making bureaucracy work for people.
        • 3.4.1 Hire people who know how to navigate the system.
        • 3.4.2 Look for expertise first in communities most affected.
  • Principle 4
    • 4. Build financial security.
      • 4.1 Backstop loss.
        • 4.1.1 Provide specific, low-barrier help with the financial and human costs of COVID-19.
        • 4.1.2 Provide a COVID-19 benefit.
        • 4.1.3 Enact/extend a moratorium on evictions, foreclosures and utility shut-offs.
      • 4.2 Ensure access to basic nutritional and economic supports.
        • 4.2.1 Reduce friction points for people accessing benefits.
        • 4.2.2 Suspend benefit cutoffs for at least six months after the end of the public health emergency.
      • 4.3 Don't fund staffed anti-poverty programs when what's needed are direct payments.
        • 4.3.1 Relax restrictions on publicly issued flex funds.
        • 4.3.2 Expand child care.
      • 4.4 Address the wealth gap.
        • 4.4.1 Address the benefits cliff.
        • 4.4.2 Invest in baby bonds and children’s savings accounts.
  • Principle 5
    • 5. Span boundaries.
      • 5.1 Tap people’s humanity.
        • 5.1.1 Include arts and culture in community assessment, design and change processes.
        • 5.1.2 Build partnerships to increase access to careers in the arts and related industries.
          • 5.1.2 Example - Bridge Builder Arts
        • 5.1.3 Allow for joy and levity.
      • 5.2 Advocate.
        • 5.2.1 Conduct and be open to cross-system, cross-field advocacy.
        • 5.2.2 Redeploy frontline staff to serve as navigators and advocates.
        • 5.2.3 Reduce the divide between services and advocacy.
        • 5.2.4 Fund and allow for non-partisan, non-electoral advocacy as part of direct services.
      • 5.3 Expressly engage across sectors and with community leaders to make the transformation.
        • 5.3.1 Use funding across systems to address structural barriers.
        • 5.3.2 Convene multiple industries to workforce development funding.
  • Principle 6
    • 6. Set our default to sustaining transformation beyond the pandemic.
Powered by GitBook
On this page

Was this helpful?

A message for those of us within systems

PreviousStart here.Next1. Start with what matters to people: wellbeing

Last updated 4 years ago

Was this helpful?

COVID-19 is laying bare the legacy of and social inequities that many of our systems are built on and that have left communities of color and those already economically marginalized far more vulnerable to the coronavirus and its economic fallout. The nation is also grappling, explicitly and across lines of race and class for perhaps the first time in a generation, with the reality of pervasive violence against Black people by police.

We know that policing and healthcare are not unique. As challenging as navigating the crisis is, this moment is the closest we are going to get in our lifetime to actually being able to rebuild our systems from the ground up. To only re-imagine each system individually — child welfare, housing, justice reform, hunger and more — misses the way in which we live our lives and the opportunity to create a far more fair, impactful and seamless way forward. As public sector, nonprofit and community leaders, we share a commitment to using this moment to drive changes that will move our country and communities towards equity, wellbeing and justice.

For too long, we have insisted that people caught up in systems are the ones who need to change. Today, we call on our fellow systems leaders to focus the change where it belongs: on the systems themselves, so that systems operate with fairness, accountability on all sides and support in the right places.

Our country needs an issue-agnostic, people-first framework centering on what every person needs to thrive, relentless in its pursuit of equity and embrace of opportunity. Across our public health, service, housing, education and safety systems, we must institutionalize responses that build on an anti-racist, human framework that spans fields and disciplines. The recommendations that follow do exactly this. They are rooted in our shared beliefs that:

(i) We are all hardwired for wellbeing — the set of needs and experiences essential in combination and balance to weather challenges and have health and hope;

(ii) Our contexts provide us vastly different access to wellbeing based on our race, gender, orientation, religion, wealth and other factors; and

(iii) Differential structural access to wellbeing reinforces poverty, trauma, chronic illness and oppression.

The recommendations therefore skew toward long-term structural change, recognizing that we need to change the rules to better align with people’s needs, strengths and the reality of the moment. This is fundamentally about healing past and current harms, and preventing new ones. They change how we do our work, but generally do not require new programs, staffing or long-term appropriations. While immediate bridge funding is absolutely needed to shore up millions of families facing dire economic circumstances, food insecurity and more, the changes laid out largely require deploying existing staff and funds differently.

Across sectors we are already making changes that are meaningful and aligned with what we call for here. We are seeing a wellbeing orientation in action, and we are committed to ensuring the gains we make now become durably embedded to define a new normal beyond the pandemic. This call to action builds on demonstrations already occurring across the country. In combination, they provide a path forward that is both deeply innovative and also tested.

This works if we work together. No one of us has the power to make all these changes. By co-signing this call for transformation, we are signaling our shared commitment to boldly doing our part and constructively challenging our fields and neighbors to join us in this transformation.

structural racism