Finding and Nurturing Effective Partnerships: Supporting Healthy Children

For 20 years, The Nicholson Foundation worked to advance meaningful change in safety net service systems in New Jersey. Its grantmaking journey is described in Changing Systems, Changing Lives: Reflecting on 20 Years. Through stories and related text, the book showed how a small family foundation could take six guiding themes and put them into action through grants and partner support. In the process, the Foundation spurred real systems change that benefitted individuals, families, and communities.

A recent scholarly paper built on that work, helping to make the Foundation’s approach broadly accessible to researchers, academics, and philanthropists. “A Framework for Creating Systems Change,” by Drs. William Brown and Wynn Rosser and published in The Foundation Review, presents a new model for systems change. Five of the model’s seven components reflect themes in Changing Systems, Changing Lives. The sixth component slightly shifts the emphasis of the Foundation’s “Engaging with Government” theme, and the seventh highlights the Foundation’s overall approach by including performance measurement as a distinct and separate component of the model.

This blog is part of a series that shows how the Foundation’s work aligns with the concepts from literature and practice embodied in the components of Brown and Rosser’s model.

A Multi-Partner Effort for Systems Change

In Brown and Rosser’s discussion of the “Nurturing Partnerships” component of their model, they talk
about the importance of coordinated action, or “collective impact” in empowering systems change. This
means strong relationships across actors and institutions in a system as well as efforts to coordinate,
collaborate, and align activities.

Here’s how the Foundation’s work exemplified this aspect of Brown and Rosser’s systems change
model: Throughout its history, the Foundation was interested in early childhood issues—education, health, and overall well-being. In 2018, its attention focused on ACEs, an issue that was getting increased state and national visibility.

ACEs, or Adverse Childhood Experiences, are stressful or traumatic experiences that occur to a child before the age of 18. They can include traumatic family experiences, such as neglect, abuse, or divorce, or adverse community environments, such as poverty, food or housing insecurity, violence, or lack of opportunity.

The Foundation joined forces with two other foundations—the Burke Foundation and the Turrell Fund—and
the New Jersey Department of Children and Families to form the New Jersey ACEs Collaborative. The Collaborative’s first action was to sponsor an awareness-raising event attended by more than 100 state leaders representing multiple sectors. At the event, held in November 2018, the Collaborative announced the goal of developing an Action Plan to guide statewide efforts to address ACEs.

Step 1 in this effort was engaging in a joint effort to write Adverse Childhood Experiences: Opportunities to Prevent, Protect Against, and Heal from the Effects of ACEs in New Jersey. Released in July 2019, the report provided background on ACEs in New Jersey and outlined five promising areas for action.

Step 2 was hiring Dave Ellis, a nationally known leader in ACEs, to draft the Action Plan and direct a new Office of Resilience, which would coordinate and lead the state’s efforts in carrying out the Action Plan. The Action Plan was launched in February 2021 with several main goals:

• Enhance public awareness about ACEs,
• Train parents, educators, law enforcement, healthcare providers, and others in ACEs and ways to reduce their impacts,
• Promote trauma-informed, healing-centered organizational capacity, policy, and budgets, and
• Foster trauma-informed, healing-centered services and supports.

By the time The Nicholson Foundation closed in December 2021, the ACEs work was firmly embedded in the state’s Office of Resilience, with other philanthropic partners supporting Action Plan activities and participating as members in the New Jersey Resiliency Coalition Community.

Learn More

• Read the other blogs in this A Framework into Action series:
  — Elevating Best Practices and Building Evidence: Scaling and Replicating
  — Finding and Nurturing Effective Partnerships: The New Jersey Health Care Quality Institute
  — Complementary Approaches
  — Organizational Capacity
  — Leadership Development
• Read the Seton Hall University School of Law report Integration of Behavioral and Physical Health
  Care: Licensing and Reimbursement Barriers and Opportunities in New Jersey.
• Read Adverse Childhood Experiences: Opportunities to Prevent, Protect Against, and Heal from the Effects of ACEs in New Jersey and the New Jersey ACEs Statewide Action Plan.
• Read Brown W, Rosser W. A Framework for Creating Systems Change. The Foundation Review,
  2023;15(4):50-6. https://doi.org/10.9707/1944-5660.1678
• Order a free copy of Changing Systems, Changing Lives: Reflecting on 20 Years. This book describes the 20-year journey of The Nicholson Foundation.