Pat Thomas
Southwest Adult Basic Education
ABSTRACT
Collaboration is a practice that many providers say they are doing but rarely do we see it translated into the actual work that staff connected with our learners—our customers—do. Our customers face multiple barriers in their desire to succeed and move forward. Leadership with a focus on creating partnerships to address the multiple barriers of these customers is critical. Leadership with a focus on collaboration must be done with intentionality, for it is hard work. We must proceed recognizing that trust among partners is essential, and we must give up individual control of the final product created. This paper examines important lessons learned through many collaborations among a rural program, Southwest Adult Basic Education (SW ABE), workforce partners, Southwest Minnesota State University (SMSU), and additional agencies and offers concrete examples of successful results.
INTRODUCTION
Collaboration is a practice we all say we are doing, but I have found that very seldom do we see it within our adult education programs. I speak about collaboration looking back on a 20-year career of being a director of an adult education program in southwestern Minnesota, Southwest Adult Basic Education (SW ABE). As I look back over my career, I believe ordinary people can do extraordinary things through true collaboration. That is precisely what we are: ordinary people with a new way to do business that benefits our common customer.
First, I believe it is vital to understand our geography, the demographics of our area, the industries in our area, and the challenges we experience. Our population in southwestern Minnesota has low density, and the population has been declining. Our region, made up of 22 counties, covers approximately 25% of the state. The area has two regional centers, which each have a population of 12,000-13,000. Our primary industry sectors are agriculture, healthcare, food processing, government, and transportation. We have very low unemployment with a skilled workforce shortage, a common problem in many places. Our employers struggle to find adequate staffing to operate. Our growth has primarily come from immigrant and refugee populations, and these populations tend to have low literacy. Since we have this large geographic area, there is a distance
between communities, and we struggle with a lack of public transportation and limited childcare providers. Resources allotted to our ABE, workforce, public schools, and colleges have been reduced.
Clearly, all of these factors would seem to create an environment where providing adequate services to our customers would be very difficult, but in reality, I would suggest these factors have been blessings that have provided the perfect environment to lead through collaboration. I would also suggest that all of our service providers and employers would confidently state that nobody has the capacity to operate as a silo or an island. None of us can succeed without the collaborative effort put forward in our area to address challenges. Together we have created some amazing partnerships and service delivery products that help make all of us successful.
An excellent example of a fruitful partnership began when the state ABE office offered grants to provide career services to ABE students. SW ABE, rather than trying to develop career services for its students, turned to our workforce partner to provide these services because our workforce partner is an expert in this field. As a result of this partnership, workforce personnel still came to ABE classes to provide their services to ABE students after the grant period ended.
So why do I say our area was blessed to face the challenge of how to overcome diminishing resources and what some might consider major obstacles? I would suggest that few organizations, by choice, look to create partnerships to address needs if there is a chance they have sufficient resources to meet the need by themselves. We do not want to give up control of the end product. True collaboration will never be successful until we each focus on our areas of expertise. Our customers do not, and should not have to, know where the resources are coming from that help them to move forward. An effective model of collaboration is one where resources flow from different agencies into one in a manner that appears seamless to the customer. Agencies need to put aside a desire to gain recognition and place a collaborative focus on the success of the customer. As Regional Workforce Development Director Carrie Bendix states, “By combining our resources toward a common goal, we are able to serve more individuals and create a more significant change throughout this region” (personal communication, May 28, 2019).
What are those resources and factors that have made successful collaboration a reality for SW ABE? Most importantly, we fully recognize that agencies do not work with other agencies, but rather staff from agencies work with staff from other agencies. Leaders of agencies need to support collaboration by all means, but they have to allow those staff in the trenches to use their experience to determine together how to make the collaboration work. Over my career, I have seen the state ABE office in Minnesota lay out three-year initiatives to seek partnerships with workforce, our college systems, and our employers. These initiatives have created beautiful examples of collaborative efforts on paper, but I find that they seldom translate to the level of staff working directly with the customer. I certainly believe these initiatives have value, but when the outcome is a collaborative effort on paper rather than actual practices resulting from the effort, we fall short of the intended outcome.
PUSHING COLLABORATION BEYOND AN EFFORT ON PAPER
A year and a half ago, ABE personnel began a conversation with our Southwest Minnesota State University (SMSU) technology staff to explore the possibility of delivering ABE services to students via technology. SMSU staff who shared this vision wrote and received a grant to provide 300 Adobe Connect web conferencing licenses to SW ABE. Over this past year, SW ABE has offered any ABE program in Minnesota this web conferencing tool and found other grants to maintain this service through the coming year. State college staff have embraced this idea and have had discussions with state ABE personnel about how this service could be continued without grant funding. The bottom line is that we now have ABE students participating in classes through their computers or smartphones when distance or schedules do not allow attendance at the physical site. In the words of SMSU President Connie Gores, “SMSU is delighted to partner with SW ABE to provide these opportunities for individuals and to create pathways for advancing through education. We will continue to partner with ABE as we explore how to continue providing these services in the future” (personal communication, May 28, 2019) (See Appendix A for additional information).
We fully recognize that our attitude will either make or break any real differences we can make in the lives of our customers. Our attitude needs to be positive and can-do to be successful. Judy Mortrude, Senior Technical Advisor at World Education International, adds that to be successful, “Collaborative leadership also requires a level of vulnerability and trust” (personal communication, May 17, 2019). The collaborative attitude requires us to start at square one, not knowing what the end product will look like, but still moving forward with all partners shaping that end product—again giving up that control and accepting the fact that there are no failures in our efforts, only opportunities to learn how to do things better the next time. Luck will always come second to persistent, positive effort in a timely fashion. If we had allowed an “Oops!” in our efforts to hamper our ability to work together instead of learning from our missteps, we would have never ended up successfully meeting our customers’ needs. Here again, effective collaboration requires giving up control and the need to blame others for a product that was less than successful. Each “Oops!” has made us stronger rather than diminishing our product, as echoed by Carrie Bendix: “A commitment to stick it out together, to problem solve, to admit when wrong, to understand the other’s needs is all needed to grow stronger” (personal communication, May 28, 2019).
By now, we fully acknowledge that we will not be successful unless we practice true collaboration and not paper compliance. Our partners invest in a common focus and a common customer; moreover, we all invest in the success of our partner agencies as much as our own agency. To do this, everyone at the table needs to be aware of the resources and skills that can be brought to the effort. Is a partner a concrete or random thinker? How does a partner take in information and give it out? Is a partner an idea person, or does he or she excel at making things happen? Partners need to be aware of their own skillsets plus the skills other partners bring to the table. I would suggest that if a business model does not change in some way through a collaborative effort, something is very wrong. I would also suggest that although all partners need to be supportive of this collaboration/new way of doing business, there needs to be one person or agency who is the “spark plug” for the effort. This “spark plug” provides the encouragement to help move the group toward greater innovation. In our collaborations, this role was often filled by the ABE program, possibly due to the fact that ABE often has less bureaucracy within its structure and has more freedom to try ideas.
An additional example I can provide that showcases what true collaboration looks like is our Adult/Youth Career Training. Before 2014, SW ABE, workforce, and our technical college had been relatively successful in providing Certified Nursing Assistant and welding classes to adults throughout our area, yet classes would often not fill to capacity. In 2014, Marshall Public Schools, together with SW ABE, workforce, and the technical college, began offering these classes to a combination of high school youth and adults to ensure cost per student could be kept at a lower rate. These classes have continued with an important realization that mixing the two populations and creating an environment where they can gain from each other has benefited both populations far beyond the original cost savings goal. The icing on the cake came in 2017 when our high school cooperative received a grant from the state legislature for $3 million to embed career training into local high schools. The cooperative has promoted this adult/youth training model to our entire area under the name Launch Your Future Today (LYFT); (See Appendix B for additional information).
Scott Monson, Superintendent of Marshall Public Schools shares, “Successful programs begin with collaboration and partnerships. This is especially true in education. Because of our collaborative leadership, we have been able to combine programs that may have been running independently, allowing us to offer greater opportunities for students and employers in the region” (personal communication, May 22, 2019). We recognize that success comes from being customer-focused. Therefore, this leads to the question: Who is your customer? Is your customer your agency’s goals, your supervisor, or the person receiving your service? I believe that to be successful in true collaboration, all must center their attention on that person utilizing the services. Our agencies cannot help but reap benefits to our own missions if we together can make these individuals successful.
As evidence of the success of our workforce, ABE, and technical college partnership, I requested information about the number of individuals served through this collaboration. The college provided the following numbers, submitted in their Carl Perkins report during the time period of 2006-2018. (These numbers reflect only adults served, and not all classes ran each year.) The total number served was over 1,200 adults in various classes in healthcare, community interpreter, welding, Commercial Drivers’ License, and electrical controls. Of this number, over half were students of color, 21% had limited English proficiency, 46% were receiving some type of public assistance, 13% had disabilities, and 5% were ex-offenders.
To further illustrate the importance of understanding each collaborative partner’s skillset, I offer an example that involves an adult welding student in our program. Our classes are held at the local public school, and background checks are done on each adult. The particular student’s background check came back to the high school principal with outstanding warrants in a different state. All partners recognized that this issue needed to be quickly addressed, and partners came together within two hours to meet. The workforce staff, who hold the grant for the welding class, wanted to lead the meeting by asking the student if he knew why the group was meeting. The high school principal, who has had extensive experience with high school students and the law, suggested a different approach of laying out the problem and asking how we could support the student to deal with this issue. The decision was to use the public school staff’s approach. The outcome was very successful: The student used support from our agencies to have the warrants dismissed, and the welding field gained a good employee. Because our partnership is based on our customers receiving our joint services, the partner with the greatest experience in dealing with this issue led the effort rather than the staff from the agency providing financial support.
True partnership or collaboration is hard work and must be entered into with great intentionality. SW ABE could say it was forced to enter into partnerships to be able to truly serve our customers, but I do believe that others not facing these same challenges are equally capable of replicating our outcomes. Agencies need to be willing to give up absolute control, staff from agencies need to have positive attitudes, and the customers’ needs should be the focus of all efforts. Then, even ordinary people can create extraordinary outcomes together!
Pat Thomas has been an innovative leader and an integral participant in many partnerships over the past 20 years as a SW ABE Director in southwestern Minnesota. These partnerships have benefited many individuals in reaching their dreams. She has lived the quote “Well-behaved women rarely make history” throughout her career.
APPENDIX A: ADOBE CONNECT COLLABORATION
To see the Adobe Connect article on the collaboration between SMSU and SW ABE, please go to http://www.smsu.edu/today/articles/2018/08-04-2018_danbaunpatthomasabegrant.html. The landing page for web conferencing services through Adobe Connect with SW ABE can be found by going to https://www.southwestabe.org/web-conferencing.
APPENDIX B: LYFT COLLABORATION
LYFT is a rural career and technical education (CTE) pathway initiative with the purpose of rebuilding CTE in southwest and west central Minnesota. To see more information on LYFT, please go to https://www.lyftpathways.org/.