After less than two years in the corporate world, Rose Vasquez has temporarily returned to the social-services realm she long served, with no small task in front of her: lead the transformation of the human service delivery system in Polk County.

On March 1, Vasquez, a diversity consultant for Principal Financial Group Inc. and former director of the Iowa Department of Human Rights, began a two-year assignment as a full-time “executive on loan” to the Human Services Planning Alliance, an umbrella organization for human-services agencies throughout the county. Her mission is to implement a plan developed last year by a broad coalition of community leaders as part of the Greater Des Moines Partnership’s Project Destiny.

“Since arriving here on March 1, people have let me know that that (being on loan from Principal) was an uprecedented offer,” said Vasquez, who now works from the United Way of Central Iowa’s offices. “It registered with people that that is a huge commitment on the part of the business community in partnering with the human-services delivery system.”

Rather than create new organizations to carry out the changes, Vasquez said, the Project Destiny task force wisely chose to use existing agencies and programs and focused on finding ways to better use the resources they already have. Broadly, the transformation plan seeks to improve Polk County preschool children’s school readiness, their future school success and the self-sufficiency of low-income families.

Working on several fronts simultaneously, the HSPA has in the past year:

– coordinated funding for a pilot program to improve the performance of seven inner-city Des Moines preschools;

– established a program to provide “circles of support” mentoring to low-income families; and

– developed the basis for a database that will track the performance and spending for preschool programs throughout the county.

The Human Services Planning Alliance, which Vasquez said by the end of the year is likely to change its name to better reflect its mission, is now working with its partners — among them Polk County, the state, human-service agencies, the Greater Des Moines Community Foundation, United Way and the Des Moines Independent Community School District — to move those pilot projects forward to a countywide scale.

Greater Des Moines Partnership Chairman J. Barry Griswell, who also co-chaired the human-services task force that recommended the initiatives, said the effort seems to be beginning to build momentum.

“This is obviously a very complicated issue; trying to get your arms around how your community handles human services is just a big, big project,” Griswell said.

“I would view our first year as a very good one in getting started. Appointing Rose Vasquez was really the most important thing we did. She has very, very good credentials to be leading an effort like this.”

The Partnership’s decision to make improvement of the human-services delivery system as a key priority of its Project Destiny initiatives — and the business community involvement that has resulted — has been important, he said.

“I think maybe the initial reaction from some (at the human-services agencies) was probably not a positive one,” he said. “There was the thought of ‘Uh-oh, the business community is going to come in now and try to direct traffic.’ Now I think it’s seen that it’s a positive, that the business community cares enough to make it a higher-level initiative. We’re giving it a prominence it could never get without the business community.”

Griswell said he would be “absolutely amazed” if the changes, and the support for those changes, don’t become sustainable over the long run. An example, he said, has been the recognition of the need to better support early-childhood programs, given that studies show that 90 percent of brain development occurs by age 5.

“This move from fixing a problem to preventing a problem is really compelling,” he said. “I think you’d have to be really oblivious to it to not recognize that.”

Better Money

Using the concept of results-based accountability, the HSPA commissioned a study known as the “Better Money Project,” which was a first step toward creating a management information system detailing all of the child-care service providers throughout the county and their sources of income.

The initial study indicated that there was no central repository for the information, so no agency had a good handle on whether funding could be used more effectively, said Mary Gottschalk, a Des Moines consultant working with the alliance.

“There was one horrifying Tuesday morning when I woke up and realized that I was the only human being in Polk County who knew how much money went to child care and what it went for,” Gottschalk said. “You have all of these different people who know their own piece, but they really don’t have a sense for how it all fits together.

“The issue is really, how much money is there, who controls it, what are the eligibility requirements, and is it being used in the most effective way to support the needs of the community?” she said.

The second phase of the Better Money Project is to create a Web-based database to make the information accessible to anyone who needs it. Gottschalk said the project was formally approved by the HSPA board on Sept. 16, but a fund-raising drive won’t begin until after the United Way campaign ends late this year. She hinted that the business community will likely be asked to contribute.

“We would like to go to people who understand the value of a good management information system, whoever that might be,” she said. “It’s very hard to run a business without knowing where your money is coming from and where it’s going. The database would be the management information system for the planning alliance. And because it will include performance measures, it will allow you to see which programs are working most effectively, and allow you to compare the success of different kinds of programs that are targeted toward the same kind of results.”

Circles of Support

The director of a program designed to reach out to low-income families says she’s found that process to be more time-consuming than initially believed.

Circles of Support, a Project Destiny initiative which has now been operating for about a year, had originally set a goal to provide a social support network and financial mentoring program to 200 families by the end of the year. The program has so far reached 25 families, which meet monthly with their “allies,” who help them with issues such as budgeting and finding better employment. Work is now under way to organize a second group of 25 families.

“It’s time consuming, and building relationships with people, you have to go at a certain pace because people have many other commitments,” said Debra Trent, who was named the program’s director on June 1. “We certainly can reach our goal; it’s just going to take longer.”

Helping the families to build relationships within the community and empowering the families with the knowledge that they do have choices are important keys to the program, Trent said.

Circles of Support is a model that’s being adopted by an increasing number of community-action agencies across the country, Trent said. However, Des Moines’ program seems particularly effective because its support extends beyond the HSPA to include the school district and partnerships throughout the community, she said.

The program, which identifies families needing support through the schools, has enrolled nearly 100 volunteers to mentor the first “cohort” group of families, and is working with Grand View College to serve as the institutional sponsor for the second group, Trent said.

“They (the sponsor) really take accountability for the project,” she said. “We need someone to step up and say, ‘You can use our facility to meet here; we will get X amount of allies, we will do this amount of education around the project.’”

Trent said the Partnership’s involvement in making the project a priority has “made all the difference in the world.”

“(Des Moines School Superintendent) Dr. Eric Witherspoon just told me yesterday that he’s going to come on as an ally,” she said. “When the superintendent says he wants to be an ally, that sends a powerful message. When Grand View College steps forward as a sponsor and encourages their employees to become sponsors, that has an impact.”

In her presentations, Trent often refers to what she calls “cultural hopelessness,” the sense of discouragement that stems from the belief that the world can’t be changed. “But when we see some of the leading citizens come forward and say, ‘Let’s try a new model,’ that breaks down that cultural hopelessness a bit.”

Improving child care

In 1999, United Way’s community development vice president returned from a seminar with a study from Baltimore that quantified the cost of providing essential success skills in that city’s children.

The next year, the Human Services Planning Alliance commissioned the Child and Family Policy Center to conduct a similar study for Polk County, using funding from United Way.

“What it basically did was defined the market and what are the best practices that we know need to be applied to the market,” said Maureen Tiffany, United Way’s vice president for community development. The study included a “gap analysis” that showed it would cost approximately $29 million each year to bring the critical elements of early education to the preschool children in the county who weren’t already receiving them.

In the past two years, the United Way’s Women’s Leadership Initiative, through which more than 600 female community leaders have each committed $1,000 or more annually toward child-care funding, has invested more than $1 million to improve seven child-care centers located within a two-mile radius of downtown Des Moines. The Polk County Empowerment Board, which is also the board of the HSPA, has committed $2.3 million per year. Those funds, a mix of federal and state dollars, represent Polk County’s share of the $15 million statewide empowerment program.

The bulk of the money was used to provide technical assistance, equipment and materials to help the centers gain accreditation. Three of the centers are now accredited and four have a plan to become accredited within the next year. Scholarships were also provided for three-quarters of the teachers to receive child development training, and a reading program was established in which many of the children are read to by adult volunteers four times a week.

“We’ve had incredible results,” Tiffany said. “We have test scores of children that are leaving the child-care centers at age 5 and we’re tracking them through kindergarten and first grade, thanks to the Des Moines public schools. In many instances, they’re testing better than their peers.

“We’d like to be able to prove that if we had a 3-year-old who was developmentally behind, we could keep that child from having to enter special education, and recoup those dollars and have them reinvested in early childhood programs,” she said.

The alliance is working with Sen. Tom Harkin’s office for legislation that would allocate approximately $5 million in federal funds to expand the program, Tiffany said. Community sources are providing about $7 million toward the project.

“The importance of this study was it gave us our road map of where we now need to invest,” she said. “If we know it can work for seven child-care centers and 700 children and 400 sets of parents, how can we take it to scale?”

Involving more business people through efforts like the Women’s Leadership Initiative has added a new dimension to the process, Tiffany said.

“The more we can get volunteers and business people to come to our planning table, the formula becomes just so much more exciting,” she said. “Different questions get asked; there’s a robustness to it. Our vision is to continue to engage the business community to step forward and be a part of this.”