STRATEGY DEVELOPMENT
Defining Impact to drive basic needs security
A university Basic Needs Center engages its community to strategize the next steps
Geography
UC Davis, California
Collaborators
University of California Davis
COLLABORATOR
UC Davis Aggie Compass Basic Needs Center helps students to build community, get connected to housing programs, receive enrollment assistance, and get support navigating basic needs resources and services. Its mission is to ensure that every student has safe, secure housing, access to healthy food, and financial stability.
Summary
The Aggie Compass Basic Needs Center addresses issues surrounding housing, food, finances and mental health at UC Davis. Accustomed to responding to the immediate and urgent needs of students, the Center needed support in developing an impact strategy to define long-term priorities, goals, and key metrics for tracking their efforts. The opportunity arose to identify gaps in their work and to define high-impact, actionable projects and strategies for the future.
Challenge
The UC Davis Aggie Compass Basic Needs Center had been working arduously to help meet the immediate and urgent needs of students. This has left them with little to no time to drive long term planning and strategic visioning. Looking to improve their efforts, assess gaps in their programming and identify new opportunities to implement impactful work, the opportunity presented itself to collaborate on moving from a reactive to a more proactive approach to their work. Leeway was given to facilitate a multi-stakeholder process to define opportunities, validate assumptions and co-build a definition for what trackable impact could look like for the Center.
Process
Support Ideation Through Facilitated Convenings
An assessment of the Center’s current available resources, challenges and engagement kickstarted the work through a series of facilitated sessions. This supported the development of goals and revealed any misalignments between these goals and the resources currently provided by Aggie Compass. Impact priorities and opportunities for change were established to drive forward momentum.
Define a Transformative Goal to Drive the Work Ahead
To help define their take on impact, the Center aligned with their North Star: to support “a campus where students have equitable access to the basic needs resources they need to thrive.” Using this transformative goal as their foundation, we identified short-,mid-,long-term outcomes needed to bring their North Star to its fruition. A roadmap was formed that outlines a route forward by which the Center can aim to achieve its intended impact.
With this clarity, key strategies were honed:
Provide education and awareness of basic needs resources through multiple channels to normalize need and encourage preventative behavior to reduce and prevent crises.
Promote mobilization and active collaboration with campus-wide partners to facilitate greater awareness of the basic needs service landscape.
Provide equitable services by orienting towards a culture of believing students and trauma-informed assessment processes.
Drive advocacy and policy/process change by collaborating with key partners on campus and in the wider Davis community.
Validate Assumptions with Students and UC Davis community
To ensure the work is centered around the students’ experience, validation of the Theory of Change through engagement with campus stakeholders was critical. This proved to be a vital process in the making and shaping of the final impact strategy. A series of facilitated roundtable discussions with campus stakeholders and focus groups with students supported the testing of the assumptions we had made.
Drive Implementation
Identifying indicators across the outcomes was a priority to track and measure Aggie Compass efforts. In close partnership with the Aggie Compass team, data was collected through a number of different instruments to ensure that short-term data collection was in alignment with the long-term impact strategy.
Project Outputs
Working with this team we developed a refined mission statement to reflect actionable internal-facing and external-facing goals. These key goals were defined across basic needs dimensions of food and housing security, financial stability, and crisis resolution.
Gained clarity on how Center resources drive forward and promote these goals in alignment with actual student needs.
Defining their center values served as key design principles along with the North Star.
To define impact, a series of pathways to change and actualize their North Star were generated alongside metrics for tracking progress, impact, and alignment with actual needs.
