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Division of Community Health and Prevention —
Illinois Department of Health and Human Services

The CH&P Division is a high-performance operation of 150 employees organized through five regional program sites and two central administration offices (Chicago and Springfield). As a whole, this vast statewide network (including human service workers, economists, accountants, government administrators, public servants) is clearly passionate and committed to appropriately focus resources where they are most needed for the families and children of Illinois. Unfortunately, too, they are under tremendous daily pressure to collaborate effectively within a challenging environment of shrinking budgets, significant staff reductions, expanding expectations for services, and shifting mandates and leadership structures.

During the period from December 2005 to March 2006, SEED-NY guided 25 Community Health and Prevention senior staff (including the Director) through a three-session training designed as a hands-on demonstration of an innovative process for improving communication and trust, building team spirit, enhancing individual and group creativity, devising and rolling out promising approaches, and taking successful ventures with universal appeal to scale. As part of this experience, the participants received training in some simple but powerful practices for enhancing dialogue and communication.

The intent throughout these three sessions with ILDHS-CHP was for the leadership of the Division to experience the spirit, the flow, and the whole of the SEED technology to inform decisions regarding its future applications.

Results:

After the first session the Division leaders began to restructure lines of communication and to recreate the way that services are designed and implemented across the State. A team was formed to review current communication and meeting patterns (including between Chicago/Springfield offices, new and senior staff, administration and field offices, etc). The intent is to encourage Division-wide input in developing improved practices for communications—as a means to enhance the capacity of the Division to fulfill its mission.

Specifically, one example is a plan that emerged to restructure the Division’s concept and delivery of “expanded staff” meetings. Recognizing the value of SEED practices the team modeled at the December training, expanded staff meetings are being reconceived to incorporate:

1.	The principle that every voice is heard;
2.	Rotating facilitation ;
3.	Shared responsibility for designing and setting agendas (possibly rotating between sites with advance input from participants) ;
4.	Division-wide practice of Reflective Listening, Check-In, and other communication techniques; and
5.	Spaces to encourage reflection and deeper personal connections, as well as systematized mechanisms to insure team creativity and group/field consciousness.

In the second session, Division leaders articulated the central questions that define their shared purpose. Seven exciting ventures immediately emerged, once the teams had articulated “Seed Patterns.” By day’s end a strategy was outlined to engage strategic partners and roll out the first venture, with a clear process to follow up in the same manner on the other ventures.

The third session was focused to bring the group through the remaining activities encompassing SEED’s comprehensive theory of change. Here the focus was on strategies for taking promising practices to scale. The team was challenged to consider three major paradigm shifts:

1.	Going to scale with “who” instead of “what”;
2.	From serving to enabling to ennobling; and
3.	Functioning as a team instead of workgroups

The group considered five types of stakeholders for creative engagement in a successful scale up. Then small groups conducted their own unique walk-through of the entire model to further ground it in their minds and bones. A strategic subset of participants met to delve deeper into future possibilities that can enable the Division to function more creatively as a team and collaborate more effectively and productively in its community partnerships.

The participant feedback from these sessions (including a subsequent convening of a “creative integration team” to consider next steps) indicates clearly that the majority has embraced the SEED techniques and wants to see them practiced on a routine basis throughout the Division.

Participants are also intrigued about SEED’s comprehensive theory of change and wish to see it tested in practical situations impacting the Division. Exciting plans are in formation to expand the potential of this work within and beyond the Division, including for application of SEED technologies to key problem areas where progress has stalled, for the purpose of devising fresh approaches and rolling out some promising new initiatives in the next three months.

“I am seeing the importance of communication to unleash the whole, the “we.” When all ideas are welcome—more so, when they are respected—by building on each other’s ideas we get to reveal an even better idea.”

“It’s hard to create new habits as a group. It seems that what defines us is how comfortable we are with change and willing to take risks together.”

“We see the world different in 2020 because of the work we’ve begun here.”