Every community has its own non-believers: You have to learn to love yours.
    The Stark County Family Council recognized that a number of the children they were attempting to serve had involvement with the MR/DD system. Those Executives who were already involved realized they needed to solicit greater involvement from the Director of the MR/DD system. In conversations with him, he basically explained that he wasn't convinced that these collaborative efforts had any payoff for him. Several Executives finally came up with the idea of making him chair of the committee in order to try to get him to the meetings. This didn't work and resulted in several of the original committee members wanting to write him off. Then, one of the Executives came up with the idea of putting an article in the paper indicating that he had been elected the chair of the inter-system committee. That article was also sent to each of his board members. He began attending and chairing meetings after that. Shortly after, the MR/DD board in Stark County became one of the first boards of it's kind in Ohio to pool funds with other systems.

Stark County is not an unusual community. This is not a community in which all of the systems marched to the field together to sing "We are the World" at the same time. They still haven't marched to sing it together. Instead, Stark County has been developing and building support for a cross system, community based mission continuously for the past ten years.

As mentioned in Lesson # One, key stakeholders in Stark County elected to start the process of collaboration despite the fact that they did not have total buy-in. They begin by building on the strengths and commitment of those involved who saw the value of building a collaborative system. Eventually, it became clear to those stakeholders that they would not be able to move forward without obtaining some commitment from those who were less enthusiastic about the mission. At that point, those who were involved developed strategies to obtain the cooperation of those who weren't. They switched from ignoring those who weren't on board and decided to approach those whom they needed to accomplish their mission. This was accomplished by a peer to peer, Executive to Executive strategy in which System Executives visited those who were still not involved. In doing so, they were looking for two things:

  1. What were areas of common ground between the emerging Family Council mission and each system Executive?
  2. What commitment, no matter how small, could they solicit which would allow the buy-in process to begin?

Those individuals who were originally solicited were partnered with in terms of how their individual system could benefit from collaborative commitments. Those initial commitments have continued to grow as the Council has continued to adapt.