Safe & Sound is committed to serving families and communities. One of the ways our Community Partnerships team supports families across San Francisco is through the Communities of Care initiative. At its heart, Communities of Care seeks to unify practices across San Francisco Family Resource Centers by using the Five Protective Factors framework. The Protective Factors are areas of family functioning that help support youth and families to be strong. Research shows that when these factors are present in populations of families, it reduces the risk of abuse, maltreatment, and negative outcomes. The project supports teams to train staff to use the Five Protective Factors framework to plan, implement, analyze and evaluate the effectiveness of their services.
Communities of Care prioritizes a deep engagement with partners and the community, meeting partners and teams where they are and not implementing a one-size-fits-all approach. This has led to a framework that prioritizes adaptation, connection and collaboration as essential, not only to the project, but also as key components of the Five Protective Factors themselves. Over the years, Communities of Care has blended these values to create an initiative that combines support for families with collaborative learning across agencies.
The initiative began in 2020 with funding from the Doris Duke Foundation and facilitation by Safe & Sound. In 2021, fifteen Family Resource Centers in San Francisco joined together in a year of planning, during which partners drafted a Theory of Change and Logic Model, while a group of “Changemakers” adapted the previously published and well-known Protective Factors Survey for potential use by participating agencies. That same year, the first cohort launched with four initial participating Family Resource Centers. In the following years additional agencies joined, four more in 2022 and two in 2023, marking steady growth of the project across the city.
A key idea that came from the early planning work was the creation of a designated collaborative meeting space, thus forming the early concept of the Communities of Care Organizing Hub (CoCO Hub). The CoCO Hub is a unique meeting space facilitated by the Safe & Sound team and shaped by the participants that meet in person on a quarterly basis. This space quickly became the heartbeat of the initiative as it sets itself apart from other collaborative and training spaces with an emphasis on participant collaboration.
CoCO Hub’s uniqueness is in part due to the fact cohort members drive the agenda. The topics that are selected to be discussed often come from requests or questions by the cohort members. The meetings prioritize brainstorming and problem solving between the teams, with occasional input or facilitation from the Safe & Sound team. The activities that are conducted, like creating opportunities for the partners to host an outreach event together, are suggested and led by participating agencies, and trainings provided within the meetings are often suggested by the participants collectively.
In addition, materials are created and updated based on input from participants, leading to exciting opportunities like the creation of the new Five Protective Factors characters. You can read more about these characters in our blog here.
All these elements come together to create a space where Family Resource Centers work together to find ways to bring consistent language, understanding, and training around the Five Protective Factors, thereby continuously refining and unifying how local families experience the web of support across San Francisco.
Feedback from participants over the years has highlighted the community and collaborative feeling that is created through the CoCO Hub. Participants have noted that the space feels “welcoming and very informative” while also providing feedback that they enjoy meeting and building relationships with others in the group. A focus on networking, sharing ideas and resources, and collaborative learning has helped build the CoCO Hub into a meeting space that is vibrant and remains regularly attended.
By creating and utilizing a space that supports implementation and capacity building within agencies, CoCO Hub strengthens the infrastructure that allows Family Resource Centers to deliver effective, strengths-based services to families. What began as a planning effort is now a citywide framework for collaboration, shared learning, and collective impact.